Honestly a lot of it is probably people getting comfortable lurking again, Lemmy only counts post and comments as active users
So glad I decided to stop lurking and actually start participating right as the whole fediverse dies out, it’s not just lemmy.
I find it more comfortable to contribute to Lemmy than to other sites. There seems to be actual discussion and opportunities to learn, which can be much harder to come across on the other platforms.
And fewer comments that are clearly a chat bot.
When you come across a ‘user’ that almost exclusively defends one controversial politician/company/government and all of their comments seem to follow a script. Also the account is either brand new or 5 years old but only started posting recently.
Don’t worry! They’ve just become less obvious.
That I agree with. I don’t post often but when I do it’s always very positive and makes me want to post more . Compared to Reddit where it would have alot more negative comments or would just get removed by the mods for some stupid reason. Did you know you can no longer post on r/buildapc about asking for suggestions on building PC’s ? What’s even the point anymore?
Commenting so I‘m active :)
It’s funny how despite social media becoming very normal, the old phenomenon of most content getting generated by a small portion of power users persists.
deleted by creator
Tervell and Dirt_Owl.
I post
Me no lurk. Me comment.
Well count me in now
I’m doing my part!
Let’s look at some numbers and do some napkin math:
Currently, the top post of Lemmy can usually get a little more than 2K upvotes, which puts Lemmy at about late 2010 to early 2011 reddit level of activity, which is right before reddit hits its explosive growth phase in 2012 with SOPA, Kony, and the Obama AMA. While active user count has been going down, the amount of post and comments have both been steadily going up.
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity. (unless you count 9gag or the_donald for some reason.)
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity.
That is a very important point that doesn’t get mentioned enough. Lemmy is the largest and most active reddit alternative around. All the other sites that tried to capitalize on the API disaster have laughable numbers of users and most posts rarely have more than 10 votes or interactions.
That is a very astute observation, and I would not worry about the temporary decline for this very reason.
Also, looking at your username… ”can somebody please find Margot Robbie so that I can make sense of all this”
That’s esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
You should have seen Lemmy before June 2023. All posts were from the same five people. For now the community seems to be alive and healthy.
Yep, I’m jaded in my expectations knowing what Lemmy was prior to the massive expansion through June and July…
It was still a fun place, but it was a couple dozen posts a day across all servers, by a handful of people from the bigger servers.
We still have a lot of fixes to make on Lemmy, especially on the moderation, management, and content filtering side of things (though apps have been thankfully filling the gaps on some of these issues). Niche communities still need more participation to get off the ground. I’ll see again where we are in a few months from now.
It’s very simple, most of the posts here are circle jerks (Linux, FOSS, boy howdy aren’t we better than Reddit, communism) or rage bait.
I only come here when I’m having a good day and I want to reel myself in a bit
Edit: see below to see how far Lemmy users will go to circle jerk how much better they are than Reddit
Yeah the “All” in particular is pretty bad for the average person. They’re not going to enjoy a Star Trek meme, followed by a Arch meme, a Self-hosted post, a grad-student Science meme, followed by a privacy post.
I’m also convinced Lemmy’s “hot” algorithm is broken; I can easily find posts with ONE UPVOTE on the all feed. Hot is supposed to be a balance between acceleration and total vote count, but it seems like it just only acceleration. Go look at the front page of reddit. The difference is night and day.
We need a normie.world that has an “all” feed that doesn’t contain 70% niche communities. We have c/humor, c/news, etc but they’re completely diluted by overpowered niche posts.
I have a potentially contentious opinion. Normies are what ruined Reddit and the crowd attracted by normie communities are why Reddit is even more toxic than it used to be.
We don’t need to attract normies, we just need to attract more people like us.
I don’t hate normies by any means, but I don’t want to hang out with them all day either.
Yeah I completely disagree. Imagine if a city/local gov wanted to use Lemmy in order to be self hosted (similar to EU govs switching to Mastodon) but the public just wonders why their local gov put their stuff on a weird circle jerk website that’s flooded with niche memes. “Why didn’t they use the normal thing (i.e. reddit)?”
We should be welcoming enough that, when someone wants to make a new subreddit, they make Lemmy community instead. And I don’t think thats the case right now.
That’s fair. Hadn’t considered that
“Memes that people don’t get are unwelcoming.”
If a person sees something they’ve never seen before, and turns around and flees, that’s a problem with them being sheltered and pathetic, not a problem with the new thing they haven’t encountered before.
It’s not fleeing as much as it is being so bored that that they never really find the motivation to come back.
The worst part of trying to appeal more to normies is how they hand out bans like they’re candy.
Gotta appeal to advertisers that want the normie eye balls.
I hate using the word normie, because these people truthfully haven’t done anything wrong. It’s the advertisers that follow them around like vampires that are the issue.
We need a normie.world
It’s called reddit and that’s why I left. Fuck the normies. They’ll import fascism.
That sounds unnecessarily combative so let me expand my argument.
There’s a book called The Authoritarians by a man called Bob Altermyer. Altermyer is now retired but he was a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. During his career he did a lot of research into authoritarians, both followers and leaders. In the book he describes for laypeople the experiments and the findings. If you want to do a deep dive into his statistical analysis you can because the whole thing is fully referenced but for people who just want an easy to read description that is also easy to understand then this is the book for you.
After reading the book redditors behaviour became a lot more easy to understand. I was less upset by what was going on but I stopped engaging because I now understood that reddit wasn’t a site for me anymore. It was a site for people that enjoyed being normal and doing normal things. And that’s ok, why shouldn’t they be catered for?
I use reddit and lemmy exclusively on desktop or laptop. So when the app business came up I didn’t regard it as my fight, however I thought that if I expected people to stand up for my interests if they are challenged I should show a bit of solidarity with them. So I didn’t visit reddit at all for the days it was blacked out. I didn’t like how spez reacted. I saw that people were crossing to the fediverse and I took a look for myself. I liked it. I posted. I wasn’t attacked for having a non-normie viewpoint. I liked that a lot.
The thing about normies is they don’t read scientific studies for fun, they don’t like long winded explanations about why the world is the way it is. They think they can see something in the street and extrapolate an entire social policy from it and there are chancers that will tell them, ‘You know what? You’re right. We don’t need experts telling you that you’re wrong, what do they know?’
So your Jordan Petersons and your Nigel Farages and Alex whatever his nameis, these people and reddit’s normie audience are made for each other. I’ll even go as far as to say this extends to the people that think the Democrats or the Labour Party are going to fix their problems, Team Liberal aren’t doing themselves any favours but my point is that if your goal is a massive website that caters to the largest part of the reddit audience you’re going to end up swimming in cryptofascist and sometimes outright fascist content. Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt.
Interesting, I think I’ll take a look. You sorta skipper over what ‘normie’ or reddit behaviour was mentioned in his book specifically. Was it the lack of reading scientific articles you mentioned in another paragraph, that alone can’t be it right?
Listen, just go and read the thing; it will be time better spent than listening to me precis it from memory. but if you do read it a feel like it hasn’t given you an insight into what drives a whole host of behaviour that one sees on social media or that I’ve misunderstood the book then do come back to me and I will refresh my memory of the book to have that discussion with you.
Yeah, that’s fair enough, gotta do my own homework some of the time.
That’s not lemmy, that’s all social media (albite divisive topics are a bit different among different communities).
This is a hot take, but I think humanity is slowly turning it’s back on social media because of it’s toxic nature. You can only open a browser and get your nuts kicked so many times before you finally decide you don’t like getting your nuts kicked.
Personnaly, I’m really enjoying it. You can interact without the Reddit toxicity. I miss a few specialized communities but I can live without it.
Why does this matter? Do we need to appease the shareholders or something? Do we need endless month over month growth, lest the world completely stops turning?
Do we need SYNERGIES??!!!?
I won’t lie. I mostly don’t engage with content I see here. I didn’t do that when I was on Reddit either and mostly for the same reason: I don’t really have much to say and, even when I do have an opinion, I don’t usually want to engage in what’s often a protracted debate about something that will probably just end up being frustrating.
That’s not to say I haven’t had positive experiences on the Fediverse - I’ve had more here than anywhere else - I’m just not particularly motivated most of the time.
It was always bound to happen after a massive user gain. Frankly, we should be quite happy we can get over 400 comments in a thread. That’s not insubstantial for a very niche platform.
We need more idiots who can comment “this” on everything
I exclusively surf “top 6 hours” and I’ve actually noticed an uptick in niche community content, lately. Different kind of growth, maybe a sort of settling into itself, finally.
I sort by New. Bring it all on.
If everyone is browsing by top-6-hour I think we need to rethink the sorting of things.
Oh yeah, the sort here kind of sucks. Also just using the site, you lose your place/sort if you click into a link or the comments. Like, if I’m on page 2 of Top 6 Hours, click a link, and then click back into the scroll… pretty sure I just see the first page of Active again until I either refresh or change pages.
That could definitely be improved as well.
I don’t think Voyager has this problem. Highly, highly recommend, both on desktop and mobile. The UI is slick enough that it’s kept me here. All I do is laugh at shit memes but it’s perfect
Lemmy is neither popular nor heavily advertised, so people join at a slow rate
On the other hand, the amount political discussions, Hexbear, and lack of content result in disinterested people leaving Lemmy and joining Reddit
So the user count is decreasing because Reddit refugees are leaving faster than new people are joining
Memes are at least 50% shilling for communism.
If that’s not your jam go to your ad filled corpo hellscape and talk to bots 🤷♂️
Lemmy is whatever we make it, except for the communism posts that love communism until they realize workers need representation. I half believe those are Chinese bots or high school kids who are stupid enough to believe the Chinese bots.
Got new for you champ China doesn’t gaf about communism… and they sure as fuck don’t care enough to deploy bots on lemmy… The fediverse maybe…
Right. Magically, everyone on the Internet has become infatuated with communism out of thin air over the last few years. Must just be my paranoia to surggest influence from a hostile government.
[I got a bot to automatically delete all my comments over 1 month old so you can’t see this comment anymore]
as a realist, allowing porn would do wonders ngl
I joined a porn instance to fill the gap and trust me, you’re not missing out on anything
Infinite growth is not a good thing, numbers rise and fall just let it do it’s own thing. That being said, maybe if the Lemmy instances would stop defederating like children snatching toys from one another at a daycare it would get more engagement.
How do you think they can better address the problem of abusive users from other servers?
Read the comments thread of ANY of the “we defederated from” posts and it’s always the same “They were annoying tankies” shit. It isn’t a matter of abusive users, they have tools for that. They just want to allow fash shit to fester unopposed by the people capable of disarming it.
Just look at any instance that has hexbear and lemmygrad blocked. Their culture is already starting to decay into becoming reddit nazi bars.
Lemmy is cool and all but the amount of communist obsession here is a bit much.
It was founded by a Communist, and decentralization appeals to leftists. The non-Communist lemmy is Reddit, basically, or making your own instance or finding an anti-Communist instance.
As someone who posts a ton, I’ve noticed that a lot of people seem to check the top posts once a day or so. Posts can be slow to get engagement and traction, but the ones that become super active still seem to hit similar peaks as before (1-2k upvotes, hundreds of comments).
But yeah, people aren’t as actively engaged and commenting on everything all day like they used to on reddit. The framework is here, and I think if there were another big exodus, Lemmy is set up to be a great landing point.
But on the other hand reddits comments were frequently shallow and full of annoying jokes. I love reading Lemmy!
[I got a bot to automatically delete all my comments over 1 month old so you can’t see this comment anymore]
