we need more users
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Today is my first day here and I've mostly just been wandering hobby/interest groups!
I think the biggest barrier for new users is that the whole system here is pretty complicated with the "decentralized" model. I don't really understand what it means or how it works, what the difference between the various servers are, or what to join or even which app to download. There are a lot of options and complicated technical terms (like "federated", "fediverse") you need to research just so you can sign up. The fact that you have to write all of these explanations about it doesn't really help. A platform like reddit (which I migrated from) is clean, easy to understand, and makes sense to the casual user.
As for the political stuff, I think people here should engage more with positive content. We should make the wholesome, fun stuff popular because it's appealing. Post about the cool/funny/awesome/interesting stuff you encounter every day; talk about the arts, your hobbies, your funny life fuck ups, your non-serious relationship woes, your pets, etc.! In my exploration today I noticed those kinds of communities barely get any interaction whereas the news/political ones are always active.
First of all, welcome! Hope you'll like it here.
Politics surely seems to drown the regular conversations at times. But some niche communities are quite active! Places like !newcommunities@lemmy.world , as well as general search might be of great help in finding your gems.
As per federation and stuff, I think Mastodon of all places does a more or less decent job on boarding new users, and Lemmy has a lot to learn from it.
Regardless, the core idea is that there are plenty of various interconnected physical servers operated by different people. A simple and rough analogy is e-mail, which is actually also federated. You may have your mailbox somewhere like Gmail, and I can have mine in Outlook or even host my own (and you can do that with Lemmy, too). But we'll be able to write to each other like if we use same service.
Here, everything is organized in a way as to allow not only private communication, but public discussion. Posts and comments are public and can be seen by everyone from the server the post is made on.
For example:
- You connect to a server under the lemmy.ca domain. So, some Canadian guy just rents/owns a physical server and puts Lemmy software on it.
- I connect to rekabu.ru, hosted by a guy somewhere in Russia. Same idea.
- The post is in the community on the lemmy.world server, which is a third one.
- Our servers connect to lemmy.world, where the post is made, and exchange information with it. My server sends my comments, your server sends yours, and so we can see each other despite connecting to different places.
- Should I send you a direct message instead, it will go straight from rekabu.ru to lemmy.ca, just like e-mail. And vice versa.
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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
It's the porn. And comments like "those colors are really a bad choice, they make the graph very difficult to read".
But seriously, the quality content in Reddit is not the reason it's big. It's a corporate. It's a massive echo chamber destined to shame people under insufficiently explained contexts. I see it like a virtual mob with pitchforks on steroids (bots).
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I think I interact with Lemmy less now because I noticed that I grew tired of reading useless comments and for finding and reading articles I want to read I have RSS which doesn't bombard me with stuff I don't care about.
The presence of comments leads me to only want to read the comments and I hate that.
Why don't you share here some of those nice articles?
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Either we will have a huge spike in activity soon or Lemmy will become a ghostland. It is no wonder that we have low activity here with those numbers of users. But, on the other hand, Reddit has too much users + bots which leads to information overflow. Thus, Lemmy would be nice if it had only a few several hundred thousands of users.
There does seem to be a cyclical nature to new users. Same with new communities. I'll go looking for a niche community and find one, only to see a half dozen posts 2 years ago during the first big push to the fediverse, and then it's dead after that. It's entirely possible I'm looking at an entire ghost community where every one of those users bailed a couple years back.
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i smell bots, and tankie infiltration into the rest of limit, since the triad is defederate, thier members are trying to branch out into other communities.
Stop, stop it for a second. "Tankie"? It's probably just people with different ideas than yours. If you don't like to read what they have to say, block them, but please stop calling collective demeaning names to artificial groups of people.
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I disagree. If Lemmy was plagued with Nazis, it would down the shitter pretty fast.
We got tankies on here, though. Not much better.
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Don't forget you can block communities that irritate you. I've got plenty blocked that aren't even things I'm opposed to, but just don't want my feed to be full of.
I've done that and it's significantly better because of that feature. Speaking of, is it possible to migrate blocklists from one account to another?
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I think I interact with Lemmy less now because I noticed that I grew tired of reading useless comments and for finding and reading articles I want to read I have RSS which doesn't bombard me with stuff I don't care about.
The presence of comments leads me to only want to read the comments and I hate that.
You know, I've never really gotten into RSS. I remember it being a huge deal a very long time ago, now I only see a niche few talk about it.
I'm still not sure I fully understand what RSS even is.
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Someone's mad the admin's don't like chauvamism
Not mad, I just s spend my time elsewhere, as many do, hence the post that Lemmy is dying.
Admins are crying, continuosly begging for money.
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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.
Disable the display of the voting system. That's what I do, and it's the reason I can use Lemmy. It won't solve the political doom and gloom part, but it really helped me with the anxiety that comes from the rejection of others to my ideas, or the dopamine boost when a collective accepts and praises my comments. Try it.
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Either we will have a huge spike in activity soon or Lemmy will become a ghostland. It is no wonder that we have low activity here with those numbers of users. But, on the other hand, Reddit has too much users + bots which leads to information overflow. Thus, Lemmy would be nice if it had only a few several hundred thousands of users.
When it came to light to everyone that their Up/Down Votes are tracked and viewable by everyone, they basically stopped engaging.
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As long as Lemmy is in hands of extremists, it wont happen.
You considered Piefed?
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It's got nothing whatsoever to do with what I want.
It only has to do with the math of how large networked systems function.
Right now the fediverse is unstable and unsustainable. balkanization is a huge contributing factor.
It's not a preference thing. If you want the fediverse to survive we all need it to be bigger and balkanization prohibits that
Most of the major instances do federate with each other though. The only notable difference in terms of content you'll get is if you like hexbear/lemmygrad currently.
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Because Lemmy, to this day, doesn't do what Reddit does. Yes, the UI is similar, but there's two big downsides to Reddit. One that's important now, and one that's important later.
- Lemmy is tiny. Like, really small. The Linus Tech Tips form and the Crackberry forum each have more users and more activity than all of Lemmy combined. That means, you can talk about general things of Lemmy, like e.g. US politics, but there aren't a lot of niche communities. On Reddit I can post a photo with some weird electronics component from the 60s and within minutes someone will post an answer identifying the component and telling me where to buy a replacement. On Lemmy, a corresponding community doesn't even exist.
- Lemmy scales terribly. Every instance holds a copy of all data that was ever posted in any community that any user on that instance ever subscribed to. That has two very negative effects:
- Storage requirements are insane. Since most traffic is in big communities and most users will subscribe to the big communities, most instances need to store a copy of almost all of Lemmy. If Lemmy were to ever get to the size of Reddit, every instance would have to store data in the order of magnitude of all of Reddit. Imagine small hobby admins having to host data in the region of Petabytes or Exabytes. Nobody can afford that.
- Admin work is insane. Since every instance holds a full, independent copy and doesn't only cache, they are legally responsible for the content and have to moderate it. So if someone posts e.g. illegal pornography on one instance and it's federated to another instance, the admin of the second instance needs to delete it or face legal consequences. That means, instead of the mods or admins of the original community/instance being solely responsible for keeping their stuff clean, everyone is responsible for everything and the same work needs to be done hundreds of times, once per instance.
This horrible scalability means that right now instances are getting close to their limits (see e.g. lemm.ee closing down exactly due to these reasons).
Lemmy has 40-50k monthly active users. Reddit has 5.16 billion monthly active users, so about 100 000x. If everyone on Reddit were to move over to Lemmy, Lemmy would be done. Just one day of Reddit-level traffic would be enough to jam up the history of Lemmy content so much that nobody could ever afford hosting a Lemmy instance again.
I don't know if you've convinced me to stay or go, but you've certainly convinced me of either or.
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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
Total servers are way down and so are users. But how come the number of comments has increased?
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I've lost track of how many subs I've been banned from cause I pissed off a friend of a mod.
How, dude? I've never even gotten a warning from a mod.
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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.
Well, if you leave there will be one less person who would post something that's neither Linux nor Trump. Be the change you want to see in the world. Stay out of spite, invite more people like you over, post whatever you want, and shove them into Linux posters' faces!
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Can I ask a different, more difficult question?
Where are people going?
Lemmy Isn't Quite It? Mastodon is too formal. Blusky is too political.
Lemmy was a clone of Reddit. Not an improvement on it.
I left, in a way. Lemmy was my main stomping ground. Now it's XMPP.
how in the name of fuck is that even an acceptable transition?
I don't need Reddit, I need engagement.
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Reddit circa 2013.
However, I'd like to take note that the world itself was far different in 2013. We're asking for 2013 politic levels when the current world is obsessed with politics and some countries are within five years of a civil war, mine in particular.
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Reddit circa 2013.
However, I'd like to take note that the world itself was far different in 2013. We're asking for 2013 politic levels when the current world is obsessed with politics and some countries are within five years of a civil war, mine in particular.
Well that's not really something a platform can change, is it?
![Tywèle [she|her]](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/85dc7b5d-7ecd-45e9-b996-df26b97d7b9a.png "Tywèle [she|her]"){kind=avatar}
