we need more users
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Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin are all entirely different and unique attempts at creating a self-hostable software package for a reddit-like website. In the same way that Reddit was trying to be like Digg, but with it's own codebase starting from scratch.
Despite using different codebases, Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin are all compatible with each other, like if you could leave comments on reddit threads from your Digg account while on Digg.
The reason they can talk to each other is they were all built with one thing in common: at the core of them is something called the ActivityPub Protocol, which in simple terms means the way they send messages, make posts, etc, are all using one standard, so they can all understand each other, like speaking the same language. An upvote from lemmy is understood as an upvote by Piefed, same for comments, posts, etc.
A similar thing on the web that functions just like that is E-mail. No matter what email provider you use, you can send an email to any other email provider, and it all just works because at the core, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL mail, Proton Mail, etc, they all use the standardized E-mail Protocol.
Just like with email, where you can't log into a Gmail account from the Yahoo Mail log-in page, you also can't log into a lemmy account from a Piefed login page.
But if you're familiar with how you can use an E-Mail client, like Thunderbird or Outlook Express to log into almost any email account regardless of where it's hosted, so to with lemmy/piefed mobile apps, which only act as a front-end like Thunderbird.
Each lemmy/piefed instance is like it's own email provider (instance just means server, a server is a computer that hosts the software and makes it available on the internet for us to find). So lemmy.world is like Gmail, but piefed.social is an entirely different provider, equivalent to Yahoo mail. You could access either from a mobile app, which acts as a client, but if you went to them with a web browser, you'd have to go to lemmy.world directly if that's where your account was, similar to how you would have to for email.
All of these servers are 'federated' with each other, which basically means once they establish a connection, they will continually offer new data to each other automatically. So Lemmy.world will always send out to piefed.social any new posts, comments, or upvotes that occur on lemmy.world, as well as pass forward any posts, comments, or upvotes that any lemmy.world user makes on a community hosted on piefed.social.
Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin are open-source, which means they are developed collaboratively online for anyone to see or participate in (if you're familiar with how Linux is developed, it is very similar to that).
As for who develops these softwares, you can see who has contributed to them on their respective development platforms.
- Lemmy is mainly developed by Dessalines and Nutomic on Github.
- Piefed is mainly developed by Rimu (and others) on Codeberg
- Mbin is developed on Github
But as for the instances themselves, they are owned by the individuals who run the physical servers that each instance runs on.
Thanks, if I get someone on this I'll link them this post, it's a good starting place.
Hopefully we can get something like this in the front page with a user guide (how to start, what are communities, FAQ, etc) so more people stay around! -
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
you know what would be really helpful? cross this with data from moderation. content removals, bans, permabans.
then, layer in mods/communities and you might find why users are leaving.
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The culture wars have reached the fediverse, and it's making me less happy to be here. I don't want to hang out in places where people use slurs and insults, even if they're not aimed at me. I'm seeing more casual misogyny/misandry, more casual use of the r**** slur, more perfectionist gatekeeping, more assumptions, and just less good-faith comments in general.
I'd advertise, but I'm starting to look for an alternative to lemmy.
I haven't seen any slurs in my feed, maybe jump instances?
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This, It is just big enough to be useful and reach specific niches. We do not need to be a massive giant monolith which will get flooded with corporate trolls, russian/israeli troll farms, undisclosed sponsored content...
Let just have a small wacko community in peace
Our numbers might be small just because we are humans who care about, well, human interaction lol. So it's not us to be unpopular, but big corpos to be overinflated by bots and shit
Thank you for your observation
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you know what would be really helpful? cross this with data from moderation. content removals, bans, permabans.
then, layer in mods/communities and you might find why users are leaving.
right?! fuck the mods
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not my point. i think thoses are totally fine. It just reflect that the audience is super niche. You go on massive social network the most liked post are random joke and life experience not really targeted on a minority type of post.
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I'm here, I just never comment :3
This part is important too! Fediverse is remarkably active for its user count, and that's its strength!
Join us as we make this place lively - and lovely
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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
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.
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kinda odd you dint block the tankies, they are just as problematic if not more so. thats why i had them blocked. i had to block politics because the people are subtly promoting pro-zionist content.
I like Lemmy as a “zoo”
I like seeing nuts and weirdos and niches and stuff when I scroll by. It feels like the old internet. And I also find that lemmy.ml has good discussions outside tankie politics, so I don’t want to block that out.
Problem with the main political subs is that they’re so big they flood post sorted by Active, Rising, or New Comments. Their tabloid garbage crowds everything else out.
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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
As long as Lemmy is in hands of extremists, it wont happen.
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oh i was regularly switching to a new account thats been warmed, up after multiple sub bans. up until reddit caught up, and just banned everyone with accts associated with other accts that were sub banned, but unbanned due to a time limit. and now reddit just straight up bans people for inactivity and new accts. mods love to misconstrue your comment,
I was actually talking about here on Lemmy. Though I have been banned from a few subs on reddit as well.
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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
I just don't get why people would stay in reddit when lemmy exist
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As long as Lemmy is in hands of extremists, it wont happen.
Someone's mad the admin's don't like chauvamism
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you know what would be really helpful? cross this with data from moderation. content removals, bans, permabans.
then, layer in mods/communities and you might find why users are leaving.
People probably leave because this plattorm isn't designed to be addictive, i take pretty significant breaks very regularly
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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
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.
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did you mention that reddit is all politics as well. reddit is intentionally forcing politics to front page, and anypolitics adjacent topics. almost all sports, celebrity talk eventually leads to politics.
According to them, "reddit also shows some soccer and sporting stuff, this is just politics."
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I just don't get why people would stay in reddit when lemmy exist
I think the reason is similar with Windows and Linux.
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Thanks, if I get someone on this I'll link them this post, it's a good starting place.
Hopefully we can get something like this in the front page with a user guide (how to start, what are communities, FAQ, etc) so more people stay around!Glad you found it helpful! Though for people new to this, depending on their tech savvyness, less info might be more.
An average user doesn't really need to know exactly how Lemmy/piefed work to actually use it effectively, and depending on how interested they are in learning how things work, the longer explanation I gave may be off-putting to some people, or make it seem too complex.
As an example; I'm not sure most people actually know how email works at all on a technical level, they just know that if they log into their Gmail and put the right address for the person they're trying to reach, everything works. They may not even understand that the @whatever.com part means their email is being sent to a totally different server (if it's not also Gmail) being hosted by different corporations somewhere else in the world, or how exactly an email is shuffled across all the different ISP's, cabling, repeaters, etc. Explaining the details of all those things would make email seem horribly complex and off-putting to many. Without any of the that knowledge, as long as they know just the steps to accomplish what they want, all is well.
With Lemmy or Piefed, an equivalent could be just sending them a link to a known reliable general instance (Piefed.social would be a good choice) and telling them to create an account there and to use it just like they would reddit. For the most part, that's all anyone really needs to know to have a pretty good experience. They may wonder why different users have different domain names at the end of their name, and if they ask you could explain further, but they'll still be able to navigate around, comment, find communities and all the rest without knowing, which should lessen the feeling that it's complicated.
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I have been noticing a drop in post/comments diversity and quantity. The diminishing users is something noticeable and sad.
We're in times where we need to seek alternatives to big tech more than ever, and yet, people don't seem to care
Yeah, i feel the same, for a lot of reasons i've noticed around here
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a lot of niche subs usually were created turing the apicalipse 3 years ago, but were quickly deserted, so anyone curious about thoses interests right now on lemmy would just find old communities where no one has spoken for years, and get back to reddit out of boredom.
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the few staying for the mainstream communities where there is still some activity are continuously hit by the same topics (lemmy is small and divided enough nowadays to act like echochambers unfortunately) and either participate, or feel excluded and leave.
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Echochambers, stereotypes, and hatred contribute to make lemmy more small and divided.
The cycle continue, and that's how you kill a defederated service.
Honestly, i see more people arguing about communities or users from lemmy itself than people simply debating or talking about things from their interests. That makes me a bit sad. -
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I've been using Lemmy less because it's so depressing. It feels like a majority of the engagement is with depressing US politics and a strong left bias (to be clear, I also hate the current government). Unlike most, I really like most of the nerdy tech content.
Which is why I've been lurking more on Hacker News lately, it's tech minded forums with an appropriate level of politics and more nuanced takes. And as a bonus the interface even less bloated (in terms of resource usage) than any Lemmy frontend I've tried.
Some Lemmy apps (and probably frontends, too) have filter settings allowing you to remove any mentions of various political figures to focus on what matters.
But yeah, Lemmy and most of Fediverse really need the influx of regular folks and regular topics.
![Tywèle [she|her]](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/85dc7b5d-7ecd-45e9-b996-df26b97d7b9a.png "Tywèle [she|her]"){kind=avatar}
