active users are declining
I’ve BEEN saying this for a while now. How Lemmy users need to welcome new people with interests that are different than their own. People from different generations than their own.
I’ve given ideas how to make starting an account easier. The concept of picking a home instance for someone who’s never heard terms like “instance”, “federated” or “decentralized” can be quite intimidating to start. And if you fuck up, and randomly choose the wrong instance? You have to start over. All your comment history gets left behind.
So people are going to choose the most active instance, trusting the idea that OTHER people know what they’re doing.
I gave the idea that Lemmy needs to adopt standards across all instances so you can push a button and move your account. All your data would come with you.
Instead I was given a list of technical reasons why it would never work. The basis of these reasons came down to “it won’t work because it would be a lot of work”.
I hear a lot of people on here complain about corporate greed, and enshitification, but you gotta admit that they do get shit done.
In 2010 Steve Jobs was reviewing the new iphone prototype. Jobs said he wanted it slimmer, and wanted it airtight. The developers said it was pretty airtight, and there was no more room inside to make it slimmer.
Essentially telling Jobs that his demands were not going to be met because it would be a lot of work. So Jobs stood up, grabbed the prototype, walked to a fish tank, and dropped it in. It sank, and bubbles came out. Thus destroying it.
He said “See that? Bubbles. There’s air inside, which means there’s room inside. It also not airtight. Make it smaller, and make it airtight.” Then he left the room. When it released to the public, the final design was smaller, and airtight.
Not saying it WON’T be hard work to make true account migration a reality, but it IS possible. The developers just figuratively need their prototype dunked in a metaphorical fish tank.
Because until this process is easier, and users are greeted with a friendlier userbase, people are just going to sign up, realize they fucked up, realize the experience isn’t great, and leave. If they have access to reddit, they will leave.
It seems everytime I search for a topic all the results are from a year ago. Which suggests to me that reddit fucked up, users exploded here, gave it a chance, disliked it, and left.
Meanwhile, I point out just SOME of the glaring problems. But instead of embracing the problem and starting a think tank on how to fix it, my posts are instead turned into an echo chamber of how wrong I am. How the ideas will never work, and the problems presented persist to this day.
All because I’m thinking from the perspective of the normie 95%, and not the linux minded 5%. Which really places an artificial self installed glass ceiling on top of you.
I agree with your argument, but not what you’ve applied it to.
“Federation” isn’t the main feature of Lemmy, and we don’t need to focus on it. It’s enough that it exists. When selling a house, would the first thing you focus on be the insurance rates if something goes wrong?
I agree with you that the onboarding process is complicated for a user that doesn’t want to invest time into learning how the fediverse works.
I think that is a positive thing.
The good thing about the Fediverse is that it isn’t profit driven, it isn’t necessary to grow without end, and because of this it also isn’t necessary to appeal to the mass of users who don’t want to learn how things work here. It’s a filter, weeding out the people who aren’t open to new structures - that often comes paired with the inability to have open minded discussions.
I do agree with you regarding the missing transfer options, but since karma isn’t a thing here, a simple import/export function for subscribed communities and blocked items should suffice, and shouldn’t be too hard to implement.
I’m gonna say it, Blockchain might actually have a usecase for Lemmy accounts.
I’m unclear what that means.
You could decentralize user accounts so that they aren’t attached to any instance, or at least the account owner can move their account from one instance to another.
This would be way easier to implement without blockchain. Data portability doesn’t require any of the consensus mechanisms or distributed computation, even if they would result in user data being portable.
If your instance disappears, then how can you make sure that you could use your same username on an instance that is created after that one disappears?
Again the interesting thing is that a lot of other sites have a huge difference in numbers. But they are all saying the same thing, “Active” users are declining or getting close to equilibrium but number of users are increasing. Strange.
I personally think that piefed/mastodon/other servers federating with lemmy might be messing up the numbers in some way. Both pumping up the numbers and making others “go down” in different sites and how they are pulling the data. Like if I respond via my mastodon account, is that a “new” account? Does that make it pop up as an active user? If I dont repost it via the mastodon account for a while, will I now be an inactive account, even though I still look at lemmy with it? Im not sure.
Bit discouraging tbh
You could have a promising career in finance
It’s amazing to me just how hassle-free it is to use Lemmy as opposed to reddit.
Rddit just feels like it’s actively trying to get you to leave it.
Reddit is like the late Roman Empire. It looks fine on the outside, but it’s corrupt all the way down, powered by unpaid labor, and the lead pipes are slowly killing everyone.
No, no, the pipes are fine (mostly). They have calcium buildup that prevents lead leeching.
The REAL major source of lead poisoning in the Empire is much stupider - knowingly making wine syrup in lead pots because the lead makes it taste sweeter. Despite knowing that lead is toxic af.
There’s probably an apt comparison in that to Reddit as well.
That’s late stage capitalism baby. 😎
All time high all time!
The latest annoyance is that they will AI-translate posts and stick those into search engines.
I migrated over to Lemmy a few weeks ago when the piece of shit Reddit app refused to load any posts but continued to load ads. I have found this community to be far more interactive, kind, and enjoyable to discuss pretty much anything with. I haven’t found a reason to return to reddit at all.
I have found Lemmy the most interactive of all the social networks I am a part of. It is my main home now.
Its my home too. Does this make us flatmates?
in this damn economy renting a flat on your own has become impossible…
Get off my lawn
I haven’t been to Reddit since the API debacle and don’t plan to
I was one of them.
Nerd.
Heh.
One of us!
Lemmy is one of the most harmful platforms I’ve ever been on.
Not even on Reddit have I spent so much time on here. Quality content and engaging conversations taking so much of my time and doomscrolling. I love you guys, keep it up.
I really hate graphs that start at 99% and top off at 100%
The gain is really next to nothing in the 2 months shown in this graph. It goes from ~1,456,000 to 1,468,000… which is a 00.8% increase, less than 1%.
I feel like lemmy is in a decent place right now. The main page is busy enough with a good amount of OC and alright discussion. It’s a lot to ask for 1000+ active niche communities. I have a few things that bug me and I’m not sure ballooning members would fix it: reddit-like anti-social behaviour, excessive reposts, and posts about MAGA people. I’ve blocked a lot of communities, some users, and very few nsfw instances.
Lemmy at first was Abit barren but I’m super happy with it now. Let’s hope we don’t see reddit collapse and the masses turn their attention here like the digg event
My biggest complaint is it’s dominated by memes, and in a distant second is news, and that’s kinda it. We need so much more diverse content still.
What I do to get around that is: subscribe to communities that are not memes, news, or tech, then read new posts by “subscribed” and “scaled”. When I run out of those, read “all” to find new communities to subscribe to.
Sort by “active” that’s where the most discussion is happening
Memes are the key
I’m only but one person.
I hope Lemmy doesn’t become overrun with reddit’s far-right psychos after reddit collapses.
We can’t stop them from using Lemmy either. They’ll come.
But this time we can defederate from servers that tolerate intolerance.
Also encouraging our local instance admins who are or seem receptive to not tolerate the intolerant.
I imagine that many will flock to right-wing friendly instances that end up widely defederated. Most of them though will go back to 4chan and other similar sites.
Exploding Heads is a Nazi instance that many people don’t even know about because of how defederated it is.
Was, it’s no longer in existence currently. Many of them moved to Nostr, though some of their members came back to Lemmy and set up the hilariouschaos Lemmy instance.
Gross, thanks for the info though.
They’d get sent to Exploding Heads, most likely.
So long as the Israeli bot networks stay off of here. I don’t like how China is discussed here but it’s a function of the type of people this place attracts, i.e not fans of authority.
On one hand I think it’s very positive that everyone starts using decentralised platforms that don’t run on profit, that work for their users and not their shareholders, but on the other hand having a space mostly without conservatives is great.
Politics is so stupid and bipolar
“More!!” -Kylo Ren
“MORE!”
believe it or not also Kylo Ren
The interesting thing to note is each website I go to that looks at the total number of lemmy users is wildly different. Im wondering if there is some sort of blocker/defederated instance occurred a couple of months ago? Im not sure.
Either way, number of users are up.
Thank you Lemmy. Reddit can go piss in the wind.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Code behind the site: https://gitlab.com/diasporg/poduptime
We need more femboys
The other data shows that posts and comments are going up linearly (a little suspicious but OK), but I wonder how the modlog affects the data (meaning how is it captured and when). I made one comment to a honest post yesterday (hosted on a remote instance), which then the post was deleted by admins like so:
Removed Post Any app for call recording ? reason: Rule 2: Please use [email protected] for support questions.
So my comment shows in my history but cannot actually be accessed; was this comment counted? was that post counted? Was I counted as an active user yesterday if that was the only activity I did all day? Was the one person who upvoted my comment before the thread was deleted counted?
Lies, damn lies and statistics. :)
Yeah thats another good one. Its almost like it would be useful to see what each tracker would do in the following scenarios:
-
Create a persona instance with a couple of accounts (like 3)
-
See what each site says
-
Create a post/ create comment/ upvote sample post.
-
Ban an account (How many active users are now being counted? How many comments? Did that comment/post go away retroactively?)
-
other such experiments…
-
Let everyone know the results.
Wish I had more time.
-
I believe we need some Lemmynade to celebrate
