…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 :’(

It seems strange that these two curves so closely match eachother in shape.

When 6month active users drop that means 6 months ago a user stopped using the platform.
When monthly active users drop that means a month ago a user stopped using the platform.
So this would suggest that there is a correlation between user attrition 6 months ago and last month.

I think part of the issue is new users not understanding or feeling comfortable with the fediverse (myself included a while ago). Even after searching for a bit and looking it up I can barely get how it works, but there’s really no guide with the common terms anywhere, how to get started, the difference between platforms and what they have in common etc. The benefits are the first thing you hear about, but they seem more like jargon terms than actually anything functional.

Reddit has better accessibility and user retainment, alongside with a library of old posts that are good for searching some niche stuff up.

For example, if I were to get a friend into lemmy, I’m not really sure how I can explain it to them, or where to start other than the copy paste “decentralized” “federated” stuff. It doesn’t really answer stuff like who moderates it, develops it, owns it, or what’s the difference between lemmy, piefed mbin, how do they interact with each other.
I believe that an introductory “oficial” post on the front of each platform in layman’s terms would be great to get new users to stay.

My two cents is that more users oughta establish new communities when they find the absence of one. Even if they don’t have the time to devote for moderating it, as people join the responsibilities can be allocated among the early adopters. Especially those with strong political and moral backgrounds (to mitigate abuses of power like those infamously cultivated over at Reddit).

Wait till Reddit fucks up again, there will be an influx of users.

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.

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.

Every person that keeps saying it’s good that there is no one here sounds like scrooge in my head going,
“Good, all to decrease the surplus population”

I agree! There is not enough people here

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’ve always been more of a lurker/commenter than a poster, but posters are what Lemmy needs if we want more users to come. People need to want to come to Lemmy for content.

In my experience, the best poster on the platform is the person making the comics on /c/unix_surrealism, in that sometimes I find myself wanting to check the comm to see if there is anything new.

And this will be disagreed with heavily, but the second best posters are the memers at Hexbear. I just think they make the funniest leftist memes (so political content, sorry people who are tired of politics), and they’re the only instance that actually has a site culture, with their own in-jokes and history/lore.

When Reddit was young, that was a big part of it: Posts that went viral among the community and became in-jokes/lore. Comment chains (as much as I grew to hate them). And original ideas for content (AMA, TIL, AITA, etc.). There was a kind of culture to the site (that’s mostly been diluted now).

That said. I like Lemmy perfectly fine at the size it is, even if it doesn’t fully replace Reddit. Though it’s concerning to see it declining.

To the user mines!

I actually don’t mind a smaller community of more intelligent people. Too much riff raff and the quality degrades.

I’m doing my part. I can’t stop making communities and having debates.

This is quite concerning indeed.

We should start by being better at retaining what we already have.

Every person is valuable now.

Alright, I’ll make more content. Give me a month or two. I’m slow at drawing.