I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
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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.
Agreed lemme is probably one of the most negative places on the Internet. I joined because I was hoping this place would grow to be a proper alternative for Reddit, with fun niche content, and its own culture of obscure inside jokes. Instead even after several years it still feels like we are the angry trolls living under reddit’s shadow.
One of the biggest things I’ve found that helped me avoid the politics was to leave lemme.world and fill my personal feed up with subscriptions to content that fits my interest. Politics has ways of working its way into content none the less, but at least I’ve got a fighting chance.
I really do believe lemme is going to struggle to find people who want to stick around unless it starts to embrace fun light hearted content. I’m not sure how we’d do that as a platform, but I do believe that’s one of the big reasons people will struggle to adopt this corner of the Internet as their own.
I guess the problem are the users (you and me) or better or use of plattforms itself.
On reddit I tended to be lurker. And if most of us are the few which actually POST content are the those with strong (mostly political) views who are willing to commit to their cause by flooding the zone with political fights.
Coclusion: If we want a cozy lemmy we need to join/start non-political, subject specific communities and actually CONTRIBUTE something instead of just consuming. Otherwise this cluster of plattforms will end up like all the other due to the same reasons.
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.
Doing my part by trying to comment more on posts with 0 comments.
Yeah, same here honestly. Well said, lemmy needs more people here
oh hey, i’m a comment dude. I rarely think up something worth posting, but i’ll chat your fingers off. everyone has a place here.
0-comment posts should be at the bottom of the default feed for this reason. That way new users don’t get scared by the awkward silence
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.
Just wait and let Reddit have another controversy
You know, there was a great blog recently that wrote about this, that now is the perfect time to popularize the fediverse. That’s because as tensions with the US are rising, more people in europe are looking for alternative internet platforms to communicate over. So the fediverse can jump in here and offer itself as an alternative.
It’s not just Europe. Plenty of us in the United States looking to circumvent the vanguard party. And fascism is rising globally. We need decentralization and federation to survive going forward.
When I look at some generic instance’s unfiltered feed all I see is posts about USA/Trump. I can see how this might deter a lot of Europeans who are looking for alternatives to Reddit.
Yeah I’m ngl the All feed kinda sucks.
I don’t think people shouldn’t be talking about the horrors in the US but if “all” is just 5 LW posts in a row on US politics its not exactly enticing for a new user.
We’re actually seeing a rise in new user applications over at Feddit.dk. The hostile behavior of the US has gotten some Reddit users to seek alternatives to american platforms.
It is. It’s one of the reasons i’ve pivot back to reddit these last few months.
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More then Reddit this place is an echo chamber for the far left anti capitalist crowd. While I don’t mind a discussion, everything over simplified to EAT THE RICH was getting tiresome.
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No company or institution is here. If I have a problem with my [insert device or appliance here] chances are good someone on reddit will reply and 50/50 there is a useable answer somewhere. Here it just stays silent. Or you get the anti capitalist reply that everything is fucked and we should just eat the rich.
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There are no real gaming or device or brand communities. Want to ask something about modding game x? Not here. Want to hook up with other players of game y? Not here. Want to know how to fix your [household appliance here]? Not here…Have a problem with mainboard from brand z? Not here.
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When you ask something here about Linux or any other gpl software the answer often times boils down to RTFMI! (I= idiot) That also happens on reddit to be honest. But here it’s just more extreme. And I know I’m an idiot. That’s why I asked. I’m too stupid can someone please explain.
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Where the fuck is LJDawson. Sync is dead it seems.
And yes. Reddit more and more feels like an AI test site. For example the AITA posts are getting more and more out of this world. They are unbelievable, that’s just for clicks. So the enshittification is not slowly but very fast becoming a problem and within a few months it will be another youtube, unusable. But for now… It’s the best we have.
- More then Reddit this place is an echo chamber for the far left anti capitalist crowd. While I don’t mind a discussion, everything over simplified to EAT THE RICH was getting tiresome.
That must be so difficult for you compared to all the wonderful corporate platforms full of rightwing hateful trolls who genuinely harass people.
I’m going to tentatively upvote this. There’s a good reason the left wingers on this platform sound bitter (myself included). The Overton Window has shifted right, so they’re pretty much surrounded by toxic right-wing stuff on every other platform.
Still, it doesn’t help Lemmy attract moderates.
What conservatives want is for us to treat them like babies with tiny little fragile baby beliefs that we have to coddle.
I don’t care if you think differently than me, what I care about is babies demanding we take their hateful and irrational ideologies seriously while they simultaneously target vulnerable groups with at a minimum hate speech and harassment.
If we coddle conservatives this place becomes less welcoming to new people, that is how it is.
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Just wait and let Reddit have another controversy and we’ll get another infusion of converts.
Just wait
this is how something like Digg swoops in and steals all the users
Or Bluesky / Threads vs Mastodon
Is this strictly Lemmy or does it include related platforms like PieFed and Mbin? Because it seems like there has been some shift to PieFed
they are separate, but not huge
They are separate but they are federated, they can see lemmy’s content and viceversa.
Edit: addition: Their success benefits lemmy, this is the beauty of the fediverse, competition is not really competition, we all win.
I hope Lemmy continues to decline, instead Piefed should reign supreme.
doesn’t it already? i made the switch when my instance shut down and i like it just as much.
Unfortunately it’s not even close, yet.
According to these two links
Piefed had 7,415 users with some sort of activity for the month
Lemmy had 1,261,530 users with some sort of activity for the month
Obviously these stats are of questionable reliability given the nature of decentralized platforms, and it’s hard to say how much of this activity is “real” or otherwise “content originating from Lemmy”, but at the moment it’s not a contest.
Luckily, Piefed can continue being used to see Lemmy content for as long as they have funding so it doesn’t matter much in the short term how much smaller Piefed’s userbase is. We just collectively have to make sure we buy the devs and instances some coffee to keep the lights on.
that. is. wild.
i had no idea we were so small.
deleted by creator
Welcome! The thing worth knowing is that corporate social media has intentionally trained you to expect zero friction because that’s the basis of their business model - to trap you. Once you spend a bit of time or watch a YT video and understand how lemmy works, it’s not that complicated at all.
Consider that things worth doing in life are not so easy that they suck you in. No one gets in shape at the gym on accident. A small bit of effort pays off here.
First of all, welcome! Hope you’ll like it here.
Politics surely seems to drown the regular conversations at times. But some niche communities are quite active! Places like !newcommunities@lemmy.world , as well as general search might be of great help in finding your gems.
As per federation and stuff, I think Mastodon of all places does a more or less decent job on boarding new users, and Lemmy has a lot to learn from it.
Regardless, the core idea is that there are plenty of various interconnected physical servers operated by different people. A simple and rough analogy is e-mail, which is actually also federated. You may have your mailbox somewhere like Gmail, and I can have mine in Outlook or even host my own (and you can do that with Lemmy, too). But we’ll be able to write to each other like if we use same service.
Here, everything is organized in a way as to allow not only private communication, but public discussion. Posts and comments are public and can be seen by everyone from the server the post is made on.
For example:
- You connect to a server under the lemmy.ca domain. So, some Canadian guy just rents/owns a physical server and puts Lemmy software on it.
- I connect to rekabu.ru, hosted by a guy somewhere in Russia. Same idea.
- The post is in the community on the lemmy.world server, which is a third one.
- Our servers connect to lemmy.world, where the post is made, and exchange information with it. My server sends my comments, your server sends yours, and so we can see each other despite connecting to different places.
- Should I send you a direct message instead, it will go straight from rekabu.ru to lemmy.ca, just like e-mail. And vice versa.
This. This is the main complaining I see over the Fediverse when I try to suggest it to people. They enter Lemmy to give it a check and go “It’s all politics?”
did you mention that reddit is all politics as well. reddit is intentionally forcing politics to front page, and anypolitics adjacent topics. almost all sports, celebrity talk eventually leads to politics.
According to them, “reddit also shows some soccer and sporting stuff, this is just politics.”
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.
Every week i feel less and less compelled to contribute
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
Mods like Ada will destroy Lemmy in general.
Edit: I’ll elaborate. Ada will not only ban you if you hurt their feelings, they’ll also ban you across several other communities even if you’ve never posted in them. That’s absurd. Must have onion-thin skin. Who acts like that?
I’m a very new user who wanted to give this a chance, here are the friction points from my point of view:
- The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn’t help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.
- Content discovery sucks ass. My feed stayed mostly the same since I started using Lemmy. I’m presented the same shit over and over again. I’m not sure if it’s something that I do wrong, if there is just no content or if that’s a side effect of ‘no tracking at all’ but either way the experience is just bad
- Someone in here already said it, but ‘Lemmy’ is a horrendous name. That alone was the reason why I didn’t bother to try it at all for a long time. Only recent events pushed me towards it but tbh I’m not sure I’ll stay.
In short the user experience is abysmal.
The more niche communities really suffer I feel from the decentralized pattern. Tv shows, movies, video games, etc. you have everyone trying to be the “de-facto” instance and none of them really get traffic.
Really, Lemmy is just a US political platform with some weak notions of being anything else. And if it wants to survive, it needs more people, with more interesting topic. To many subs are just ghost towns.
if it wants to survive, it needs more people, with more interesting topic.
I’ve been repeating this since 2024 to the point I sound like a broken record: It’s ironic how you can’t spell fediverse without diverse, yet it feels like the whole place feels so un-diverse.
…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 :’(
Yeah I’m turned off from interacting. I got banned (I’m guessing since I can’t even reply to people) from world news when Maduro was kidnapped and I mentioned that my Venezuelan friends were hopeful. As this was scary but good news. And my god how I got flamed. Theres no room for conversation I got tagged, replied to, people made fun of me and that’s it. I wasn’t even allowed to interact anymore so it looks like I just said something and ran away.
I’m not even close to center, yet it’s all or nothing with politics here. It’s seriously become reddit 2.0. Pathetic.
Just talk up Lemmy, the issue is most people doesn’t realize there’s another option to the popular toxic trash fires.
I’ve told people about Lemmy before. I got the same reaction everytime.
“It looks like it’s just people talking about computers.”
And their interest dies. Which tells me there needs to be more diversity of active communities. No one wants to come to a small platform, create a new dead community, and talk to themself.
To be completely honest, Lemmy is kinda dead outside the politics subs and some of the tech ones. When I deleted my reddit account I came here and joined some of the communities I was using reddit for: Pathfinder 2e, RPG, memes, anime. Out of all of them I only see an occasional post from memes while the other ones are literal ghost towns.
Shameless plug.
If you are into computer RPGs (CRPGs), we have a relatively active community:
The JRPG community is also pretty active:
they should link to each other in the sidebar so people know how to find them
Lemmy communities could benefit from a webring concept.
You’re right! That’s perfect! that’s what i was looking for, now i have a name to it. thank you. i think it would maybe work well enough if the sidebar could link to related communities?
We have an open issue for this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5871
A) “Lemmy” is an embarrassingly bad name.
B) Most of the content I see on here seems to be shitposts. Not saying it all is, but the immediate impression for new users is terrible.
C) Lemmy’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. Moderation is near non-existent and the comment section of posts always devolves into shit.
C) Moderation varies wildly based on the instance, and the community. I wouldn’t say Lemmy comment sections are any worse than Reddits though.
Most people on Reddit avoid the larger subs like the plague though - but then when they come here, they don’t know what to avoid or even to pay attention to, e.g. is !Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net a lively and fun, exciting place, or a toxic cesspit hellhole?
And at least that one is honest about what it is, whereas lemmy.ml markets itself as a community dedicated to discussing FOSS! (Which, among other things, yes is one of the variety of things discussed there, although somehow that description seems to be missing a fair bit of information that would have REALLY helped out a ton in educating people what communities to participate in).
If we defederate Hexbear and ml, that will go some of the way to easing those bad experiences for new users
ml is run by the devs of Lemmy so unfortunately that’s not realistic, you could be missing on a ton of information if you want to subscribe to Lemmy development or information related communities
The devs can make accounts on a less controversial instance if they want their news to be heard by the rest of us
Can I ask a different, more difficult question?
Where are people going?
Lemmy Isn’t Quite It? Mastodon is too formal. Blusky is too political.
Lemmy was a clone of Reddit. Not an improvement on it.
I went to Discord and Bluesky. Yeah Bluesky can be political + US centric as heck but thankfully other niches still have major presence… unlike Lemmy and the whole threadiverse.
bluesky has the advantage of being an active leftist contingent, and the disadvantage of being an active leftist contingent
I can totally tolerate Bluesky being too political. But the US-centric attitude there annoys me very much.
No, Threadiverse isn’t much better. I have repeated this criticism of being US-centric countless of times to the point I sound like a broken record.
I’m so done with this whole thing
No search is THE deal breaker for lots.
i would even say searching and finding are about equally important.
finding means that you stumble upon good content by accident, which is i.e. with content recommendation algorithms. We need a system that shows you similar communities to those that you’re already subscribed to. I even made a post about this here.
Also we really need a better way to link to other posts and comments. I.e. it shouldn’t bring you to another site but open the link on your site/app/viewer.
This Lemmy frontend gives a content recommendation algorithm
https://quiblr.com/understanding_your_private_personalized_feed
you know what would be really helpful? cross this with data from moderation. content removals, bans, permabans.
then, layer in mods/communities and you might find why users are leaving.
right?! fuck the mods
