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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Alright, I’ll make more content. Give me a month or two. I’m slow at drawing.
This is quite concerning indeed.
We should start by being better at retaining what we already have.
Every person is valuable now.
Then start breeding yall
Just wait for Reddit to finally ban porn and we’ll have more users than we know what to do with
Can someone vibecode a self hosted tool that reposts reddit top rated content to Lemmy? Like people that are interested could just run that self hosted service for subreddit they are interested in and it would post automatically into lemmy communities .
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.
I’ll do my best! Luckily, Lemmy still has a healthy community though
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.
Look, this is my filter list:
Because i don’t want to deal with depressing politics every day in my off time.
And this is what i still see:
Maybe a tagging system would help?
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. :/
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.
Have you considered trying out Piefed? Piefed has custom feed options currently.
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.
I don’t really know how you make the onboarding, the instance selection easier at this point. What do you propose?
What site did you use when you found lemmy?
I agree. New user introduction is very poor. Took me ages just to choose an instance - and that was in no small part because I’m here not only to escape the enshittified chokepoint capitalism of american big tech, but also because I’m utterly sick of the domination of US centric points of view and censorship. Even though i know communities are not instance locked, I wanted an instance that is not likely to be managed in the same way. Time will tell if I chose well or poorly
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 wanted to see it and did take a look into your profile: That was one user and he was rightfully criticized and downvoted for that stupid post. It’s not great that this happened, but I’m not sure if it is fair to judge all of us here based on that
Lemmy is the left wing version of Truth Social
I’d say a few instances are indeed, but overall I find it ranges from far left to centerish, where as TS ranges from far right.
but make no mistake THE FEDIVERSE IS AN ECHO CHAMBER.
VERSE IS AN ECHO CHAMBER…
I really don’t mind that the fediverse is an echo chamber. I’m in no way interessted in having conversations with fascists.
Your response is an example of what frustrates me with Lemmy. Anyone with a different opinion must be a fascist. No nuance. Just instantly labelling people. No wonder the numbers are dropping and not attracting new users.
Guess what? We can have people who aren’t far left who aren’t fascists. I’d rather see healthy discussions and debates than everyone patting each other on the back for saying “DAE capitalism bad”.
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.
I agree with you but I would still want numbers to go up a little bit, not down the way they are apparently.
Couldn’t say it any better. If stagnant popularity is what is necessary to stay unattractive for botnets and bad actors I personally am all for it.
I enjoy that aspect for sure. Once I had subscribed to enough communities, I have plenty of content and apparent activity in my feed. For a lot of people that takes getting used to and people have low attention spans.
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”.
This place has always been dead if special interest groups are a measure. There is nothing here and honestly never was…
I’m not disagreeing with you. I didn’t say “this place used to be a utopia of special interest content”.
There’s plenty but. It’s only dead if you think you need to be constantly engaged by your phone all day
This is empirically false. Given the context, it is more akin to grocery shopping at a gas station in the middle of nowhere.
No you’re wrong, using large words though really helps get your incorrect point across. Much further and you would be strawmanning it
Which word is big there? empiric? akin? or is it grocery? gas? station? middle? Did they edit it out and I missed it?
Good choice shorten the word you knew was the one.
I checked the usage statistics and you are partially (85%?) right. Empirically is rarer unless you are(/were recently) in academia, then it is very common. Akin is rare in general but only in usage, everyone apparently knows it.
I really though you were gonna choose akin because I don’t hear that one as often as 10 years ago (and I never used it I think).
I’m a non-native speaker and I use empiric and empirically at least once a week. STEM though, maybe I’m biased.
Ok
Would it almost be better to prune old communities? I agree it’s off-putting to find community for an interest and seeing last activity like a year ago, doesn’t make you want to post since it seems inactive.
One thing about how reddit/lemmy works though is people subscribed (assumedly still active on Lemmy elsewhere) might still see that content vs a forum where no activity means very few visit the site.
That might be an option. I personally would be fine with that but I’ve noticed that many / most users get very upset about the notion that posts / communities / users are impermanent ?
Another solution is to simply promote these dead communities - if anyone is interested in warming them up then they should do so. If they’re consistent then after a few months ask existing mods to add them as mods, or ask admins to do so if the mods are not responsive.
This approach runs the risk that the person doing the work may not become a mod, but honestly I don’t think being a mod should be the objective of creating a community.
Yeah, I just thought about my suggestion more and one thing I think that has given reddit so much staying power is the fact content sticks around so long, I’d imagine many of us here would specifically search in reddit for reviews or help with something and found a like 3 year old thread with the answer.
So… Pruning is probably a bad idea lol.
Unfortunately threadiverse searchability is pretty bad, assumedly because of the nature of the fediverse with content being copied across instances essentially I am sure its a little more difficult for an indexer to properly handle it, not to mention somehow deciding which instance to specifically link to for a certain thread. On top of that, it wouldn’t surprise me if all the corpo search engines would deprioritize most fediverse sites out of self preservation 🤷
On the “warming them up” that makes sense in theory, but usually if I’m making a rare post it’s to engage with a group of people, if I don’t see the engagement I’m probably not going to go there again to post whatever it is because what’s the point if no one sees it anyway?
I mean “warming up” a community intentionally.
For example, one of the subs I regularly read on reddit is /r/audiobooks, looking for recommendations et cetera. The audiobook communities here are dead.
If I want to adopt one of those dead communities here, I could just decide to make several posts a week for a few months. Thereafter, if I’m still keen, and still haven’t had any interaction from the existing mods, I could approach the admin of that instance and make my case for being appointed as a mod.
Pruning is a bad idea imo. Old communities here (like on reddit) can be great resources for solutions to technical problems, for example. And weird one-off communities that have like 2 memes from a decade ago can be really funny when you get linked to them.
Perhaps a notification-type nag, a tab of “communities you used to use but haven’t posted to for a while” but with a snappier title, alongside “local” and “all”.
