we need more users
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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.
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I just don't get why people would stay in reddit when lemmy exist
Because reddit coddles nazis and lemmy doesn't.
Also niche communities exist on reddit that lemmy doesn't have the population to support.
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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
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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
Lemmy doesn't have the niche communities and people don't want to take the time to customise what it can do for them so get stuck in the same shit as reddit, so then they leave.
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I'm here, I just never comment :3
I’ve been trying to comment more, but we have to post as well
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Because reddit coddles nazis and lemmy doesn't.
Also niche communities exist on reddit that lemmy doesn't have the population to support.
I disagree. If Lemmy was plagued with Nazis, it would down the shitter pretty fast.
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why beat yourself up. you know good content won't be rewarded or seen.
only the ragebait. the internet is not information driven anymore, it's dopmine driven.
the internet is not information driven anymore, it’s dopmine driven.
Dopamine? It's cortisol driven.
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I just don't get why people would stay in reddit when lemmy exist
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.
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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?
![Tywèle [she|her]](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/85dc7b5d-7ecd-45e9-b996-df26b97d7b9a.png "Tywèle [she|her]"){kind=avatar}