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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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.
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.
i suspect reddit has upped thier bannings recently, even banning anti-right wing views. plus they upped thier detection of people who are serial evaders, the ones that use hundreds of accounts to spam(not the propaganda bots though). reddit bans for refrencing physical “damage” to people, not even outright saying it. or implying a “demographic” or anti-zionist comments.
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.
i’m sick of how awful and ignorant the vast majority of comments here are. and how they have to conflated outlandish beliefs with being morally correct.
deleted by creator
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.
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
ooh, SoftestSapphic, i remember seeing your memes :) i liked them
<3
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
Hey look more lies from the liar.
Every week i feel less and less compelled to contribute
Good. Stay gone. You’re just mad no one tolerates your actions.
So, basically instead of having one huge gatekeeper, we now have many smaller ones.
This. It was never about not having gatekeepers, it was always about being the gatekeeper instead.
The gatekeepers of these spaces are not meaningfully different from reddit.
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?
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
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.
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
I’ll do my best! Luckily, Lemmy still has a healthy community though
This, It is just big enough to be useful and reach specific niches. We do not need to be a massive giant monolith which will get flooded with corporate trolls, russian/israeli troll farms, undisclosed sponsored content…
Let just have a small wacko community in peace
Our numbers might be small just because we are humans who care about, well, human interaction lol. So it’s not us to be unpopular, but big corpos to be overinflated by bots and shit
Thank you for your observation ✌️
Growth for growth sake is one of the most toxic concepts in modern society.
Hey Bro i think you forgot to wear this 👑👑👑👑
noooo, I didn’t want to lose my head in the guillotine,
After trying to convert a friend who heavily uses reddit, multiple times, I recommended him again the other day to leave the hellsite (reddit).
I didn’t recommend Lemmy but have a while back.
He himself specifically brought up that he ‘didn’t vibe with Lemmy as much as reddit’ and that he believes he would ‘miss stories he would otherwise have liked to see’ by switching to Lemmy.
Reddit has kept him more up to date than not over the past year - he believes had he not been using reddit he wouldn’t have found out about [specific events in iran] as early as he did.
The other main pain point I’ve encountered is the small and niche community problem, which I’m sure we are all aware of - certain information feels like it can only be found on such small subreddits.
Therefore I have two suggestions:
- create a Lemmy instance that mirrors reddit, rather than have bots post reddit posts onto main Lemmy instances, create an instance that mirrors specific subreddits on request, including the comments of their posts, and allows Lemmy users to comment and reply back, where those comments are also propagated to reddit so that replies and discussion are mirrored also.
This would struggle due to reddit API and compute power requirements but the subreddits on request and a specific instance for these posts would eliminate the bot spam problem from earlier attempts at the same thing.
- potentially allow the user to associate their reddit account with the instance so comments etc can proliferate without bot recognition.
The other suggestion would be:
- set up trackers for major (and newly popular) subreddits, tag posts by priority, and use this set of posts to determine what content and types of content are missing, but don’t just automatically post everything as the spam problem gets out of hand.
Finally, my biggest gripe with my Lemmy use is the constant instance wars.
I have had my comments removed for being rightfully critical of Israel by lemmy.world mods. They appear intent on recreating the problems of reddit here.
This would struggle due to reddit API and compute power requirements
IIRC the EU released a law a few months ago that forces big internet communication platforms to open their API to third-party clients.
this applied to whatsapp i think, i’m not sure whether it also applies to reddit but it might be worth investigating if somebody has too much time on their hands :P
Reddit would probably sooner just lop off their entire EU userbase than comply.
No offense to Europeans because I love y’all, but you are a drop in the bucket for global (English) internet usage.
I think you would be surprised. Obviously UK (if you include it here) would do some heavy lifting for English-language users in Europe using Reddit, a massive chunk of Europe can communicate perfectly well in English on social media platforms and do - and you wouldn’t know they aren’t American or Anglo unless a topic came up where they would say it, or if you asked them.
To the best of my recollection the last I’ve seen bits of traffic data here and there, it’s large, but not large in comparison to the US and India.
Where does Reddit share data on country of origin for its users?
To moderators. I want to say even to regular users if your comment/post gets enough traction on New Reddit, i.e. hundreds or thousands of views.
Other, similar websites also show such data to those in privileged positions as well. If they’re pretty sure you’re not a bot, they give it freely. Whatever tier above “average user” and especially “a person interested in growing the website out of self-interest” a given website has, it’ll probably be available. I’m sure you can imagine a half dozen that are on the money.
I meant at scale. Yeah I can see who replies to my individual comments or posts based on their country (or VPN) but that doesn’t tell the whole story.
Here’s my Amateur Coder waving the Wand of Coding idea:
What if we had a FOSS browser extension that scraped Reddit passively, uploading everything you see as you browse (except PII like your username and PMs and such) via bot to Lemmy (on a delay so they can’t pinpoint your identity as easily?)
I can’t be the only one who splits their time between Lemmy and Reddit, and would much rather participate here than there, but there’s much less to comment on here.
My favorite subreddit (/r/tampa) recently perma-banned me for extremely petty reasons, but /c/tampa is a ghost town.
That does sound like a decent idea, that way the content being mirrored would be only that that genuine users accessed.
Perhaps immediately mirroring the content as the browser itself reads it, preventing additional requests that could be flagged.
Only issues are:
- some people don’t use reddit whatsover anymore
- many people only browse reddit on mobile
- a browser extension might require too much trust and involvement to generate much output considering the development involved.
Though this does answer some issues and have some clear use cases.
Cheers for the suggestion!
The nice part about my idea is that even with those hurdles in mind, I still proposed it knowing that all it would take is one person to happen upon whichever post or subreddit to auto-scrape and get the discussion on Lemmy going.
Let’s be real; 99% of the reason Lemmy is less popular than Reddit is copy+pasting a link, writing your own title, etc. is more effort than 0, therefore the Lemmy-Reddit hybrids like myself don’t bother.
Hell, even the staunchly anti-Reddit Lemmites who could be parasitically “stealing” posts and comments to steal Reddit’s thunder don’t do it. There are other things they’d rather do, evidently.
Now that I think of it, after using the word “scrape,” it could be that Reddit ToS follows most websites’ in that scraping is explicitly forbidden, so displaying the open source code (or even using it) would incur legal action from Reddit.
I’ve been here a few years now and I can say Lemmy’s got issues. You can’t come on here and have a good time anymore when all it’s about is trump trump trump and Linux Linux Linux it gets old. I wanna escape from reality a bit sometimes and there’s few areas to subscribe to that gives any joy anymore.
On a long enough timeline, every Lemmy thread eventually becomes one of the following:
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ACAB
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Trump bad
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FOSS good
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Reddit bad
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Socialism (generally, via vanguard party) good
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Tankies (i.e. #5) bad
Not that I disagree with most of the above, but we need some normies in here to balance things out, so invite them and don’t demonize them. That’s made trickier by Reddit banning people for talking about the Fediverse/Lemmy, so you have to be clever about it.
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A lot of those ‘users’ are bots or paid shills too.
I doubt the latter - we are too small - but many are definitely alts for sure. Lemmy’s lack of federation for moderator reports (either coming soon or only came recently I forget which) made that necessary.
.ml and hexbear are literal troll farms
I came here looking for something different than Reddit but I’m actually pretty done. I try to post, start threads and conversations but the ones that don’t get deleted because of some vague rule get questioned to hell as to why it exists that it makes me wish I hadn’t posted at all.
I’ve lost track of how many subs I’ve been banned from cause I pissed off a friend of a mod.
How, dude? I’ve never even gotten a warning from a mod.
