There is a drop in monthly active Lemmy users (from 65k to 57k)

I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same.

That's funny because the meme subs still far outpace posting from politics subs for me, and I mostly see memes.

In fact, a few weeks ago, there were lots of complaints in meme comments of how the only thing they saw on the site was memes.

I see very few memes and far too much political content

Where are you even looking? My timeline is flooded with memes all the damn time. They're practically drowning out any posts of value at this point.

Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale

Been saying this for months. No one seems to understand what made reddit grow, and it is ironically very much like /r/place when you get down to it:

Reddit was a singular canvas that all users worked on together. Posts, comments, and voting shaped the site as a whole. The front page of Reddit was the result of it's userbase, and it's userbase was diverse. Because Reddit forced all users, of all backgrounds and ideologies, to exist together in the same space, and work on the same canvas, it created something living and varied.

You may not have ever gotten along with people from a certain subreddit in th comments, but I promise, the two of you worked together at one point to get a post to the front page or a comment to the top, and you didn't even know it. Thos little moments where diametrically opposed people shared a liking of something by how they voted. On the surface, everyone bickered. Under the hood, they were all unknowingly agreeing and cooperating all the time, and that was what powered reddit's engine: it's diverse userbase's activity.

That's why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.

I think the default activity sort is part of the problem. Sorting by activity means everyone is just looking at and engaging with the same topics for 24 hours or so. There needs to be some "hot" category or something so that new stuff gets churned through a bit more regularly. New is too new, top is even more stale, activity causes things with high activity to stay high. It makes for very samey content.

I see very few memes and far too much political content.

This is what is turning me off from lemmy, worst of it I see a lot of shitty political memes, it wasn't this bad at the beginning of the reddit exodus.

And then there isn't seem to be a neutral instance, I was in world and then they banned the piracy community, I moved to lemm.ee and all I see is stupid hexbear posts, I appreciate that they don't defederate willy nilly but Lemmy urgently needs the block instance feature from user level.

Noted! Good feedback.

Every time I peek into reddit, it's just a dumpster fire of toxic comments screaming at each other with strawman arguments and reeing that videos are fake. It's exhausting.

If the stats are accurate then this is not necessarily due to people being unhappy and leaving as both comments and posts are still stable - indicating that the lower active count are lurkers, duplicates or otherwise non engaging accounts.

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

That said, you can come up with statistics to prove anything! Forfty percent of all people know that.

Yup if I hadn't blocked several communities from appearing constantly in my feed, I would leave too.

Right. Everything negative about Lemmy is being turned into a positive for some reason. Truth is this is still a difficult concept for a lot of people to get on board with and the overall reliability of instances leaves much to be desired. All we need to do is continue to contribute and see what takes off.

But just remember: Some of those people that are not staying are the types of people you wouldn't want to interact with anyway. If the roughly 10k people who quit were Nazis (for example), it's a good thing.

As I said in a comment below, I would like this to be a signal for interest groups to choose one of the dozens communities they have, stick to one and make it grow.

Looking at gaming or books, always seems detrimental to have the . world, .ml, .sh.itjust.works and so on with the same content posted everywhere.

The reason I'm still here instead of there is that I absolutely can't use their official app. I just can't. It's so awful. Lemmy isn't perfect but at least it isn't that. So I do spend less time doom scrolling and that's probably good for me.

Same here, I actually have a much healthier relationship with social media when on Lemmy vs Reddit. That might change as Lemmy grows in user content but for now I’ll enjoy the quieter experience

There is a middle ground between "infinite doomscrolling" and just barren. I miss a lot of communities I used to browse on Reddit and they aren't taking roots here. Losing more people isn't a good sign.

That will change soon enough.

Precisely. And maybe bring the grass to Lemmy a little bit

E: see my posts

I agree, I finish up my daily feed (at the moment I am subscribed to 628 communities).

The number of times Lemmy.world was down made it unusable for me to use. Switched to Lemdro.id and it's so much better now.

I am on Lemm.ee and haven't had a single issue

lemmy.ml was also down recently for half a day or so. But lemmy.ml was never knwon for being reliable, even it it works fine since some time now.

Tbh it did affect me, I had just joined and it was out often, & it seemed like a hassle (being new) to find and join new instances or w/e especially when I had to create a new account for every one. Didn't necessarily think it was trash just buggy and unreliable especially for that to be happening during such a big migration (after Reddit changed the api's)

Idk it's nice here but that did reduce my usage. Something that I'm new on being down for a day or two means I'm less likely to use it the next day and incorporate it into my daily routine

I think a good third of what I have typed or posted so far on Lemmy has never succeeded as submitting them would cause it to stop responding and never compete. Refreshing will bring the page back up and allow me comment, but it'll not work most the time.

Their downtime has been pretty severe... growing pains, I get it, but it's not just that.

After several attempts at retyping it all, then trying to copy and paste to try to post again just got to me a bit. It's taking a lot out of me as I'm personally struggling in life to try to communicate with people, with it being flakey all the time, it's feels like when you have to repeat yourself, then just give up.

It's a shame because I wanted to post in me communities, but I couldn't. I keep seeing "View reply" on my comments, but they frequently never load or just vanish. I do wonder if they're broken/incomplete replies.

Same for me, good to still see you around

Yeah, lemmy seems like a great alternative to discourse.

The turning point will be when companies/websites start spinning up their own Lemmy instances as their official one to replace their forums, which I think will happen.

I don't know if this is going to happen, and to be honest I hope it doesn't. Lemmy is not designed to be a forum and shouldn't try to be used as a replacement for one.

The biggest issue for me is the stale posts keep showing on my feed. Either the posts are too old, or it's too new with low engagement. I think the sweet spot for me is when a post is in its 1/3 of its lifecycle. Already got a discussion going but not too far that I can't engage meaningfully.

This is exactly my issue with Lemmy in all honesty.

“Big tech company bad, Twitter dead, Linux good”

Add Firefox in there and yes I've seen this everywhere. So many posts about browser news or the web that just devolves into a circlejerk about how great Firefox is.

Post more my dude. Start the conversations you want to see.

I agree. The FOSS movement is its own subculture that can be pretty preachy and annoying for outside people.

Opinions definitely feel stronger on lemmy, with a sense of judgement roaming around. But, for what it is worth, I found it lead to some actual discussions that I rarely find on other sites.

Also let's not forget the Hexbear "Russia is good actually" posts.

Don't forget the hardcore left wing echo chamber... Oh wait that was Reddit as well.

It honestly feels nice because the activity feels human and not just spammy low-effort comments 0:

Been a little hard to get used to, but I've mostly transitioned over from reddit, like I went to it from Digg.

Been using the Connect apk for my phone and everything seems pretty nice with it.

Trump, Trump, Elon, shitty meme, trump, Elon, Elon, capitalism bad, shitty meme.

Repeat

There should be an option for communities to form unions between them of some sort, or at least a client-side option to combine communities into a single big one

Never really had that issue. Are you referring to you sub feed or all? If the issue is all maybe start blocking the duplicates that you deem unworthy of your time.

The lack or rudimentary algorithms lemmy has compared to corporate social media is both good and bad. Less dopamine/doom scrolling but you also have to curate the feed a bit to make it work for you.

That makes sense, thank you for your feedback

Pretty sure it's going to just be like 12 of us

Hexbear has been very active for 3 years before we even federated. There's plenty of room for growth. We're not going to become reddit (and that's a good thing) but acting like it's just going to die (or is already dead) is just ridiculous

12 of us

I'm fine with 12 of us if everyone is active.

Hopefully by then we'll have a few active communities and not hundreds of ghost towns like now

Long time hexbear user, I've actually had pretty good luck getting input on non-political questions. No sick fish, but I've asked quite a variety of questions and gotten help. Maybe I would have gotten a higher quality answer on Reddit, but my experience with modern reddit (last 6ish years) has been hit or miss. Reminds me in a way of the forums I used back in the really 2000s. Even though the forums I was on were primarily oriented around tabletop gaming, the "general/off-topic" sections would have quite a variety of people and interests. And those people, since they all had a common interest, were far more talkative and generous with their time than what I've experienced in Reddit. IMO this makes up for the smaller population. Hexbear has that vibe for me, just with a non-sectarian socialist shitposting focus. Which works for me.

Summed up my feelings too. Reddit's larger communities were trash, but for really specific questions, it was unbeatable. Not to mention the fact that most Lemmy pages are either tech-related or tankie propaganda. There's very little in the way of active hobby/lifestyle boards so unless you're in either a nerd (non-derogatory) or a communist (derogatory), Lemmy's not got much going on for you

Well, i am here directly due to reddit policy changes. The loss of a viable mobile option forced me here. I can't believe I am not an average case. I am enjoying this experience so far and will definitely spread the word. But i will continue to use reddit on the computer... I am surprised that there are only 60,000 of us here though.

Very good point-a way of connecting communities on Reddit that seems fairly innocuous but is actually a massive means of the "transmission" of users between communities, allowing users to find communities they like quicker and thus making them more likely to stay.

Very good point that I didn't think of tbh.

Why do you think communities with the same name will have the same content?

I would love to see something like this where it shows you content from communities with the same name across whatever your server is federated with.

There is no way for a user to block whole instances, there is no way to know if you've been banned from a community or instance, it's extremely easy for people to evade bans and blocks, you can't make private communities, armies of extremists are brigading other instances and they're exploiting Lemmy's flaws to do it, the list goes on and on.

Lemmy blows, but give the rubes time. They'll figure it out.

Good point indeed

It does explain why all the niche communities I visit have gone from quiet to abandoned.

Yeah, it's not a good thing and I'm getting sick of people on here trying to gaslight themselves into thinking it is. The same people saying that this is good are also mocking X and threads for losing users. Nobody's claiming that's good for those platforms.

We want growth, more users and more instances is better for Lemmy overall.i don't buy this arguments of "people are just not using their alts", I mean fuck off, that statement was pulled from OP's arse with nothing to back it up.

Some subs on Reddit were practically unusable due to the amount of users and the noise they created. Especially if you weren't in an American timezone so missed the early chatter before everyone piled on. I've come to appreciate less users being here.

When there's too much people on the social media site, it becomes noisy and unfriendly. I can't remember any subreddit with more than 20k users being any good.

Quality > quantity

If we had been 60,000 strong at Helmsdeep, Rohan would have fallen

@itadakimasu
there’s only 60k of us? And that’s a good thing?

A centralised platform is a numbers game. The money for upgrading servers for growth has to come from one company, and if the platform shrinks it gets harder to get a return on that spending.

It just doesn't matter as much in a federated network. The cost of growth is spread across many servers. Some of which will end up shutting down, for a range of reasons. But others have room for growth.

(1/2)

@Blaze @Kushan @patatahooligan

Active users half year is still climbing so we have people coming in.

If people were coming in, shouldn't the monthly active users increase as well?

If the MAU is decreasing, it means that we are losing more people than people joining. On your graph, the MAU trend is clearly decreasing.

Maybe I'm missing something?

I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics.

Definitely

The small comms I'm subscribed to don't show up in any sorting, I have to actually visit them to see there was a new post. I heard the devs are doing something to improve it, so hopefully that'll make small comms more viable

Another thing I would like to suggest is a change in recruitment strategy. At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.

A thing to look out for is that the microblog fedi (outside the big handful of instances that fill .world's role there) is strongly in favor of stricter instance-level moderation compared to the more "individualistic" view a lot of the Reddit migratees tend to have. If we want people from the microblog fedi to participate we (collectively) need to up our moderation game. (And in my personal opinion instances like .world have grown too large to accomodate any reasonable expectation of moderation, except for select individual communities set up there)

The standard web UI also needs major improvements. Nobody logs in through an app for their first time and first impressions are critical. It needs to be easier to navigate and use without downloading an app so people will stick around long enough to get involved and have a good time.

From the statistics that seems to make sense, only total/active users is seeing a drop everything else was still rising at the "normal" rate