It’s not that we’re missing more user, but rather that we are missing communities where people would come for the community specifically.

Lemmy is filled with people that want something that is reddit without being reddit.

We will start winning the moment we have communities were people join Lemmy to be part of said community.

I’ve been using Lemmy less because it’s so depressing. It feels like a majority of the engagement is with depressing US politics and a strong left bias (to be clear, I also hate the current government). Unlike most, I really like most of the nerdy tech content.

Which is why I’ve been lurking more on Hacker News lately, it’s tech minded forums with an appropriate level of politics and more nuanced takes. And as a bonus the interface even less bloated (in terms of resource usage) than any Lemmy frontend I’ve tried.

From my own experience with Lemmy, I can absolutely see why it’s declining.

Lemmy is packed full of miserable people constantly calling for violence. 90% of the feed is packed full of US politics, it doesn’t matter how many filters I use I still see that greasy orange cunt’s face every time I open Lemmy.

The amount of hostility towards outsiders just getting into Lemmy is astounding, and I’ve absolutely seen the whole “quality over quantity” crap that only drives people away from the platform. The IT tech snobbery is also incredibly offputting to people who aren’t tech enthusiests.

In short, Lemmy has a toxic shithead problem that a platform this small can’t afford if it wants to survive long term.

I’m feeling very burnt out. Lemmy is kinda an endless stream of political doom and gloom. For context, I’m in the US and already stressed out by our political situation. But I don’t come here to see more doom and gloom. It’s getting to the point where I think I need to get off for my mental health.

Then there are all the people who if you don’t agree exactly with their opinion they downvote you to hell. You have left leaning politics but not my flavor of left? Downvote! You hate enshitification and big tech privacy practices, but you use a single piece of software that isn’t FOSS? Downvote!

It’s so exhausting. I absolutely hate Reddit but I miss going on there and just laughing at how someone’s TV is too high. I miss laughing at how some restaurant serves food of shovels instead of plates.

And that’s not even getting into the lack of content. That part I understand requires users like myself to be as active as possible. But it’s hard being active when I feel so burnt out from the other stuff here.

Tbh, idk if these issues are specific to Lemmy or just the internet as a whole. I can only speak to the slice of the internet I find myself in. But I just wanna see people that are excited about things: photography, 3d printing, weird keyboards, etc. And that exists here, but it’s drowned out by all the doom and gloom.

I came to this space in November of 2024.

As a trans person I wanted community. So I checked out blahaj first. But, the queer community here is controlled by Ada who bans anyone she doesn’t like and i ticked her off once by not bowing to her judgement when it came to allowing trolls to stay in the space. This drama also splintered the 196 community, and neither 196 space has had the same number of participants since.

So no more queer community for me. I’ve had to get that other places like Tumblr.

I then decide to use the .db0 community to report what I feel is abusive behavior from .blahaj staff and after enough time they realized that they really don’t like people using the “report abuse community” to report abuse of specific spaces like blahaj. Banned for using the space for what it was created for.

So no more .db0

I’m just so tired of using this space, it feels just like reddit except there’s somehow even less accountability.

I used to enjoy posting like a dozen memes a day and now I don’t post anymore. It’s not fun it’s a chore to keep feeding memes and engagement into this space that pretty much only has told me it hates me for the last year.

Bad app :c

Every week i feel less and less compel

Hot take: the biggest issue is actually ever entering a community and seeing zero comments. Most reddit addiction stems from wanting to read comments, so I think people should add a comment to something if they’re upvoting and they see that the thread has zero comments.

Nothing eliminates enthusiasm like seeing 0 comments on every post in a community, especially if that community is driven by bots.

Today is my first day here and I’ve mostly just been wandering hobby/interest groups!

I think the biggest barrier for new users is that the whole system here is pretty complicated with the “decentralized”/“federated” model. I don’t really understand what it means or how it works, and I’m sure the fact that you have to write all of these long posts to explain it to people doesn’t help. A platform like reddit (which I migrated from) is clean, easy to understand, and makes sense to the casual user.

As for the political stuff, why don’t people here engage more with positive content? Make the more wholesome, fun stuff popular? Make posts about the cool/funny stuff you encounter every day? Talk about the arts, your hobbies, etc.? In my exploration today I noticed those kinds of communities barely get any interaction whereas the news/political ones are always active.

…I am drifting away from Lemmy myself.

Political communities are echo chambers like Reddit, in a different color. Discussing tech or helping others is better, but still feels like talking in circles.

Wholesome subs like /c/SuperBowl are sublime, but I mostly lurk there.

Information hygiene is awful. Big subs upvote tabloids and Tweets to the sky, as long as they align with their beliefs. I just saw a discussion on a not-obviously AI generated photo with the community sentiment of “misinformation? Who cares. It’s a pro-lefty meme, so spread it.”

Anyway, all this scrolling and impulse commenting eats time. I get the same feeling of shouting into a black hole that I get on corporate social media.

Much of this is my fault, though.

I have several niches I intend to make original posts for, but never do.

It’s somewhere in the giant pile of my IRL executive dysfunction :’(

When this post is two days old and still on the very top of my feed you know that it’s either a ghost town or the sorting algo doesn’t work.

One thing I’ve noticed with Lemmy is that it feels way more like a social bookmarking and commentary platform. I see fewer posts that are “original content” here than for example Reddit.

I’m here, I just never comment :3

I don’t know the motives of others, but I’ve been spending increasingly less time on the internet and more time listening to podcasts & reading.

Lemmy attracts only certain types of people who like reading articles and replying long paragraphs arguing with each other or small details. In a time when literacy is falling, means there’s only a smaller and smaller pie left. Maybe we need a book club or pen pal system or a noobie hub to make it a friendlier environment. There’s a cloud of hostility in the air friends, don’t let it take you. Ape strong together.

Lemmy doesn’t have the niche communities and people don’t want to take the time to customise what it can do for them so get stuck in the same shit as reddit, so then they leave.

It’s quality and quantity. The quality has held despite a drop in users. Just wait and let Reddit have another controversy and we’ll get another infusion of converts. Popularity may only threaten more bots and scams.

I’m going to be frank.

I’m highly empathetic, and studied history, sociology, economics, international relations, and a few other subjects in university. I dabble in reading as well.

It’s really, really hard for me to stomach the news coming out of the US right now. I’m Australian, so in comparison I live in a utopia. But I just want to cry whenever I see how innocent people are being hurt in the US, Venezuela, Palestine, or really anywhere else. I get angry when I see how the US government, and many others are fucking everything up right now. Things don’t have to be like this.

There is so much American news on this platform. There is so much bad news in general. I don’t come to the internet to stress and worry. I come here to learn stuff about niches and chill out. And every time I’m on Lemmy I’m left with the same bad feelings I get from reading world news subreddits.

Let me be clear; I have no problem with the fact that American news gets posted. It’s that when I get on the lemmy.zip or lemmy.world page, some days 9/10 links are to American news, that is very, very, bad news. It makes me miserable.

So why should I be here instead of just switching off? I love Lemmy, but I find that I just can’t justify coming on here. It makes me feel awful.