I feel like that is more or less to be expected. A ton of people found Lemmy during the reddit protests. Now that the protests are gone and Lemmy has had its growing pains some users are leaving, going back to reddit or other places. If we keep using it and making content users will grow organically.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
Having recently jumped from the largest instance to a small unknown one, I will say that it’s nice not having to deal with downtimes roughly 20% of the time when I try to use Lemmy.
I wish there was a way to migrate all my subscriptions, cause then I would probably change instances to ease the burden on my current instance.
There are ways! Have a look at these:
I haven’t tried it out but have been watching it. Looks like a great tool!
It’s worked excellently. Very easy to use.
LASIM can copy your current subs to another instance, as others have said. I wish there was a way to migrate posts/comments over. I guess you could just link to your old account in your bio though.
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
There are a few others, mostly command line scripts.
I found this
I appreciate World’s transparency but it’s been a lot nicer on lemm.ee for me. Not having a way to kill time when I need to isn’t the end of the world but definitely annoying.
“You broke Reddit!”
No, you broke yourself.
It’s not that users want to centralize everything. It’s that Lemmy’s design is such that there are advantages to centralizing.
- Joining the largest instance makes searching, joining, or opening communities much more seamless.This can be addressed by:
- Improving the search so that it can find communities, or even content, that no one on the instance has subscribed yet.
- Making it easier to open a community in your home instance.
- In addition to Sub/Local/All feed, you can have a “moderated” feed (with communities selected by admins). The “local” feed is most useful for instances on a specific topic. But for very small instances, it’ll be too empty at least at first. So a moderated feed can create an on-topic feed that’s more lively.
- For most topics, only the largest communities are large enough to have good content, so everyone wants to join them. To address this, you need some easy mechanism to subscribe to all communities on a topic. For example, we can let communities follow other communities. Then people can create topical meta-communities that aggregate content without centralizing it.
This is the big one to me. It’s much more difficult to search for specific content if it’s isolated amongst communities on different servers, all trying to fill the same niche and splitting the potential userbase for said niche up between them.
If there was like a tag system in place that communities could use to tag themselves as being for a specific thing, like cooking, for example, and then you could aggregate/search posts from all communities under the cooking tag across all servers federated with yours, it would greatly simplify finding content for less tech literate users while also increasing the resilience of the entire network by allowing more communities for a specific niche to exist, which would prevent content loss if one server goes down without discoverability being an issue.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
Because decentralization, at least as it is now, runs counter to what people are looking for in a social media platform; mainly discoverability.
Does it though? My instance has very little locally, but if I browse ‘All’ it really isn’t any different than being on any other instance, even a big one.
You are only shown what your server has stored. Your server only stores what people of your instance have subscribed to. If you visit bogger instances, they all have different Hot feeds, because each server pulls different content. There is no one way to see what is going on in all of the fediverse. You are only ever shown a part.
Sure but above a certain user count, your instance will usually have at least one subscriber to just about every active community. (I may have used a bot to help this process…)
Subscribe to what you want to see?
It’s hard to find instances that offer what world offers, so I get it.
OTOH, I ended up moving or handing over most of my communities that I had created on world because this instance is TOO popular and bogged down all the time. Plus, they make arbitrary and drastic decisions without discussion on matters like defederation and often banning. It’s smart to go to a smaller instance but it’s also risky because any instance could go down at any moment. That’s why many of my communities are duplicated (across world and infosec) because it would be devastating to lose all of those quality links and engagement.
You also don’t have the content of Reddit. It doesn’t take too long to scroll through all top six hours and get to the single digits of upvotes.
Kinda cozy though, if you pay attention you kinda see who’s active.
Like you, only user on my instance who has more comments than me.
How do you think I got so much karma on Reddit?
If Lemmy gets significantly larger we gotta figure out how to make our own CC
Right now private communities aren’t really possible.
There are a lot of parts of Lemmy that are rough around the edges or aren’t there at all. Hopefully it improves over time, especially as new front end apps can free developers to focus on the back end, but we’ll see.
It’s that everyone wants to create the same community on different instances.
I think more people need to make communities they are interested in that might already exist on beehaw/lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/etc but on other instances. We really need to not keep everything on a few instances… I agree it contradicts itself. I tried by creating fallout but hard to get activity. Even its main community is quiet so that makes sense. I might try something a bit less niche.
I think there is a gap in understanding how Lemmy works and how it differs from reddit, in particular with the less technical crowd. We definitely don’t want people sharing giant instances, but that matches more with the sign up for reddit, use reddit logic many people are used to.
I think it’s also why we have seen such drama over Sync for Lemmy and its ads and pricing. To the techy crowd that was the majority of Lemmy users, that all seems antithetical to what Lemmy is and how it works. To the people who came to Lemmy from reddit, and especially those who may have tried out Lemmy because of Sync, the criticism sounds maddening because that’s the way it always worked on reddit.
So in some sense all of this is expected. Lemmy will lose some users, but maybe it will find an equilibrium. The key focus these days imho should be outreach about smaller instances, and outreach about donating to your instance (if you can) to keep it running.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
Is that any different on Mastodon and other Fediverse projects?
Same shit happened with the ‘temporary’ mass migration to Signal.
Signal
Interesting what do you mean? I use signal but I can’t get anyone other than my ex wife to use it with me. It is so much nicer than google voice or the texting app, regardless of the end to end encryption.
That doesn’t seem weird to me. Honestly it seems weird that it’s that active. I would’ve expected a sharper, quicker decline. Retaining active users is hard.
Exactly. Users who are involved in extremely niche communities will probably not find a place on Lemmy/Kbin yet. In 2008, reddit was the same. The politics subreddit only had 50,000 subscribers.
It’s all about momentum. The more users we have, the more engagement in niche communities, the more it’ll attract and retain users.
And loads of people hear the buzz, try it out and leave when they grow bored.
Just to chime in, please correct me if I’m wrong, but Lemmy only counts activity as someone who’s posting or commenting (citation needed), so as more people go back to their old ways of lurking, activity will drop as browsing isn’t counted as activity
Us lurkers are still here (hopefully) but it’s easy to go back to the ways of scrolling without engaging
That’s correct on the active users, as more people go back to lurking it will show less users but good chance they just don’t post much now
Why I’m encouraging anyone who will listen to participate in their fledgling niche communities here. Even if it’s just a little bit.
One can simply lurk on the niche subreddits. Growing fediverse communities need active participation.
Lemmy is a much closer analog to Reddit than Mastodon is for Twitter. While Mastodon has similar basic functionality to Twitter, it lacks a lot of the features that make it easy to find new content and new people to follow.
Pair that with some very polished third-party mobile reddit apps with large, loyal followings transitioning to Lemmy and it became way easier to abandon reddit for Lemmy than it was to leave Twitter for Mastodon. I’m a huge open source supporter, but the average user doesn’t care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.
the average user doesn’t care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.
Truer words were never said.
until personal interest groups are populated people will not use this site. its basically 1 big meme sub right now with some tech and politics sprinkled on top.
This is honestly it.
I like the site, I want to use it, I want to encourage others to use it, but I’m getting tired of only talking about the same things here.
Maybe we need to start encouraging people to post rather than just expecting them to.
we don’t need more memes, we need people to start going to the games, movies, shows, and hobbies they like and making posts.
[email protected] is promising
I’m in the process of making some stuff, I just worry that the community I post it to on lemmy isn’t big enough to get the word out community-wide.
For context, I’ve been working on a very long dogelore thing. But in the same way, I feel like this hurts any bhj or mtcj stuff I might do. The community on lemmy isn’t big enough to get traction, so what’s the point?
I’m not going back to reddit, and discord is annoying, so it’s just a little discouraging.
It feels like it’s mainly talking one way or another about Reddit, or describing how one of the 3P apps is now available for Lemmy. The content is super stale, but it will grow. Fuck, Reddit back in the day was not exactly the thriving metropolis it was maybe six or so years ago. And reddit peaked and came down to how it exists today. So it’ll take time.
That being said, I don’t check Lemmy anywhere near as frequently as I did Reddit, and mainly because the subs I frequented most have smaller footprints here for now. Which is what you said, but in fewer words.
For what it’s worth, memes have helped me stay. I doubt I’m the only one.
They’re quick and easy to browse and some get a bunch of topical comments and links to other relevant communities.
It’ll take a while to reach a level that’s known in the public eye like Twitter and Reddit, but the low-hanging fruit helps keep people interested while more niche communities are forming.
We don’t want to be in the public eye. Let’s enjoy what we have while it lasts
Also, liftoff kinda sucked, but I just figured out some features of Sync, and it’s fucking beautiful.
Lol what? Liftoff is fantastic, and FOSS. Are we blaming liftoff for the downward trend/lack of growth? Cause the oh-so-amazing Sync does not seem to have reversed it, to spite all the claims I keep seeing.
I’m still using wefwef. What am I missing?
You’re not missing anything but ads. I cannot understand the Sync hype and attribute all posts about it to promotion.
I paid for Apollo, and I’m happy to support developers, but in app ads is a big no.
Connect for Lemmy is basically Sync free. It’s got the same swipe gestures and everything. I’m not sure what people are so blown away by.
Not by a long shot. Connect is good, don’t get me wrong, but Sync has some major points that others usually just completely gloss over or ignore entirely–including Connect.
Like tablet-friendly UI.
And no, Infinity, “tablet-friendly” does not mean like 5 columns of independently scrolling content which take you to one big comment section which is a mobile UI stretched to screen size.
Tablet UI–let alone good, productive tablet UI like Sync has with pagination and all–is always overlooked.
Not sure what you mean, this is what sync looks like for me on a big screen. Hardly tablet friendly.
Connect looks much better for me
The native advertising has already arrived on Lemmy. Tis a day of sorrow.
Unsure what is going on but I’m using Sync, haven’t purchased anything, and haven’t seen a single ad.
Hope it continues as I like the app.
Yeah, I really want r/sysadmin on here.
They have a Discord but Discord is so incredibly annoying to use for this.
hot is completely useless because its filled with content that’s less than an hour old with virtually no comments. its very poor quality content.
But active is filled with old content with barely any comments.
active is about what posts have a lot of comments recently.
I will say I was looking for some opinions on new Internet browsers.
Posted on Reddit and here.
Already got responses on lemmy, but my Reddit post is just being ignored.
Also, Lemmy posts tend to get real conversations going rather than reused meme templates.
If you’re interested in the right (tech) topics I can see Lemmy being better yeah
The two biggest ones I know of are startrek.website for trekkies and blahaj for all things trans/lgbtq. But even those don’t see to have much activity. We need better advertisement to smaller communities somehow.
I think I’ve blocked the biggest meme sub or two. Helps a lot with that.
Some dropoff after initial hype is normal. Now we just continue as usual until reddit pisses people off again.
We have to wait until tomorrow?
exactly this right here. we saw the same phenomenon with threads and mastodon before it inre twitter annoying its userbase. depending on how engaged each wave of incoming users ends up, i’d guess you could expect it to look something like:
- spike
- drop off
- plateau
- spike
- drop off
- plateau above the last plateau
- etc etc
sometimes the drop off is really bad. sometimes its just people getting bored with the initial hype while others stay. rinse and repeat until the platform succeeds or dies.
I’m not sure what else will be able to cause a spike again. Reddits behavior over the past month is pretty much as terrible as it can get. If people aren’t moving to Lemmy anymore, it’s going to take something apocalyptic to cause Lemmys usercount to grow again.
is pretty much as terrible as it can get
I believe in the power of human ingenuity.
exactly. a little bit of elbow grease and greed is what got us all to the fairly awful future we find ourselves in, who’s to say it can’t get worse? never let the hope die. lol
I think there are a combination of factors intermingling, situations like the API backlash just jostle things a little harder and that’s when you see big spikes. Once a platform like Lemmy begins to see more and more traffic and, in turn, content, it starts to become a viable alternative.
Lemmy existed for at least a couple years before I joined, for instance, and I came with what I would guess was the biggest wave so far (June 2023). Provided the userbase can keep up a respectable momentum generating discussion and content, the next wave could be bigger or it could be more resistant to leaving because there’s enough content here to consume and interact with.
Reddit could take years to lose substantial portions of its userbase or it may shed some and stay solid, but Im not one of these people who obsesses over it’s ruin. If they survive long term, God bless, whatever, who cares. What’s interesting to me is seeing an alternative sprout up and actually generate traffic and start building a community, whether that’s Lemmy or something else built on ActivityPub or something else built on a different federated framework or even something else entirely that’s centralized… I think Lemmy is one permutation of this and it has undoubtedly got some traction.
I sometimes wonder if/when I’ll start getting random Lemmy links from people instead of ones to Reddit.
edit: I should also add that considering reddit is trying hard to get value on paper and probably still hoping to ipo, we probably shouldn’t put it past them be shitty once again at some point in the future.
They still have the Big Red Button of killing off old.reddit that they have yet to push.
There are also conscious efforts to weed out bots and other measures that try to remove potential cancer from spreading.
There was a post recently that outlined bot weeding efforts on a couple dozen instances that tanked user number by something like 1/5 - clearly visible on graphs.
Lemmy’s doing great. Even if plenty small communities are still not big enough here.
I’m actively lurking, I just have nothing of value to share 🌝
I feel like people just want to hang out and talk about stuff. We don’t always need to be wowed by some crazy high quality content or new OC. We just want to hang out with friends and shoot the shit. Most of us are on here to distract us from whatever bullshit we should probably be doing instead.
At least it’s less likely for your boss to find you here on the Fediverse.
…for now *ominous background music*
Just emphasizing my upvote on your comment through my comment.
To be honest, I do the same thing. A couple of simple rules to keep the web entertaining:
- Filter everything that triggers you
- Ban porn
- Never, never look at comments on politics, religion and family. You’re like to want to erase humanity afterwards
Yeah it took a long time for me to finally curate Reddit to something I enjoyed using, I’ve started increasingly working on my filters and it just gets better and better here.
Like Reddit, I find trying to find communities I’m interested in a little difficult so I’m just defaulting to all and continuing to filter for now. At some point soon I’ll be able to just default to subscribed.
there’s always something of value to share at least on c/lemmyshitpost
Yup. Exactly.
I’m to tired to make quality posts. Props to the people that can do that every day. Best I got is a few mildly opinionated comments.
Even lurkers are still part of the community.
I started out looking for an exact replacement for Reddit (where I mostly lurk). Initially I thought the lack of content and traffic on Lemmy was a bad thing, but I now see it as early days of a community and lack of content means I have a chance to make a post or comment that is valued and gets engagement from other users. Reddit was so mature that anything I wanted to post was either already there, not welcome or buried under an ocean of other content/comments. If you use both you could even find good content on Reddit to crosspost on Lemmy.
It’s quite nice being part of a small community now. Even just an up/down vote from you will be worth more here. It’s great.
I used to be a reddit lurker. I would go into a thread for a post and look for the thing I would have posted, and upvote it.
I can’t do this on Lemmy, I actually have to write stuff now I guess, otherwise it doesn’t show up. I don’t like it.
Feels weird man.
actually have to write stuff now I guess, otherwise it doesn’t show up
can you exoskeleton this one for me? I don’t get it.
(autocorrect, just guess what that word was supposed to be)
Just a joke. I used to just read the comments in reddit threads and be satisfied with the conversations already being had. The subreddits I usually visited were busy enough that I had plenty to read. Rarely did I ever feel like logging in to add something. (I’m also unoriginal, so if I thought of a joke I’d go find it in the reddit thread and upvote it, ha).
Lemmy has less comments, less to read. But I also don’t pointlessly scroll forever, so I guess that’s probably good.
I try to comment when I can. Even if it’s not insightful. A small compliment keeps a community going.
I try to browse and upvote in new also
I’m to tired to make quality posts.
There’s room for shitty posts too. 🫂
How mildly opinionated of you.
Get out of my head!
Sorry. I’ll try to respect your mental personal space next time.
Perfection 🤌🤌🤌
Thanks for pointing that out! High quality content takes time to craft. It’s being skilled and/or knowledgable, being able to convey that across on a digital platform (where basically everyone’s anonymous and of unknown backgrounds), and being engaging while you’re at it. It definitely can be demanding for some.
Beans on toast are better than vegemite on toast!
Noodles on toast is better than both
Well, to keep a user is way harder than to attract his attention.
I think that the key differences between this platform(s) and the more known alternatives are part of the problem - people are very dumb these days and lazy. Often the first reaction to something new and not working in the expected way is to skip it, or demand the solution, rather than look around, try different approach and such.
I feel like I’m witnessing Diaspora 2.0 effect…
Yes, most people give up as soon as something does not work first time.
Maybe there are enough of us to be enough abd to fix those annoying little things that make lemmy complicated to use.
A lot if issues got resolved, apps are here,it is getting better fast.
I doubt it - too many people with different preferences they aren’t willing to let go, I’m afraid.
If you’re asking me, it’s “good enough” the way it is. I’d gladly have some more content filters, but even without them I perceive it as a platform with enough potential to consider it good.
There’s a flaw in your logic around people’s preferences if Lemmy wants to keep growing - at the end of the day, Lemmy is a service, and people shouldn’t be expected to give up what they want from a service. They’ll just go somewhere else if they aren’t getting the services they want.
It’s like if a restaurant told you what they were going to serve you and you better eat it or go find somewhere else to eat. Nobody’s going to put up with that. They’ll go somewhere else to eat. Just because you think the food is good doesn’t make that a good service model.
Now, I’m not saying that Lemmy should copy Reddit, or Facebook, or whatever else because that would defeat the entire point of Lemmy. But, taking into consideration the friction points people have with using federated platforms and coming up with ways to reduce that friction will only end up helping everybody. For example, finding a way to make a native aggregator for similar communities across multiple instances would not only help with discoverability for smaller communities, but would increase engagement by simplifying the process of users being able to find content they’re looking for while also allowing for more instances of those communities to exist across more servers without splitting or isolating the userbase to those servers, which would increase the resilience of Lemmy’s communities to specific servers going down.
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I think those issues will be solved though. Apps will increasingly make onboarding simpler so Lemmy will be as simple to use as Reddit.
At that point really its just a case of waiting for Reddit to fuck itself, which it absolutely will do eventually via corporate greed, and there we go, all the Lemmy content anyone could ever need.
I’m just here because I like the pretty 3rd party apps.
One thing that bugs me is people asking for/using tools that replicate the look and feel of Reddit instead of learning the ropes. I left Reddit, I don’t want another one. I get it, familiarity is comforting, but when the user base is a fraction of the other platform, no UI or app will ever give you the same experience. I say move on, get out of your comfort zone and participate.
Amen to that.
I don’t imagine staying on some site that resembles a drowning wreck, because “I got used to how things work here”.
I think I am on shitjustworks… i don’t know how big my instance is I just chose it because it has a cool name.
It has gone down a few times and at first my reaction was to go to is it down dot com to see if the problem was with my app… but then I had the realization that ohhhh, it’s just my home server is down… I thought about making a separate account on another instance but instead just decided to do something else with those few minutes I would have spent here….
No big deal…. It’s happened a few times in the couple months I’ve been here, but it always works eventually… I really like this platform, and the philosophy behind it, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to understand all the inner workings and how the instances work together, but I don’t feel like I need to.
But I can see how people who understand it even less than I do might get frustrated and so that is going to be a limiting factor with new growth here I would assume…
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I’m not too worried. Graphs dont only go up. :)
Graps are delicious and I love the wins they make.
:) I erased any evidence of any misspelling that may or may not have taken place here tonight.
FYI, Lemmy doesn’t count lurkers as active users. Here’s how Lemmy counts active users:
An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame. For site counts, only local users are counted. For community counts, federated users are included.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
This alone will make a huge difference with other platforms that will hide that info under seven wraps an report any and all accounts as active users.
I really just want to lurk.
You made a comment just now. You’re not lurking according to the how they’re categorizing a lurker.
Honestly, how about this? Every single lurker, commit to making at least one post or comment a day. Call it a social experiment
This is me, lurking 👀
Joined today. I’ll likely just lurk in the background…
They said while commenting…
Used to say that too,but now Im commenting too.
I thought so too but I don’t mind leaving a comment or making a post here and there.
even if it’s stupid it’s still something for ppl to downvote lol let em think of something better. or make content mocking mine
If you comment on posts you think are under-rated and upvote, you’ll push them up the activity queue and it’ll reach more people.
As a lurker I mostly just vote. But gotta post every once in a while to add to active users stat!
Also, this graph does not take into account kbin which is essentially the same kind of software as lemmy but tracked seperately. Better data can be found here: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
Also, instance hopping and users registering on multiple instances before picking only one/being active on only once may be an explanation.
Also worth noting is Lemmy only counts posts/comments as “active users”. Lurkers who only read and up/downvote aren’t counted.
That’s interesting, I would expect people who vote to be accounted
Me as well. I only remember this because around July 1st there was a post about it, which lead to a wave of “doing my part by posting my daily comment to count as an active user”-comments.
That was probably my post :)
wow, I lurk so much more than I post stuff… one would think they would track this
So true. This is straight from Lemmy’s documentation:
An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame. For site counts, only local users are counted. For community counts, federated users are included.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
I think this is the biggest factor. Most people only lurk. How many people signed up and only lurk?
At least 2.
In this case, I have a theory. I remember a month ago people were posting a lot on Reddit and the [email protected] community was extremely active. It was like group therapy for refugees. But now the new reality is setting in and people are actually having real and meaningful conversations, which means more lurkers.
So it doesn’t mean that active users are down per se, it’s just that it’s stabilised because people are mostly over Reddit.
Absolutely, and also keep in mind that many who were lurkers on Reddit and came over here maybe made one or two comments immediately saying something like “Happy to be on Lemmy!” and then went back to lurking here and haven’t commented since. They would have counted as monthly active users for July, but not August.
There’s also people that create multiple accounts in different instances and end up using just one.
Lemmy needs a middle logical layer to really take off. If a local server moderats it as such, the default view for say /c/technology shouldn’t be slit across a dozen instances. Instead it should be merged into one view.
Without it you have a bunch of largely stagnant communities.
