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.
Definitely trying to interact more, Lemmy is a gift imo.
I feel like mastodon is doing alright.
For me Mastodon is still growing and getting more interesting, with more and more formal institutions joining (newspapers, NGOs, government institutions etc.).
I comment on stuff to try to make discussions active, it rarely works.
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That’s just not true. I’ve made comments that I thought desirve no reply but humans find a way. If there’s no comments to read the shared content just isn’t that interesting. If I see comments then the shared content must be interesting enough to justify a discussion.
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Of course it helps. But some of my shitty comments are scaping the bottom of the barrel of my knowledge or patience with the replier…
I comment because I crave validation from Internet strangers.
I agree.
That’s a very good 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.
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Well i think it’s stupid that we need that divisiveness
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And I never said you said it was a good thing.
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!
Hello
Yo
Me no lurk. Me comment.
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, 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.
Well count me in now
Really? Oh
Time to count me back in!
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.
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.
Take a breath. Scaled sort is coming in the next version.
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.
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.
Yeah I completely disagree. Imagine if a city/local gov wanted to use Lemmy in order to be self hosted (similar to EU govs switching to Mastodon) but the public just wonders why their local gov put their stuff on a weird circle jerk website that’s flooded with niche memes. “Why didn’t they use the normal thing (i.e. reddit)?”
We should be welcoming enough that, when someone wants to make a new subreddit, they make Lemmy community instead. And I don’t think thats the case right now.
That’s fair. Hadn’t considered that
Nothing more normie than tribalism.
Then go use Reddit if you want all the normies around. There’s a site that already exists that meets your desires. I still use it for niche content, but there has been an undeniable increase in toxicity on Reddit as the user count has increased.
Incredible.
Typical down vote and smarmy useless comments. Feels like you want to go back home.
Using normie unironicaly, you never left home.
Also a weirdly large amount of “death to America” and whatnot.
Don’t forget rabid antisemitism and Hamas-shilling.
I found the American
Don’t forget firefox
Lol, yesterday it felt like there was at least half a dozen posts about Firefox, mostly claiming that YouTube was slowing them down. Which seemed really bad at first, till I dug into it and saw it was probably an unintended bug with ad handling.
And why were there so many posts? Who wants to see the same post more than once?
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.
Yeah I could’ve been more clear. I mean the All feed not Local. I went and updated my comment. And to be fully clear, I’ve got no complaints about lemm.ee. It’s exactly what I want, e.g. show me everything and I’ll decide what to block. That said, I know I’m not the norm.
Saying you blocked a fair amount is exactly what I’m talking about, so have I. A little bit of effort can really make the feed more palletable. We need to have a place where that is done by default. Maybe even an open source AI or even just an algorithm that tailors it to the user. I’m already glad Lemmy.world is much more moderate than lemm.ee, and we just need a place that goes all the way; NSFW blocked by default, several communities blocked-by-default (not defederated), and somehow prevents All from being flooded by niche memes. I love Linux and the memes (even if they get a bit repetitive) but we shouldn’t have 3 of the top 10 posts be linux memes.
I tried to get my lab mate, a PhD in computer science and Linux Mint user, to get a Lemmy. He took one look at the all page, laughed, pointed out the circle jerk stuff and asked how some junk posts even made it to the all page and then said “yeah, no thanks” and has never touched Lemmy since. He was already 4 times more likely than the average person, but even he was instantly turned off.
I gotcha. Fwiw I kind of agree, even beyond Lemmy I’ve been a little surprised some of these sites/instances haven’t done more to tailor themselves to accommodate more folks or focus on specific demographics.
That’s supposed to be one of the big perks of the federation approach, being able to create more distinct communities, but outside of a few, they largely seem to run the software as-is, maybe with some backend adjustments to help reduce the costs of operation or the like.
Yeah, and maybe that means I should try making such an instance. I don’t have the funds for something like lemmy.world, but I’ve got the technical background. So maybe that’ll turn into my winter break project
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.
The echo chamber is as bad as reddit but less diverse and smaller. Sometimes it’s really painful.
Fuck yes.
Good days are good!
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.
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.)
My hypothesis is user account consolidation. I made several accounts across multiple instances (to deal with outages) but now only use a couple of them. So maybe people are not using their alts as much
i am hopeful still. and i prefer this to be quieter and hence, safer, honestly. personally, i am not an active user because i’m the type of person that feels shame just for existing, but internet is helping me socialize. still not to the point of having something useful to say without wanting to delete it immediatly, but when i see these posts, i automatically get strenght to give my support. i am not able to maintain a community, be a mod, i don’t know how to code, i just can post supportive messages or be a helpful user adding resources and so. but i should be doing more, yep. i am ashamed of posting, but not contributing probably would be more shameful haha sorry people… hehe
That is a very astute observation, and I would not worry about the temporary decline for this very reason.
Also, looking at your username… ”can somebody please find Margot Robbie so that I can make sense of all this”
That’s esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
lol forgot about fucking KONY
wonder what that ol’ fella is up to these days!
(is he dead? he’s dead isn’t he?)
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!
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
Well that was a fascinating watch. Thanks for the link. I’ll definitely be watching more of his videos.
*boring
Thanks bud.
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 continued exploring it. But, aside of one or other interesting sites that catch my attention for long periods of time (e.g. TvTropes), I can’t find internet amusing as I used to do in my childhood/teens. Sometimes I pick a good site that keep me entertained while browsing CloudHiker, but isn’t the same thing anymore.
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.
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
I think the difference is that I have experienced a lot of people engaging constructively with comments that they definitely wouldn’t have on reddit.
(Not that they would have reacted badly, they just wouldn’t have gotten responses at all)
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That’s irrelevant, it shows that the hive mind trends toward the stupid opinion.
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.
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.
Since the fall of reddit, I feel like I don’t know how to internet anymore.
I miss the good ol’ days when everyone on the planet was free to make their own unique websites using JavaScript and HTML. Now all we have is google twitter tiktok instagram LinkedIn
And when reddit was at its best, it took years to gather those user numbers. I just dont understand why people keep missing this point.
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.
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
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!
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.
there should be a “find the community” or something, where u can post ur niche and ppl will link where they discuss that
Have you checked out [email protected]? For some reason I don’t see it mentioned or linked to much, but it’s basically that, which I think would feel much more approachable to new people than pointing them to tools like Lemmyverse (as much as I do really appreciate it).
Another good one for sharing communities you’ve stumbled across would be [email protected].
Saved both communites, but don’t tell me this. Tell it to: @[email protected]
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.
I mostly lurk so this is me being proactive!
I also mostly lurk, but I logged in to post now. I don’t think the goal should be too be as big as possible, but a place of better discussions.
Currently imagining a community that is only a place for lurkers to post in.
Squabbles had a community called “Lurkers_Anon” for that specific purpose. Was great! I would love to see something like that on Lemmy!
Haha what sort of thing were people posting on it?!
Mainly encouraging each other to post things, and Twitter-like Posts about things happening in their lifes
I’m doing my part!
(starship troopers.jpg)
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.
Maybe there should be a community that boosts all those smaller niche communities? I think that could help spread the traffic around lemmy
I do wonder what the solution to this problem even looks like. Cuz I agree issa problem
I wish we could not have those
You can easily block them
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.
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.
