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I recently joined Lemmy, i can’t share your experiences with a “decline” but i gotta say Lemmy works because it’s quality over quantity. Recognizing usernames again makes you realize you’re in a small community and people generally have similar interests and passions to you. I (mostly) try to put more thought into what i post here. The change I wanna see in online communities starts with me. 15 Upvotes and a well thought out comment on a post feels more rewarding than a lot of Karma and people trying to 1-up each other with snappy remarks. Also: no bots ❤️
Back in my day, we kept StickPage.com alive with a community of maybe 100 animators. We were happy and productive. 😁 Quality over quantity. Chin up!
Ah yes, 2023 the year lemmy went to shit.
Unlimited growth is capitalist mindset. Stability and community are what we value here.
Yeah. And we don’t need to attract the MOST people, just the BEST people
Rare user from feddit.it 🇮🇹
feels like there was a missed opportunity there
Could be fedd.it was already taken
Seems like it is… by feddit.it.
To late now though as federation doesnt like domain changes i believe. Even though feddit.de > feddit.org migration seemed pretty seamless.
I might be in the minority but I’m entirely comfortable with moderate explosive growth, it hasn’t hurt bluesky one bit. Especially since explosive growth here implies reddit is dying.
Personally I’d prefer to avoid reddit-ification, it had become very bad in the last few years
i do agree with the sentiment, but i think we’re largely okay on that front:
among the big problems with reddit for the past, say, 10-ish years, was the consolidation of subreddit moderation in relatively few, extremely influential mods. some of which where widely known to be assholes of one kind or another…
the very design of lemmy provides a kind of natural resistance to this phenomenon by spreading communities over many distinct servers, with distinct admins and moderation teams.
it’s by no means perfect, but the simple fact that communities can choose to leave servers that have become unsuitable to hosting them (like we’ve already seen with some of the star trek comms leaving .world…i think that’s the server they left?), it becomes more difficult for power tripping admins or mods to utterly ruin communities. it still causes major disruptions, of course, but i think it’s a decent trade-off!
having already seen that part of the design in action; I’m really not that worried about lemmy turning into reddit.
what’s much more concerning is eventually being overrun by sophisticated, hostile discourse manipulators like bot and troll farms. (if we ever get big enough to attract those…)
while decentralization provides resilience against enemies within, I’m not so sure it does the same for enemies without: coordinating bot defense and using proper authentication for end-users to ensure that the people talking are actually, you know, people, is probably going to be extremely challenging… eventually, at least…
This doesn’t seem to be hoping for unlimited growth but rather that is has stagnated and is even falling. That can kill a community especially when it is as small as it is
Anecdotally, it doesn’t feel like the experience is contracting, or part of a shrinking community. It’s worth asking what the data means, and whether it’s bad, but there are definitely other reasonable factors too. Users from interoperable platforms like mastodon and piefed, individual people using fewer accounts, or even fewer lurkers, could be responsible for a good chunk of the data.
I agree except it feels like people are way more active here than on reddit, me personally I never commented but I comment all the time on here. Lemmy feels really active even without a ton of users (especially discussion threads)
That is true because the individual engagement is much higher in a smaller community. On reddit you’d just be one of thousands shouting into the void. It also helps that Lemmy pushes new comments to the top.
Yeah the pushing new comments to the top is my favorite part about lemmy, it’s a good mix of top comments and I still get to see a -20 comment from time to time (and sometimes they’re right)
You see decline. What I see is that a remarkable number of users have remained.
Agreed, so much is stacked against us, these numbers show we are serious about making alternative communities.
So much this^. No where else did have I gotten more thoughtful and well written responses to my few questions I have raised on askelectronics@discuss.tchncs.de. It “only” has 3.88k subscribers but those who are there are really cool. ~Wish I could be of more help there as well.~ In times where most of search results on the web are AI generated it really is worth a lot. Wouldn’t want it any other way and think that having more might actually be counter productive.
And yet the graph is going down…
Nah its basically stable. Green is monthly which fluctuates with seasons (more people in northern hemisphere and spend more time online in winter months). The blue line is yearly rolling average and the initial spike takes a long time to work though giving impression of gradual decline.
People have started using Piefed insted of Lemmy, but I’m not sure we should throw away hope for the fediverse because of that.
It’s all or nothing baby! Let’s burn it down if something isn’t perfect from day one.
People will come in waves, some will share the same mindset and others will seek out more dopamine centric engagement.
Let’s talk about the Overton window.
At some point in time, the major social platforms will fuck up - probably by way of AI - and end up in a collective scandal that gives people a bad taste in their mouthes.
At that point y’all better have your talking points, framing, concepts and schpiel at the ready, because it’ll be another chance to adopt even more users. So let me stress a couple of things:
You win more bees with honey, you should be more concerned about peoples wellbeing than your own opinion and start collecting valuable, objective and giving accounts - be they international, but most preferably local - across the fediverse to share with new users.
AGAIN!! You being a toxic little shit will repell people. If you REALLY CARE about GETTING PEOPLE OFF OF PREDATORY CORPORATE PLATFORMS plz be mindful, kind, shower, groom, keep your inside humor to your inside group, learn some rhetoric to improve your communication skills and remember:
👏 you 👏 win 👏 more 👏 bees 👏 with 👏 honey
Being on your A-game does not mean Asshole-game. Plz do not stink up the place.
This certainly needs to be said and I know exactly what your talking about, but lets be real here. This is an online space, it’s always gonna have that element to it.
I’m personally very excited to have more folks flow in from reddit tho.
I’m personally very excited to have more folks flow in from reddit tho.
That would definitely stink up the place. But… I have a plan.
We need to come up with a new SSO for the fediverse, one that has an OPAD that only yields a code if it doesn’t detect BO.
last 2 years look pretty stable to me
Everyone who compares growth here (here being very relative considering how it works) vs. the idealized Reddit is forgetting something. Age. You don’t get peak Reddit by looking at its first years, and yet you’re looking at the literal first years for Lemmy and company and saying it’s not comparable. No, it’s not.
Doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be constant discussion on improving and growing communities for better discussion, but the whole “oh no, the numbers are low” is ridiculous. Aside from being a aggregated discussion format, this is like comparing apples and cars. Reddit shouldn’t be a goal or benchmark, discussion flow here should be. I’ll be more worried about stagnation when feed numbers for myself drop back to the first few months, where there was concern about if federation would even work well. (and improving federation/defederation is also a great topic to talk about, it isn’t perfect, but it’s far better than it was)
Yeah, we need more users. The fediverse/lemmy is stagnating in content because we don’t have enough people with niche interests. It’s mostly US-centered politics; we need more stuff from around the world. Fediverse/lemmy needs more users.
This is actually pretty good user retention. Most platforms bleed way more users after a surge in sign ups (eg Mastodon, Pixelfed, Threads, Bluesky).
Did Mastodon ever have users? Lol.
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Clicks “All”, “Top Six Hours”
- Sees impersonal biased news sources reporting how bad the world is
- Every post repetition of the one above it
-
Clicks “Comments”
- Scrolls for a while
- Finds one person talking about how good their day is or one topic they’re passionate about
Be the change you want to see. This is your time to shine.
Nail, meet head. This is the Lemmy experience.
Reddit was big enough for people to have different interests and, here is the kicker, the subreddit system was a perfect way to separate the people that didn’t give a shit about a subject and those that did.
There was life besides /all
If you remove /all from Lemmy you have, maybe, 3-4 communities that post with any regularity. Within those there are maybe 2 people in total that post.
It’s turning to shit. A complete and utter echo chamber.
People attack me constantly on Lemmy if I suggest to look at the positive a little more.
THE BEATINGS SHALL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES
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You can’t ignore PieFed at this point anymore. I think the statistic is skewed without it.
https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats
Piefied is at about 5k monthly users and rising, so that does help a bit. With that factored in the monthly users is probably about level over the last 2 years and comments are going up, although that could be the influence of bots as well.
which part, I can’t see Piefed in the data
Exactly
hey this is a nice rug, where did you ge-
- ow, wtf man! Is this how you treat your guests?
Normalize labeling all axes.
It peaks around 110k and 65k, respectively, and the bottom is thankfully 0. A grid would help too.
Based on what I’ve seen, much of this could be from instances with redundant accounts shutting down.
In other words, a lot of folks can’t sustain the burden of hosting an instance long term. That’s fine, and expected.
Especially since drama is more personal with the volunteering and donating.
This is fine. We don’t need lemmy or the fediverse to take over completely immediately.
It’s a good working prototype that’s not a complete ghost town and that’s good enough for now. It doesn’t need to win everywhere immediately, it’s fine if it’s a working solution we can point to and new communities can be created if some people decide to and they won’t exist in a complete vacuum.
Who is the real competitor? The people who are fed up with Reddit, where do they go to for discussions?
Bluesky?
I imagine most people just want a replacement website, and think it was just one bad CEO and not enshittification. That’s why the Linux users and leftists; we’ve been on the losing side of network effects before.
