by fedidb.org
Honestly a lot of it is probably people getting comfortable lurking again, Lemmy only counts post and comments as active users
Commenting so I‘m active :)
I don’t know how long it counts it for, but I try to remember to comment something like once every two weeks or something
that‘s a good idea. I will copy your „way of lemmy“.
I’m doing my part!
Ok I am guilty of that. What about votes? Are they not counted as activity?
I’ll try to post atleast one comment every now and then.
My comment to stop the lurk
Well in that case, ping!
Yeah, that’s probably the case.
Really? Oh
Well count me in now
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.
How’s kbin doing? Granted they federate with Lemmy so it’s like asking about an instance. But not quite the same
Kbin is doing pretty well, they are still holding on to about 6,000 MAUs. Lemmy still has around 32,000, for comparison. Lemmy peaked around 66,000 MAUs at the end of July, but a big chunk of that was probably alt accounts that have since gone dormant.
Kbin’s main developer had some major IRL events that coincided with the reddit exodus so he wasn’t really able to do much work on the code for a while. But now he is back, and another team has also made a fork of kbin called mbin.
Federation is still pretty janky with kbin, so I think that activity should pick up on both sides once we get some software updates and more intermingling of the kbin and Lemmy userbases.
OP is also spot on about this being the largest that a reddit alternative has ever gotten. I’m pretty sure alternatives such as discuit, squabble, tildes, etc have never even approached 10k MAUs, so we are already well past that. If not for the fact that this platform is federated, there would probably already be much more activity. However, the federated structure should become more and more useful as we grow larger, so it’s a worthy sacrifice even if it’s stunting activity for the time being.
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.
Under a centralized system, bans are terrible. But federation is awesome because it’s perfectly okay for an instance to be ban-happy. Just join another instance. (I’m on lemm.ee because I want to see everything)
Not only is it fine, but I think we actually need a variety of instances; no-bans, some-bans, lots-of-bans, and excessive-bans. People should have the choice.
While I don’t entirely disagree, I’m a little confused by your description of the front page of lemm.ee, which we’re both on. My front page when viewing All here is mostly memes/shitposts/news/technology when set to Active sort, is yours not?
I’ve admittedly blocked a fair amount and have show NSFW/bot posts disabled, but the communities you mention aren’t affected by that.
Yeah I could’ve been more clear. I mean the All feed not Local. I went and updated my comment. And to be fully clear, I’ve got no complaints about lemm.ee. It’s exactly what I want, e.g. show me everything and I’ll decide what to block. That said, I know I’m not the norm.
Saying you blocked a fair amount is exactly what I’m talking about, so have I. A little bit of effort can really make the feed more palletable. We need to have a place where that is done by default. Maybe even an open source AI or even just an algorithm that tailors it to the user. I’m already glad Lemmy.world is much more moderate than lemm.ee, and we just need a place that goes all the way; NSFW blocked by default, several communities blocked-by-default (not defederated), and somehow prevents All from being flooded by niche memes. I love Linux and the memes (even if they get a bit repetitive) but we shouldn’t have 3 of the top 10 posts be linux memes.
I tried to get my lab mate, a PhD in computer science and Linux Mint user, to get a Lemmy. He took one look at the all page, laughed, pointed out the circle jerk stuff and asked how some junk posts even made it to the all page and then said “yeah, no thanks” and has never touched Lemmy since. He was already 4 times more likely than the average person, but even he was instantly turned off.
I gotcha. Fwiw I kind of agree, even beyond Lemmy I’ve been a little surprised some of these sites/instances haven’t done more to tailor themselves to accommodate more folks or focus on specific demographics.
That’s supposed to be one of the big perks of the federation approach, being able to create more distinct communities, but outside of a few, they largely seem to run the software as-is, maybe with some backend adjustments to help reduce the costs of operation or the like.
Yeah, and maybe that means I should try making such an instance. I don’t have the funds for something like lemmy.world, but I’ve got the technical background. So maybe that’ll turn into my winter break project
Don’t forget firefox
Lol, yesterday it felt like there was at least half a dozen posts about Firefox, mostly claiming that YouTube was slowing them down. Which seemed really bad at first, till I dug into it and saw it was probably an unintended bug with ad handling.
And why were there so many posts? Who wants to see the same post more than once?
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.
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.
Isn’t Lemmy suposed to be FOSS? I thought that was the main reason why people left Reddit for Lemmy was that and API changes. Wouldn´t other FOSS be of interestt too? Just a thought.
Hey don’t forget about the other half of the posts, which are in a language you don’t understand. Seriously, my block list is long because language settings here mean nothing, and while I’m sure that’s quality content, uh, I can’t understand it.
Fuck yes.
Good days are good!
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.
Yeah Reddit just sucks now. I don’t care much about karma, but it can be discouraging to type out a long answer to help someone and just get a downvote with no comment or anything. Over and over again.
The influx of people who don’t know how the site is supposed to work, on top of the usual toxicity, has just ruined it for me.
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.
I do most of my discourse on Beehaw which is protected in many ways. When I used reddit I would often have a comment typed out ready to post and think better of it since I knew it would only drive dismissive and antagonistic responses of the stupidest kind. It may be because of the protections or it may be because of the smaller community but I find a lot less posturing and a lot more actual conversation since I’ve been using this platform. This is what keeps me here rather than reddit. It might be worth engaging in conversations you wouldn’t have on reddit when you’re interested.
I agree… Beehaw is such a wonderful and special place on the internet. I have an account there but I try to keep it separate from my main Lemmy.ca one so that I better hold myself accountable to the server rules, in order to foster nicer discourse.
Well, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts.
There are a number of thread topics on Lemmy that seem to keep going the same direction (Google, Musk, Gaza, Trump, Windows, etc.), and as you say, it can be frustrating and exhausting…
At the same tine on Lemmy, I had found articles that were worthwhile reading, updates to FOSS that I would have otherwise missed, no shortage of silly memes, and a handful of new perspectives that were positively thought provoking. Those let me look past most of the negative things and stuff that is pervasive on all kinds of forums, Reddit and social media on the whole.
I’ll happily participate with light-hearted content but otherwise I mostly feel like you when it comes to any polarising topics like politics, etc. I wish there were more content about my areas of expertise so I could participate in that but alas there’s mostly developer stuff only. Maybe I’m also not doing my best curating my feed since I tend to mostly browse all.
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
If people left Reddit and then went back, then they are just proving to spez that they are the addicts he thinks they are and is counting on abusing. No thanks. Fuck Reddit.
Reddit has actually gotten a lot better since the Exodus. All the political activists have come here.
Just wait for the US election season to get into full swing. It’ll become a steaming pile again.
Highly doubt that. You’ve probably just gotten better at curating your subs. Fediverse has been a vastly superior experience for me either way.
There’s no more r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM?
We need more idiots who can comment “this” on everything
This
i second this
I third this
That?
This
This
this.
This
this
dis
this
psst
this
I’m sure it won’t just be anot- why, you little scamp!
Thizz
And my axe!
+1
I, too, choose this guy’s wife.
The quality here is far better with the exception of maybe some user generated text stories. Posts don’t just get lost in a sea of posts. The users here may not be as many, but it appears to have more consistent engagement and far less people PM’ing me offering me Amazon gift cards for feet pics.
If you missed them maybe you can persuade those wikifeet contributors to join your lemmy instance.
NO. NO FEET PICS. BAD.
We should be more active to keep this ship afloat. Don’t be stingy with the comments.
Edit: spelling
You mean stingyv not stringy
But if I give my opinion on Pokemon’s, my server will get defederated, so I’ll keep quiet.
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??!!!?
As a Lemmy shareholder, I’m outraged. If Lemmy doesn’t get more users soon, I am going to stop the thrusters that keep the world turning. You have been warned.
Active user count is probably the single most important metric to whether a platform is successful and stays alive. Even above quality of content, as proven by many other social media platforms that thrive despite being flooded with trash content.
No one wants to hang out in a ghost town.
Coulda fooled me, the content quality has continued to climb, and that’s all that matters. Look at this post, it’s an original meme only relevant to this community, and it’s blowing up.
I get a bit annoyed with a hit meme being reposted 5+ times across instances, it clogs the main feed with repetition and only artificially increases the post numbers while making the whole experience less good. I did enjoy the comment-stacking meme yesterday where everyone added their own take. There are a few news-posting bots that post the exact same articles and cause the clogging repetitive main feed that makes the app far less interesting as well. It gets a bit depressing seeing the same inflammatory headlines 3-4 times, ie “35 blind fingerless coal-mining orphans bombed in Gaza strip hospital, why isn’t Joe Biden doing anything?” While reporting is important, the repetition of some themes seems astroturf-y. I also get really annoyed with the bots posting NSFW/ extremely explicit sex content/ads on main feeds. I have been here less because of these things.
Less content, that is spread across multiple instances that can have duplicate communities.
You just can’t keep doomscrolling here, the “active” search repeats all the time and the “best of the day” is like two pages.
And then there’s specific communities that just… Stayed on Reddit.
Less content, that is spread across multiple instances that can have duplicate communities.
on top of that, there redundant communities that are unnecessary even in the same instances. For example there is the android@ and the askandroid@. The first one has a decent amount of subscribers while the second one has a single digit number. I wanted to ask a question, I posted in the first one since it would make sense to reach more people. The post got deleted and I was told to go to the other one. In the first one they were posting only news articles.
This is ridiculous. Splitting communities in such way was the result of the huge traffic that such communities had in the past in other platforms. This makes sense only when the traffic is so huge that it is practically chaotic to navigate and moderate between news/articles and support questions. When both communities combined have 50 subscribers, such split only harms the platform and the users.
Everyone wanted to migrate by bringing an identical environment to what they had used to. However this should be adaptable to the current situation instead of directly copying it.
I think some people expected their entire community to get up and move.
It’s not just that. Most people here are into far left, anti-capitalist bs and people don’t care to deal with that
I like it here because of the far left anti-capitalist bs. The internet is full of edgy incel nazis and it’s pretty relieving to have some safe spaces 🤷♂️
People clearly support that, and it makes sense, considering Lemmy’s founder is a Communist and decentralization appeals to Leftists.
I actually found that I really like the “hot” scrolling so much better. On Reddit, everything I came across had ~hundreds of comments and everything was multiple hours old. I didn’t feel like I could contribute at all. But here… it feels a lot smaller, and most of the “hot” posts are not rubbish, so I feel like I can actually contribute!
Well for me, the real content of Reddit was finding an interesting thing and then reading a few dozen comments from people really in the know.
Here it’s going to be a dozen top-level comments and maybe one of them will have a thread longer than three messages.
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.
I see more people complaining on Lemmy about problems than I do the actual problems they’re complaining about.
Just use the thing, and put the content and comments you want on it? You don’t have to be a passive observer just staring out the window as monkeys dance for you. Be the monkey. Dance how you want. Eat a banana. Fling poo if that’s what you want. Just stop expecting everyone else to create your dream routine and then having a sook because they step-pause-turn-pause-pivot-step-paused when you wanted them to step-pause-turn-pause-pivot-step-step.
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!
Pun threads on Reddit are the worst. I thought they were funny and clever… In 2009…
[I got a bot to automatically delete all my comments over 1 month old so you can’t see this comment anymore]