1y ago

Lemmy is popular nowadays, yet is losing its active users

Similar to Mastodon's spikes last year, it seems. Anyways, there is data to think about. Source

You're viewing a single thread.

475 comments

I feel like that is more or less to be expected. A ton of people found Lemmy during the reddit protests. Now that the protests are gone and Lemmy has had its growing pains some users are leaving, going back to reddit or other places. If we keep using it and making content users will grow organically.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
- I don’t think it’s about a craving for centralisation but for newcomers and people still learning the core ideas about decentralisation it’s about a promise of more active engagement and more varied content.
  
  And FOMO. New users gravitate towards the large instances because they think they will miss content, not knowing they can easily access said content on any instance as long as it hasn't defederated from them.
  
  I’m barely seeing any content at all, I often see a post click on the community and it shows either 2 other posts and nothing else or nothing at all. It constantly seems like the majority of posts just disappear into the void.
  
  It is much much more of a pain to access content on small instances where it hasn't synced yet. It means visiting those larger instances anyway to check if it's worth subscribing to communities. And then trying to actually subscribe is a lesson in patience while it gives you no search results and errors out if you try to visit an unsynced community directly.
  
  Of course it's not about centralisation per se, but the problems that a centralised platform does not have to deal with.
- Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
  Because decentralization, at least as it is now, runs counter to what people are looking for in a social media platform; mainly discoverability.
  
  Does it though? My instance has very little locally, but if I browse 'All' it really isn't any different than being on any other instance, even a big one.
  
  You are only shown what your server has stored. Your server only stores what people of your instance have subscribed to. If you visit bogger instances, they all have different Hot feeds, because each server pulls different content. There is no one way to see what is going on in all of the fediverse. You are only ever shown a part.
  
  Sure but above a certain user count, your instance will usually have at least one subscriber to just about every active community. (I may have used a bot to help this process....)
  
  Subscribe to what you want to see?
- It's not that users want to centralize everything. It's Lemmy's design that promotes it, because despite federation, there are still advantages to choosing big instances and communities.
  Joining the largest instance makes searching, joining, or opening communities much more seamless.This can be addressed by:
  Improving the search so that it can find communities, or even content, that no one on the instance has subscribed yet.
  Making it easier to open a community in your home instance.
  In addition to Sub/Local/All feed, you can have a "moderated" feed (with communities selected by admins). The "local" feed is most useful for instances on a specific topic. But for very small instances, it'll be too empty at least at first. So a moderated feed can create an on-topic feed that's more lively.
  For most topics, only the largest communities are large enough to have good content, so everyone wants to join them. To address this, you need some easy mechanism to subscribe to all communities on a topic. For example, we can let communities follow other communities. Then people can create topical meta-communities that aggregate content without centralizing it.
  
  This is the big one to me. It's much more difficult to search for specific content if it's isolated amongst communities on different servers, all trying to fill the same niche and splitting the potential userbase for said niche up between them.
  If there was like a tag system in place that communities could use to tag themselves as being for a specific thing, like cooking, for example, and then you could aggregate/search posts from all communities under the cooking tag across all servers federated with yours, it would greatly simplify finding content for less tech literate users while also increasing the resilience of the entire network by allowing more communities for a specific niche to exist, which would prevent content loss if one server goes down without discoverability being an issue.
- You also don't have the content of Reddit. It doesn't take too long to scroll through all top six hours and get to the single digits of upvotes.
  
  Kinda cozy though, if you pay attention you kinda see who's active.
  Like you, only user on my instance who has more comments than me.
  
  How do you think I got so much karma on Reddit?
  
  If Lemmy gets significantly larger we gotta figure out how to make our own CC
  Right now private communities aren't really possible.
  
  There are a lot of parts of Lemmy that are rough around the edges or aren't there at all. Hopefully it improves over time, especially as new front end apps can free developers to focus on the back end, but we'll see.
- It's hard to find instances that offer what world offers, so I get it.
  OTOH, I ended up moving or handing over most of my communities that I had created on world because this instance is TOO popular and bogged down all the time. Plus, they make arbitrary and drastic decisions without discussion on matters like defederation and often banning. It's smart to go to a smaller instance but it's also risky because any instance could go down at any moment. That's why many of my communities are duplicated (across world and infosec) because it would be devastating to lose all of those quality links and engagement.
- It's that everyone wants to create the same community on different instances.
- I think more people need to make communities they are interested in that might already exist on beehaw/lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/etc but on other instances. We really need to not keep everything on a few instances… I agree it contradicts itself. I tried by creating fallout but hard to get activity. Even its main community is quiet so that makes sense. I might try something a bit less niche.
- I think there is a gap in understanding how Lemmy works and how it differs from reddit, in particular with the less technical crowd. We definitely don't want people sharing giant instances, but that matches more with the sign up for reddit, use reddit logic many people are used to.
  I think it's also why we have seen such drama over Sync for Lemmy and its ads and pricing. To the techy crowd that was the majority of Lemmy users, that all seems antithetical to what Lemmy is and how it works. To the people who came to Lemmy from reddit, and especially those who may have tried out Lemmy because of Sync, the criticism sounds maddening because that's the way it always worked on reddit.
  So in some sense all of this is expected. Lemmy will lose some users, but maybe it will find an equilibrium. The key focus these days imho should be outreach about smaller instances, and outreach about donating to your instance (if you can) to keep it running.
- I like the idea of federated social media platforms conceptually, but ai absolutely want to make my home on the largest instances. That's just an artifact of how I use social media, though, I always gravitate towards the busiest platforms because interacting with so many people is the real joy of it.
- Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
  Is that any different on Mastodon and other Fediverse projects?
- Same shit happened with the 'temporary' mass migration to Signal.
  
  Signal
  Interesting what do you mean? I use signal but I can't get anyone other than my ex wife to use it with me. It is so much nicer than google voice or the texting app, regardless of the end to end encryption.

475 comments