Fediverse

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.

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

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.

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.

Just talk up Lemmy, the issue is most people doesn't realize there's another option to the popular toxic trash fires.

…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 :’(

I'm a very new user who wanted to give this a chance, here are the friction points from my point of view:

1. 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.
2. 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
3. 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.

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'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.

Part of the issue (I feel a large part ) is that the learning curve is too steep to get on Lemmy

Now I'm not saying it's hard at all; but it's significantly higher than simply "go to a main page and create a user name and password". Lemmy needs a sign up page that just random signs you up to an active instance (per the instances permission) and automatically subscribes you to the 50 most active instances to just get you started up.

Making a getting started page that's as idiot proof as any .com would probably go a long ways into upping our numbers here.

Here is my super unpopular take: ultimately you / some / we have misunderstood "quality over quantity".

It doesn't mean "we don't want more users", it means that the best way to attract more users and growth of the platform is to focus on being the best fediverse we can be. Actively trying to attract more users is a foot gun - even in the unlikely event you're successful, you reduce the quality of the experience for everyone.

Focusing instead on the health, vibrance, management, and activity of the platform is the best way to attract more users.

Perhaps another way of saying the same thing: the most fertile market segment are those users who used to be active monthly. They were here trying to participate at some point but lost interest. Why? Pretty solid guess is that they were still logging in to reddit for the special / niche interest subs, and after a few months got sick of checking lemmy.

IMO, dead special interest communities are the cancer consuming the fediverse. Nothing wrong with a small active community, but a small community with a half dozen posts from 3 years ago is a big sign saying "go back to reddit, this place is dead".

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" model. I don't really understand what it means or how it works, what the difference between the various servers are, or what to join or even which app to download. There are a lot of options and complicated technical terms (like "federated", "fediverse") you need to research just so you can sign up. The fact that you have to write all of these explanations about it doesn't really 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, I think people here should engage more with positive content. We should make the wholesome, fun stuff popular because it's appealing. Post about the cool/funny/awesome/interesting stuff you encounter every day; talk about the arts, your hobbies, your funny life fuck ups, your non-serious relationship woes, your pets, etc.! In my exploration today I noticed those kinds of communities barely get any interaction whereas the news/political ones are always active.

I posted in an ADHD community about how I'm fed up with managing my symptoms and I think I finally need to talk to a professional. Someone tried to blame my symptoms on capitalism.

As someone who simply left Reddit because they took away RIF and only stays here because I'm stubborn, Lemmy is the left wing version of Truth Social. A great deal of the users here are the absolute embodiment of the people from Sanfrancisco in South Park huffing each others farts about how progressive they are.

Like, I get it and I do agree in principle on most things with Lemmy which is the only reason I dont leave, but make no mistake THE FEDIVERSE IS AN ECHO CHAMBER.

I'll commit to commenting more. I prefer to lurk, but the fediverse needs me 🤣

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.

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 have been noticing a drop in post/comments diversity and quantity. The diminishing users is something noticeable and sad.

We're in times where we need to seek alternatives to big tech more than ever, and yet, people don't seem to care :(

Lemmy feels like a return to the old internet, when communities were smaller, and for me its refreshing to be able to participate in communities on major topics again without getting drowned out. It harkens back to the days of early forums and message boards, where users gathered around shared interests and discussions felt more organic.

Just wait for Reddit to finally ban porn and we’ll have more users than we know what to do with

I'm here, I just never comment :3

As a developer for a Lemmy app, recently I've felt Lemmy become more and more fragmented resulting in a poorer than usual user experience. And the base user experience is already poor. I'm mostly just venting but man is the fragmentation annoying to deal with as a developer and as a user. :/

While (I think) I totally understand what you are saying here...

... Yeah I'm honestly fine with lemmy just being more or less a tiny cluster of neo forums.

I like the cozy.

At the same time... from I guess a less selfish perspective... yeah, this is the exact time an alternative to Reddit and other corpo social media needs to be popularized.

But, somewhat alleviating myself from that... I don't really know anybody that I could 'word of mouth' spread lemmy to, that I haven't already.

And I'm too crippled to put stickers on really anything outside my own apartment, lol.

The only way non tech users who comprises of 90% of the world will join Lemmy only if they have one instance which is baked in the app.

People don't understand and don't want to learn what instances are, how it works etc. Non tech users don't give a shit. All they need is an app with username and password which hopefully the remember.

Once you get an app like that and the UI is reddit like , then 100% will move.

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.

I send my friends memes. They ask "Muad'dib, where do you get these great memes?" I say I get my great memes from Lemmy. They instantly lose interest, because Lemmy is full of tankies and kinphobes

I’m happy to promote it. I tried to get a few non-technical people to check it out. They felt it was too complicated. I’ve shared it with tech friends and coworkers who use Reddit. They’re aware of Lemmy to varying degrees, and are not enthused about moving to another platform despite hating Reddit.

I think it’s because despite Lemmy being a great alternative, it is more complicated and lacks the user base that users of other social media platforms have.

Bluesky is marginally more complicated than Twitter, but compared to Mastodon it is user friendly. Bluesky worked to create a dedicated, easy to use app that most users use.

Bluesky existed for a while before experiencing explosive growth. This occurred during moments of controversy with X. Bluesky capitalized on these moments, with champions on both platforms that led their followers to change, and there were mechanisms in place to bootstrap a user’s feed with the followers and topics that they had in the other place.

I think Lemmy needs to follow this model. There needs to be a Lemmy app that has a user experience as similar as possible with the Reddit app. It also needs champions that have main stream recognition (George Takei, Mark Hamill, etc.) that can be willing to make noise about switching from Reddit to Lemmy when the next controversy occurs. Repeat with more and more promotion by this evangelists, and Lemmy could grow.

The culture wars have reached the fediverse, and it's making me less happy to be here. I don't want to hang out in places where people use slurs and insults, even if they're not aimed at me. I'm seeing more casual misogyny/misandry, more casual use of the r**** slur, more perfectionist gatekeeping, more assumptions, and just less good-faith comments in general.

I'd advertise, but I'm starting to look for an alternative to lemmy.

The source data shows that while active users are down, the number of posts and comments are near all-time highs. While you need new users to help counteract churn, I think the higher post/comments count points to what I think a lot of people feel here: that quality seems to keep getting better and better.

Regarding how to bring more people in, I personally like how different lemmy servers have slightly different characteristics but each seems to appeal to larger groups. I see a future where there’s probably a small-ish number of large servers that cover broad groups of people.