Memes @lemmy.ml

1y ago

Why? Are we not doing enough?

by fedidb.org

589 comments

Honestly a lot of it is probably people getting comfortable lurking again, Lemmy only counts post and comments as active users
- So glad I decided to stop lurking and actually start participating right as the whole fediverse dies out, it's not just lemmy.
  
  I find it more comfortable to contribute to Lemmy than to other sites. There seems to be actual discussion and opportunities to learn, which can be much harder to come across on the other platforms.
  
  Definitely trying to interact more, Lemmy is a gift imo.
  
  I feel like mastodon is doing alright.
  
  The fediverse is not dying out, don't be dramatic.
  
  For me Mastodon is still growing and getting more interesting, with more and more formal institutions joining (newspapers, NGOs, government institutions etc.).
- It's funny how despite social media becoming very normal, the old phenomenon of most content getting generated by a small portion of power users persists.
  
  Tervell and Dirt_Owl.
  
  I'm just not clever enough to post
- I comment on stuff to try to make discussions active, it rarely works.
  
  It has to be authentic, you can't just comment to comment.
  
  This is something I've learned from online game forums. You actually have to be divisive to get a high amount of concurrent users.
  It only seems to be the shit-shows that anyone feels obligated to post in.
  
  I’ve been pretty successful and keeping conversations going! I DO comment quite a bit, though.
- Time to step out of the shadows then 🤭
  
  I'm doing my part!
- Commenting so I‘m active :)
  
  I don't know how long it counts it for, but I try to remember to comment something like once every two weeks or something
- I'm doing my part!
- Me no lurk. Me comment.
- My comment to stop the lurk
- Ok I am guilty of that. What about votes? Are they not counted as activity?
  I’ll try to post atleast one comment every now and then.
- Well in that case, ping!
- Yeah, that's probably the case.
- Well, as they say: “I’m going my part”.
  I try to make it a point to post questions on communities that have not kicked off yet, knowing that I most likely will not receive a response for a while.
- Time to count me back in!
- Really? Oh
- Well count me in now

You should have seen Lemmy before June 2023. All posts were from the same five people. For now the community seems to be alive and healthy.
- I wonder if those same five people are sad, presumably because their posts aren't as popular.
  
  No, we are sad because the decrease in posts lately have left behind the worst parts of reddit.
- Yep, I'm jaded in my expectations knowing what Lemmy was prior to the massive expansion through June and July...
  It was still a fun place, but it was a couple dozen posts a day across all servers, by a handful of people from the bigger servers.
  We still have a lot of fixes to make on Lemmy, especially on the moderation, management, and content filtering side of things (though apps have been thankfully filling the gaps on some of these issues). Niche communities still need more participation to get off the ground. I'll see again where we are in a few months from now.

I exclusively surf "top 6 hours" and I've actually noticed an uptick in niche community content, lately. Different kind of growth, maybe a sort of settling into itself, finally.
- If everyone is browsing by top-6-hour I think we need to rethink the sorting of things.
  
  Oh yeah, the sort here kind of sucks. Also just using the site, you lose your place/sort if you click into a link or the comments. Like, if I'm on page 2 of Top 6 Hours, click a link, and then click back into the scroll.. pretty sure I just see the first page of Active again until I either refresh or change pages.
  That could definitely be improved as well.
  
  Lemmy sorting has shit ever since there was enough content here to make sorting necessary. It's been five months and it hasn't been fixed.
  Lemmy desperately needs a fork.
- I sort by New. Bring it all on.
  
  I subscribed to the communities I care the most about and sort by subscribed and new. That said, across 20 communities it's probably something like 10-15 new posts per day so after I get through those and interact it's off to all.
  But I do try to engage in the communities I want to see grow.
  
  New gets... Weird
- That's all I scroll as well. It's not a bad experience over all
- Bro, I noticed the same, it has been a long time since I played around with the sort types, I basically settled with Active and hid all seen stuff, now I feel I get different content with other kinds of sorts.

Let's look at some numbers and do some napkin math:
Currently, the top post of Lemmy can usually get a little more than 2K upvotes, which puts Lemmy at about late 2010 to early 2011 reddit level of activity, which is right before reddit hits its explosive growth phase in 2012 with SOPA, Kony, and the Obama AMA. While active user count has been going down, the amount of post and comments have both been steadily going up.
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity. (unless you count 9gag or the_donald for some reason.)

It's very simple, most of the posts here are circle jerks (Linux, FOSS, boy howdy aren't we better than Reddit, communism) or rage bait.
I only come here when I'm having a good day and I want to reel myself in a bit
Edit: see below to see how far Lemmy users will go to circle jerk how much better they are than Reddit
- Yeah the "All" in particular is pretty bad for the average person. They're not going to enjoy a Star Trek meme, followed by a Arch meme, a Self-hosted post, a grad-student Science meme, followed by a privacy post.
  I'm also convinced Lemmy's "hot" algorithm is broken; I can easily find posts with ONE UPVOTE on the all feed. Hot is supposed to be a balance between acceleration and total vote count, but it seems like it just only acceleration. Go look at the front page of reddit. The difference is night and day.
  We need a normie.world that has an "all" feed that doesn't contain 70% niche communities. We have c/humor, c/news, etc but they're completely diluted by overpowered niche posts.
  
  I have a potentially contentious opinion. Normies are what ruined Reddit and the crowd attracted by normie communities are why Reddit is even more toxic than it used to be.
  We don't need to attract normies, we just need to attract more people like us.
  I don't hate normies by any means, but I don't want to hang out with them all day either.
  
  Also a weirdly large amount of "death to America" and whatnot.
  
  Don't forget firefox
  
  While I don't entirely disagree, I'm a little confused by your description of the front page of lemm.ee, which we're both on. My front page when viewing All here is mostly memes/shitposts/news/technology when set to Active sort, is yours not?
  I've admittedly blocked a fair amount and have show NSFW/bot posts disabled, but the communities you mention aren't affected by that.
  
  We need a normie.world
  It's called reddit and that's why I left. Fuck the normies. They'll import fascism.
  That sounds unnecessarily combative so let me expand my argument.
  There's a book called The Authoritarians by a man called Bob Altermyer. Altermyer is now retired but he was a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. During his career he did a lot of research into authoritarians, both followers and leaders. In the book he describes for laypeople the experiments and the findings. If you want to do a deep dive into his statistical analysis you can because the whole thing is fully referenced but for people who just want an easy to read description that is also easy to understand then this is the book for you.
  After reading the book redditors behaviour became a lot more easy to understand. I was less upset by what was going on but I stopped engaging because I now understood that reddit wasn't a site for me anymore. It was a site for people that enjoyed being normal and doing normal things. And that's ok, why shouldn't they be catered for?
  I use reddit and lemmy exclusively on desktop or laptop. So when the app business came up I didn't regard it as my fight, however I thought that if I expected people to stand up for my interests if they are challenged I should show a bit of solidarity with them. So I didn't visit reddit at all for the days it was blacked out. I didn't like how spez reacted. I saw that people were crossing to the fediverse and I took a look for myself. I liked it. I posted. I wasn't attacked for having a non-normie viewpoint. I liked that a lot.
  The thing about normies is they don't read scientific studies for fun, they don't like long winded explanations about why the world is the way it is. They think they can see something in the street and extrapolate an entire social policy from it and there are chancers that will tell them, 'You know what? You're right. We don't need experts telling you that you're wrong, what do they know?'
  So your Jordan Petersons and your Nigel Farages and Alex whatever his nameis, these people and reddit's normie audience are made for each other. I'll even go as far as to say this extends to the people that think the Democrats or the Labour Party are going to fix their problems, Team Liberal aren't doing themselves any favours but my point is that if your goal is a massive website that caters to the largest part of the reddit audience you're going to end up swimming in cryptofascist and sometimes outright fascist content. Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt.
- That's not lemmy, that's all social media (albite divisive topics are a bit different among different communities).
  This is a hot take, but I think humanity is slowly turning it's back on social media because of it's toxic nature. You can only open a browser and get your nuts kicked so many times before you finally decide you don't like getting your nuts kicked.
  
  humanity is slowly turning it's back on social media
  Are you living in a parallel universe or something? Are we talking for the same humanity that is 24/7 on Instagram and on tiktok?
  I really wish you're right but I'm afraid that the minorities you may know who just abandoned Facebook are not representing humanity
  
  Would be nice if that's the direction being taken.
- The echo chamber is as bad as reddit but less diverse and smaller. Sometimes it's really painful.
- Isn't Lemmy suposed to be FOSS? I thought that was the main reason why people left Reddit for Lemmy was that and API changes. Wouldn´t other FOSS be of interestt too? Just a thought.
  
  Reddit's great strength was that it was big enough that niche communities could attract enough users to have interesting conversations and a steady flow of content, and if you are a Reddit refugee looking for those sorts of communities you aren't likely to find them on Lemmy. I've more or less made my peace with that, but if you're not the kind to stand on principle, a falling user count is bad news for the hope that the Fediverse might snowball into the sort of place that can support discussions about your passions and hobbies even if they're not the sort of thing that is popular with a specific set of tech-savvy anti-capitalist leftwing activists (and I say this with love as a fellow tech-savvy leftie... but y'all got one-track minds and it shows in what communities live and die around here).
- Hey don't forget about the other half of the posts, which are in a language you don't understand. Seriously, my block list is long because language settings here mean nothing, and while I'm sure that's quality content, uh, I can't understand it.
- Fuck yes.
  Good days are good!
- Thats why i like this place. Arguing and discussion online is terrible and its more suited to do with friends you trust.

It's worth noting that Lemmy only had around 1000 active users for the first half of 2023. (Kbin had fewer than 40 active users until May 2023!) Currently Lemmy + Kbin have about 38,000 active users.

That's the reality of where we are. A quiet rural village that turned into a boom town, and now is finding a new normal.
- I never even new lemmy existed until the reddixit and I never went back because I think lemmy is a lot less toxic. Also worth pointing out that this post alone has more than 800 likes When I firsf came around top posts had 100 likes tops
- for what it's worth, it's a small active community. Those that stay participate, like a pre-Eternal September internet. I've seen memes here before they made it to reddit, that's a shift in "power" that can't be understated in the landscape of the internets.
  
  I think "the good ending" looks something like that.
  We aren't beholden to stockholders, so we don't need perpetual growth. We aren't driven by an egomaniacal CEO so we don't need to be the biggest social network around. We just need to find our equilibrium.
- There's some of us!
- Exactly. There's nothing out of the ordinary in that chart, just a quick growth, that led to an overshoot, and now it's stabilizing In the next months, we will probably see a more stable pattern of linear-looking growth, with occasional peaks here and there.

Personnaly, I'm really enjoying it. You can interact without the Reddit toxicity. I miss a few specialized communities but I can live without it.
- The behavior is describe as toxic definitely still exists here, and it's worse because the morons tend to get up voted by other morons.
  
  Yup, Lemmy is just as toxic if not more on some aspects
- Yeah Reddit just sucks now. I don't care much about karma, but it can be discouraging to type out a long answer to help someone and just get a downvote with no comment or anything. Over and over again.
  The influx of people who don't know how the site is supposed to work, on top of the usual toxicity, has just ruined it for me.

I won't lie. I mostly don't engage with content I see here. I didn't do that when I was on Reddit either and mostly for the same reason: I don't really have much to say and, even when I do have an opinion, I don't usually want to engage in what's often a protracted debate about something that will probably just end up being frustrating.
That's not to say I haven't had positive experiences on the Fediverse - I've had more here than anywhere else - I'm just not particularly motivated most of the time.
- Well, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts.
  There are a number of thread topics on Lemmy that seem to keep going the same direction (Google, Musk, Gaza, Trump, Windows, etc.), and as you say, it can be frustrating and exhausting...
  At the same tine on Lemmy, I had found articles that were worthwhile reading, updates to FOSS that I would have otherwise missed, no shortage of silly memes, and a handful of new perspectives that were positively thought provoking. Those let me look past most of the negative things and stuff that is pervasive on all kinds of forums, Reddit and social media on the whole.
- I do most of my discourse on Beehaw which is protected in many ways. When I used reddit I would often have a comment typed out ready to post and think better of it since I knew it would only drive dismissive and antagonistic responses of the stupidest kind. It may be because of the protections or it may be because of the smaller community but I find a lot less posturing and a lot more actual conversation since I’ve been using this platform. This is what keeps me here rather than reddit. It might be worth engaging in conversations you wouldn’t have on reddit when you’re interested.
  
  I agree... Beehaw is such a wonderful and special place on the internet. I have an account there but I try to keep it separate from my main Lemmy.ca one so that I better hold myself accountable to the server rules, in order to foster nicer discourse.
- I'll happily participate with light-hearted content but otherwise I mostly feel like you when it comes to any polarising topics like politics, etc. I wish there were more content about my areas of expertise so I could participate in that but alas there's mostly developer stuff only. Maybe I'm also not doing my best curating my feed since I tend to mostly browse all.

Social media as a whole is slowing down I think. People are starting to realize it makes them angry, sad, and annoyed.
- I'm doing the least social media I've done since Facebook became a thing and now I realize that without those emotions I'm just kind of bored.
  
  Find a hobby or learn something. The internet has so much to give that isn't outrage and horror.
  He's a guy I like watching now and again building a solar array by himself
  
  *boring
- Internet in general is becoming boring and tedious. Don't know if it's because of my age (Started to use internet when I was 13yo now I'm 31) but the internet isn't that exciting and curiosity inducing place to me.
  
  Have you continued exploring, or found yourself settling in more?
  For me any place stagnates when I start settling into it, so I try to find a new angle, a new question to ask of it, and eventually something gives way to something exciting and fascinating that was right around the corner the whole time.
- I literally bought a Lightphone II because I was spending too much time on reddit. Like, I'd stay in bed for an hour just scrolling.
  I've recently slacked off and started keeping my iPhone (on wifi) next to me when I sleep. I loose interest in like 20 minutes.
  I've made a point of not posting or commenting on reddit since the recent debacle, but it's really frustrating when I have some OC that would be great for a niche community that just doesn't exist in any real numbers on lemmy.
  like Playdate dev or Framework laptop.
  
  There's nothing wrong with browsing your social media whereever that be Facebook or Instagram or messageboards like lemmy reddit or 4chan just as long as it's not impacting your life. Could be a good way to catch up on friends and pass the time. Although "social media detoxing" can be really good for your mental health
- Good god, I sure hope so.

People had multiple accounts because servers were unstable. Now that stability has increased we're just abandoning the alts.
- Absolutely the case for me, I had like 5-6 alts, now I use maybe two.
- Can confirm.
- Yep, can confirm. Over the last couple of week I closed 20.000 alts.
  
  the average lemmy user has 3 alts factoid is just statistical error. the average lemmy user has 0 alts. alts georg, who lives on linux.community apparently and has 20,000 alts, is a statistical outlier adn should not be counted
- Yeah, "monthly active users" does not necessarily mean "unique monthly active users".
  I would much rather see activity statistics like posts+comments or something like that. As long as those are looking good, then new unique users will continue to join gradually.

We need more idiots who can comment "this" on everything
- I completely disagree. What this place needs is a bunch of bot accounts that endlessly spam the top comments from when whatever's posted was on the front page last week.
  Or the week before that I guess..
  
  This!
  
  Gonna build spezify_bot which will do that, copy over comments and comment "this" and "finally someone said it!" below the top comments. Maybe even some "I came here to say this, too!" at some points?
- This
  
  i second this
- This
- This
- This
- I'm sure it won't just be anot- why, you little scamp!
- this.
- dis
- this
- this
- Thizz
- And my axe!
- +1
- I, too, choose this guy's wife.

lemmy still isnt nearly as good as reddit was by a long shot. niche communities suck, porn sucks, c/all content isnt bad but if you scroll once youll just repeat everything on refresh.
but god damn the reddit app is terrible now and the content sucks there now too it literally feels like its trying to be a tik tok clone.

I mostly lurk so this is me being proactive!

The quality here is far better with the exception of maybe some user generated text stories. Posts don't just get lost in a sea of posts. The users here may not be as many, but it appears to have more consistent engagement and far less people PM'ing me offering me Amazon gift cards for feet pics.
- This really is a nice place. Even most engaged posts hardly get over 50 comments usually, but 48 of those comments are on topic, sane and unique even on a fandom community. Arguments are heated but mostly contribute at least some point of view rather than being rabid spoutings that either get upvoted (or awarded) to skies above or downvoted to hell unanimously.
  We have way fewer posts, even fewer do in niche communities. However, the posts on the bigger communities are quite enough to pass the time. What we actually need is more people interacting with the seemingly dead niche communities of their fandoms and interests.
  Big communities keep crossposting a lot of daily news or magazine-worth happenings, which kinda gets tiring after seeing the same post for the 5th time. Hiding crossposts per user settings would be nice to prevent the feeling of only same posts being posted for interested non-fediverse users.
- Agreed. I do miss my niche subreddits like druggardening, centuryhomes, unclebens, and diyprint.
  
  3d printing is one of the things that's pretty popular on Lemmy, actually.
- If you missed them maybe you can persuade those wikifeet contributors to join your lemmy instance.
  
  NO. NO FEET PICS. BAD.
- I swear that was the best part of reddit.... When I was alone there was always someone to offer me gift cards for pics >⁠.⁠<
  
  What about some feet pics for some blockbuster gift cards? It's gonna make a comeback I'm sure

Less content, that is spread across multiple instances that can have duplicate communities.
You just can't keep doomscrolling here, the "active" search repeats all the time and the "best of the day" is like two pages.
And then there's specific communities that just... Stayed on Reddit.

Infinite growth is not a good thing, numbers rise and fall just let it do it's own thing. That being said, maybe if the Lemmy instances would stop defederating like children snatching toys from one another at a daycare it would get more engagement.
- How do you think they can better address the problem of abusive users from other servers?
  
  I mean how did it work on Reddit? You banned the abusive users.
  
  Read the comments thread of ANY of the "we defederated from" posts and it's always the same "They were annoying tankies" shit. It isn't a matter of abusive users, they have tools for that. They just want to allow fash shit to fester unopposed by the people capable of disarming it.
  Just look at any instance that has hexbear and lemmygrad blocked. Their culture is already starting to decay into becoming reddit nazi bars.

So do the new posts and everything. But Reddit is a shithole and Omegle got sued to death, online gaming is either a full time job or a money sink, streaming services start to cancel out each other and most of the regular games and their performance suck ass.
Guess I’ll just be productive then.
- Guess I’ll just be productive then.
  Never!
  
  I will be posting 1 upvote (mine) and 0 comment posts until I die instead of choosing to be productive.
- Eyyy, wellcome to enshitification!
- Indie games are the only thing keeping gaming alive for me, for the most part. All the AAA games I play are older titles. Doing the GTAV story with a trainer has been a pretty fun time lately for me.
- I hate to admit this, but I’ve started using Reddit again. It pains me, but there is stuff I just can’t get here.
  
  I used from time to time but I just can't forget how shitty they were with the mods and the users overall.
  
  Same here. I like the idea of Lemmy but the decentralization makes it really difficult to find the content I want. Reddits centralization, while causing some problems, definitely made it easy to find communities. That lack of ease is what makes Lemmy not as easy to use for new people.
  
  Same here. I lurk more on Lemmy but if I want to discuss some niche topic then Reddit is so easy to I don’t use that fucking app though, website or 3rd party.
  
  Same, but I only use it for TV show discussions. I haven't been on the main page since June.
- Posting is half of the fun. Especially contents who bring others to comment and share opinion and new info.
- I've gone back to playing old games. It helps
- Try Deep Rock Galactic! It is neither a full time job or a money sink. Any purchases are purely cosmetic, seasons are entirely free and there are regular updates.

We should be more active to keep this ship afloat. Don't be stingy with the comments.
Edit: spelling

I prefer social media not based on addiction. Lemmy has been much better for my lifestyle, than my reddit addiction.

Coulda fooled me, the content quality has continued to climb, and that's all that matters. Look at this post, it's an original meme only relevant to this community, and it's blowing up.
- I get a bit annoyed with a hit meme being reposted 5+ times across instances, it clogs the main feed with repetition and only artificially increases the post numbers while making the whole experience less good. I did enjoy the comment-stacking meme yesterday where everyone added their own take. There are a few news-posting bots that post the exact same articles and cause the clogging repetitive main feed that makes the app far less interesting as well. It gets a bit depressing seeing the same inflammatory headlines 3-4 times, ie "35 blind fingerless coal-mining orphans bombed in Gaza strip hospital, why isn't Joe Biden doing anything?" While reporting is important, the repetition of some themes seems astroturf-y. I also get really annoyed with the bots posting NSFW/ extremely explicit sex content/ads on main feeds. I have been here less because of these things.

Why does this matter? Do we need to appease the shareholders or something? Do we need endless month over month growth, lest the world completely stops turning?
Do we need SYNERGIES??!!!?

It really doesn't bother me tbh. The fediverse isn't for everyone and I'd rather people just use whatever platform they prefer than endlessly complaining on Lemmy when it's clearly simply not for them. And that's okay, use whatever platform suits you.
- The whole "populist" mindset of modern social media is trash anyway. I miss the age of forums and boards instead of monolithic megacorp run social media
- It's actually a good thing. We are all chaff here.
  
  No... we're the wheat!

As someone who posts a ton, I've noticed that a lot of people seem to check the top posts once a day or so. Posts can be slow to get engagement and traction, but the ones that become super active still seem to hit similar peaks as before (1-2k upvotes, hundreds of comments).
But yeah, people aren't as actively engaged and commenting on everything all day like they used to on reddit. The framework is here, and I think if there were another big exodus, Lemmy is set up to be a great landing point.
- But on the other hand reddits comments were frequently shallow and full of annoying jokes. I love reading Lemmy!
  
  This. Quality over quantity. There are much more walls of text, but it's filled with information and humanity. Reddit just became another Meta platform, but for niches. Lemmy has great communities, but all are tech and anti-big-corpo related, I feel right at home :p, but I understand that most don't.
  
  Pun threads on Reddit are the worst. I thought they were funny and clever... In 2009...
  
  [I got a bot to automatically delete all my comments over 1 month old so you can't see this comment anymore]
- I think part of it is that if someone comes here looking for a Reddit substitute, they will be disappointed, but if they come here looking for something extremely distinct from Reddit, they will also be disappointed. A lot of fediverse stuff is basically an inferior Reddit clone and that problem was compounded by the huge wave of Ledditors basically hijacking the culture of multiple instances to just exercise their Reddit habits, making the comparison even more obvious and poor.
  Lemmy needs to eat populations that aren't too big in order to metabolize them properly. Anything beyond that is going to get ejected along with some of what it could have handled if it was just that, and this will remain how it works until Lemmy figures out how to push people much harder to engage differently with it than with Reddit.

I see more people complaining on Lemmy about problems than I do the actual problems they're complaining about.
Just use the thing, and put the content and comments you want on it? You don't have to be a passive observer just staring out the window as monkeys dance for you. Be the monkey. Dance how you want. Eat a banana. Fling poo if that's what you want. Just stop expecting everyone else to create your dream routine and then having a sook because they step-pause-turn-pause-pivot-step-paused when you wanted them to step-pause-turn-pause-pivot-step-step.
- GOOD post
- I believe I have the same experience you have, I think others have a different experience and it makes me curious as to why, I think there might be something interesting there and ignoring it or treating it minimally doesn't seem to be ideal. If there's a different kind of lemmy experience or set of interactions, I want to know, what is it?

Lemmy is neither popular nor heavily advertised, so people join at a slow rate
On the other hand, the amount political discussions, Hexbear, and lack of content result in disinterested people leaving Lemmy and joining Reddit
So the user count is decreasing because Reddit refugees are leaving faster than new people are joining
- If people left Reddit and then went back, then they are just proving to spez that they are the addicts he thinks they are and is counting on abusing. No thanks. Fuck Reddit.
  
  Reddit has actually gotten a lot better since the Exodus. All the political activists have come here.

It was better before people absolutely fucking insisted on scraping reddit posts to bring over here. Post after post after post of regurgitated bot posts, without a single comment, no engagement at all. Fun!
- And then you find the same post on FIVE separate communities! Fun²
  
  But but but... I want the little offshoot niche community to grow! I also want content to get seen by more than 5 people.
  In reality there just isn't the user mass to make small/niche communities viable right now, so you see more general communities filling the void.
  An easy example is 3D printing. There are two 3D printing communities in the lemmyverse. There's also a 'fix my print' community that's a ghost town and a few printer specific communities that are also ghost towns. Posts in these more specialized communities tend to get a consistent level of votes, but very few comments.
  I've intentionally been trying to seed more content, but it's hard without literally posting the same thing in two spots.
  
  I do wonder what the solution to this problem even looks like. Cuz I agree issa problem
- I don't see those. I think some instances have defederated from the worst offenders.
- I wish we could not have those
  
  I follow one for news articles. I don't need nor want the comments. I also follow several news communities from lemmy; just a way for me to aggregate.
  
  You can easily block them

Hexbear is holding pretty steady, I think there are just a lot of Ledditors elsewhere still who were never going to stick around longterm
- yeah, idk, we've built up an actual community here over the last few years and all these redditors have come over, made reddit 2 but worse on their instances, got bored and then left
  
  We also experienced an initial explosion followed by a major drop and then steady growth. It’s healthy growth because it shows we’re keeping genuine daily users to compete with natural user churn.
- The internet outside of hexbear is generally hostile to many of our views, so it's not like we can easily go elsewhere.
  
  Oh yeah? I can be hostile to our views even in hexbear. Watch me start a struggle session on checks notes outdoor vegan cats!1!!

Maybe if every community wasn't just another Linux memes community we wouldn't have lost all of the users.
Told you guys this shit was gonna happen.
- There are plenty of other communities people made, just most didn't become very active. If the Linux memes are everywhere, it's because those are the people actually active here
  
  It's not that they're not active, it's that every single thread on every single community devolves into linux discussions even if the community isn't in any way supposed to be about Linux.
  Also the ones that aren't active aren't active because everyone realized lemmy only caters to like three interests.
  We need better moderation so that the communities which are supposed to be about Linux are, and the ones that aren't don't get flooded with it. That way newcomers won't feel like they have no place here unless they're an anti-car, vegan, FOSS user.
  If this doesn't happen, lemmy will slowly die and people will have to go to other places like Tildes or back to Reddit.
- Yeah reddit spring user here, I kinda agree. Not that I mind them but there is an awful lot of 'LOL WINDOWS NORMIES LOL' and 'JOKE ABOUT HOW HARD THIS LINUX IS.' is like... allot of the jokes.
- A lot of the problems with Linux are the same problems Lemmy has, so it's a really good point.
- Do you have a few minutes to talk about our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds?
  
  Personally I only worship Saint IGNUcius https://stallman.org/saint.html
  
  Oh and Satan, I also worship Satan.
  
  I use Linux, I just hate Linux users.

I am still on Lemmy. It's still my primary timewaster. I was clean from Reddit until a few weeks ago and I relapsed. The app is shit. Lemmy feels more like what I loved about Reddit but without the content. Reddit still has content but the app doesn't feel good to use.I m stuck going back and forth. First to Lemmy then to Reddit. I'll stick with Lemmy until it gets better or it dies.

It doesn't help that every feds response to literally any perceived slight is OH MY GOD DEFEDERATE NOW. Kinda defeats the purpose and advantage of the fediverse.
Hexbear still going strong though. We'll be here after every else continues to splinter and defed from each other I'll bet
- Or ya'll could try not to be unbearable assholes constantly. Or not, because others can just defederate, which is actually a nice advantage of the fediverse.
- Lmao Hexbear defederated from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.blahaj.zone, in both cases with extensive theatrics and drama for essentially no concrete reason. Y'all literally defederated a server that is run by a trans woman as a safe space for gender diverse people because you claimed it was transphobic 😂
  Yeah, you're really going strong over there, no splintering whatsoever.
  
  We literally defederated from a server that our trans community fairly unanimously said was harming them yes. Are you saying that we should have ignored our entire trans community?
  Shit just works kept actually threatening our community so I appreciate our mods defederating from them too. Not sure what you think a "good" reason is if you apparently think "threatening actual material harm on a community" is a bad one.
  All of this is clearly laid out in the posts about the defeds, which you could go read for more information. You won't. But you could educate yourself instead of spouting complete nonsense

tbh its true: apart from my french instance where i like to hang out, most of Lemmy is just memes, Linux related posts, or self hosting posts. No meaningful content for ur average person really. In fact i scroll throu 'All' in new and reach yesterday's posts in just few minutes, given the amount of 'not so meaningful content' i am filtering ..

idk, I'm not going anywhere

In the early days of Reddit it's motto was fake it until you make it. It was a ghost town so they set up an army of bots to generate content and fake activity. Not much has changed tbh.
- It's just now scam artists and annoying people who have taken over the bot market
- The subreddit simulator must date from the late stages of that era

Tbf, I have like 7 accounts and I'm currently only using 2 or 3 since Lemmy servers are much more stable than they used to be

Yeah I lurk most of the time and comment on neutral topics sometimes, but generally the content isn't too engaging.
It's either memes, Linux (or memes about Linux), or this or that type of politics. Lots of bot-generated content, too many American-based sports teams; lots of repeating topic content (e.g. shitload of musk, trump/biden/whatever), lots of community and/or news duplicates. I won't be lying I've seen like 5 reposts of some amd threadripper news in my active feed within 10 pages.
Sometimes I know that engaging into a small comment will yield zero replies, and other times I feel like the response will most likely be frustrating. What I valued about reddit is diverse topic discussions, interesting questions and fun reads. But people seem to have more fun bypassing my anti-politics filters in-between porn. I honestly think we need to revive many communities related to questions, interesting topics, and overall "lets-have-a-chat-on-something" (preferably not related to what I mentioned above, or at least that touches a broader audience).
Do I contribute a lot? Am I the one to tell people what to do? I don't think so, but when I have a will to create some content, that will is usually cut off by zero-to-none expected engagement from other people. People wanna do what they wanna do, I guess. I don't blame em.
- I won't be lying I've seen like 5 reposts of some amd threadripper news in my active feed within 10 pages.
  It's true and one of the pitfalls of the de-centralized model. As a poster I try to crosspost the same link across servers to multiple communities big and small, as a way for people to "discover" niche communities.
  I'm in full agreement on how there should be more laid back "chat about something" content. You might interested in having a look at https://beehaw.org (not federated with LW or SJW), that has !chat@beehaw.org and that server might be more your speed, I personally like it a lot. Bee sure to read and follow the spirit of the server rules.
- I honestly think we need to revive many communities related to questions, interesting topics, and overall “lets-have-a-chat-on-something” (preferably not related to what I mentioned above, or at least that touches a broader audience).
  Have you subbed to the various AskLemmy/Ask[instance]/NoStupidQuestions/Out of the Loop communities across here?
  To my own amusement, I found sh.itjust.works has several question communities that I tossed some posts to here & there.
  Think they were:
  !askshit@sh.itjust.works
  !randomquestions@sh.itjust.works
  And of course, the obligatory:
  !asklemmy@sh.itjust.works
  But besides those and the big AskLemmy communities on World and Lemmy.ml, there's:
  !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
  !nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca
  !outoftheloop@lemmy.world
  Also although I haven't sorted out what I might want to post in them, there's these chat communities for other discussing other topics besides those you highlight getting plenty enough discussion:
  !casualconversation@lemmy.world
  !chatter@lemmy.ca
  !chat@beehaw.org
  !general@lemmy.world
- My god, the amount of Trump shit I see on here is insane. I despise the cunt, but god damn do I really need to scroll past like 15 posts a day about the shit stain? Even on Reddit they didn't suck his cheeto dick so much

Lemmy tickles the same part of my brain without all the corporate bs - less content makes me scroll less, but less toxicity makes it worth it
I feel like Ive found my people and I ain't leaving

I'm one of the people who has stopped coming here. I'll keep visiting occasionally but the lack of content and pro-east/anti-west rhetoric is just as irritating as the maga/conspiracy crowds on reddit.
- Do you visit here/Reddit for some news alongside other stuff, or more other stuff than news?
  If the latter, you can somewhat avoid the rhetoric back & forth by blocking out a lot of the news communities, but then you do run into the general content problem more (especially if you're also blocking memes).
  
  I've been looking for more specific subjects now but generally I just browse active/top/hot all. Reddit is getting really bad...
- Yeah... I've also never watched star trek, or used Linux, or had Firefox and browsing is all that.
  
  I've done all of those but none of them are interests of mine. I like the odd reference but linux is an OS.... it doesn't get more boring than that for me.
- Large portions of Lemmy feel similar to places like /r/sino on Reddit. Personally I like to look at that stuff from time to time just to keep tabs on that flavor of propaganda, but it's pretty detached from reality.
- Okay. But you’re here. So … what?

I love it here

People are leaving lemmy because of the quality of the apps
They are used to using a terrible app that often breaks and spams you with notifications of random posts

Happened with Mastodon too, but that's thriving now. Users come in waves. Don't focus on the numbers, focus on the content.

There are too many dimwits who think Lemmy was made so that they can build their echo chambers. So, there is no discourse, just stupid people encouraging stupid people. Anyone that comments otherwise is immediately removed.
Most mods are dumdums. Most are obviously politically and ideologically motivated. It's their job to prune anything they disagree with, which means they can't help themselves and ban everyone. Most of the time it's a complete waste of time to comment in smaller subs. The dumdums have taken hold either by making the subs and controlling them, or by volunteering as mods with no oversight.

This is normal. Most "alt" services, rely on outrage and shit to grow user base. Reddit will do something stupid and we'll get a huge influx again, some people will stay, others will leave.
One of the other alt sites that I was part of had a meme just for this: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/409/691/008.png
We need something like this drawn up for Lemmy but without the N word.
- Ha, I like the meme. Maybe replace the N word with “commie” or an Anime tankie chick. I’m with that last Redditor that stuck around, I’m liking this place. Certainly not the same as Reddit, but it’s got it’s own charm to it that a lot of others have already commented about

Wait... Are you guys not doing the Highlander thing? Because I've been cutting the heads off of other Lemmy users to absorb their power, but if there can actually be more than one true Lemmy user then wow... That is some egg on my face, but anyway the monthly users should start increasing again once I stop!
Sincerely, the 900 or so Lemmy users I for lack of a better word now "represent".
- Only if you start banging other lemmy users... else itll just stay the same.

Feels Very circle jerky here. Its low effort commentaries on political issues mostly and extraordinarily little growth of niche interest subs. The lack of content here helps curb my doom scrolling, so that and a real hate for reddit leadership and the pathetic Simps that think writing "fuck Spez" while still contributing content to his network for free is a form of effective protest, are all that keeps me here though.
- This is my take on Lemmy as well. I was impacted by the removal of third party apps because I used Reddit as a mobile quick reader between activities where the bite-sized format of title -> elaboration -> brief discussion was great, but maybe a little too much. On Lemmy I don’t feel the need to keep reading. This also means I wasn’t invested enough in Reddit, so when they made clear their disdain for the users, I simply left. Nothing there is important enough to keep going.
  Lemmy is definitely lower quality though. All is primarily single topic outrage and there is a significant amount of extreme rhetoric that makes me feel like I’ll be put on a list for reading, which would have been removed on Reddit for lack of civility or worse. The niche things don’t exist and, even if I wasn’t a bite-sized mobile user and had the time or thoughts to form a community, these Reddit clones are always most active at political… discussion users can’t express elsewhere and that tends to kill the niche hobbyists who don’t want to look at or be surrounded by that type of passion. So it’s difficult to curate a personal feed of anything but that.
  Lemmy still works for my use case and it’s about the next best thing to Reddit. I do think the “circlejerk” feeling is contributing to the decline though, and wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up like Voat.

i love lemmy,

For me personally, I have less connection to specific subs than back in the reddit days, given its federated nature and all that. I enjoy scrolling through the homepage, but don't really have that specific moment of 'I thought of something nice! That would fit nicely into this one, specific subreddit!'
Which, don't get me wrong, can be a good thing in the long run. But it takes a bit of getting used to.

Lemmy is cool and all but the amount of communist obsession here is a bit much.

I find this all very irrelevant. I deleted reddit, account and all, and have never felt better. If I need to tell you you're great more to keep people here, then I will.
Hey, you're great!
Thanks.

I like turtles. Can we have more turtle-centric content?

oh my god who cares

I have no intention of leaving

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