we need more users
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mostly these
Legendary
thanks mate -
I get bummed that the political stuff has really taken over. I find myself spending more and more time just working on my own content and answering people's comments than browsing the other communities. It's draining scrolling past so much stuff to find the fun bits, but I don't want to just block it and not see how our platform is developing as a whole.
A lot of communities have rules that posts need to be titled the same as the source article, which, while it prevents editorializing, it also brings all those ragebait headlines here. Plus I'd like to see Lemmy users' opinions moreso than an article I could just read myself. I'd probably prefer more of the political post to be thoughts/feelings and then discussion is backed up by decent articles rather than an article being the post and comments are just all steered back to a single, often inflammatory article.
If half our content is just reposted mainstream media, why would one expect our comment sections to look any different than the comment sections of those mainstream sites?
A lot of communities have rules that posts need to be titled the same as the source article, which, while it prevents editorializing, it also brings all those ragebait headlines here. Plus I’d like to see Lemmy users’ opinions moreso than an article I could just read myself.
If half our content is just reposted mainstream media, why would one expect our comment sections to look any different than the comment sections of those mainstream sites?
I agree with the sentiment but disagree with the prognosis.
In my experience, the ragebait articles around here are largely from the same sites. Rawstory, mediaite, dailybeast, some of The Guardian's more indulgent pieces. I won't presume to know why the posters post them, but they're ragebait to start.
I don't even see "Big Media" like Reuters or local news or whatever get upvoted much. And as longs as the news sections aren't mixed up with the opinion ones, IMO they're more professional.
The accurate title rule is great as long as posters pick more journalistic articles instead of opinion pieces or reposts. And if they don't there's no fixing that anyway.
I’d probably prefer more of the political post to be thoughts/feelings and then discussion is backed up by decent articles
And I straight up I disagree with this.
There are tons of talking heads with opinions. But journalism rooted in sourcing is much harder. That should come first, or at least come with an opinion in the OP, and then the discussion can be built around facts.
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I disagree. If Lemmy was plagued with Nazis, it would down the shitter pretty fast.
I don't want nazis here either and I'm glad that lemmy remains hostile to them. I was responding to someone who asked why people stayed on reddit. Given reddit's userbase, they're staying because they're welcome. We shouldn't welcome nazis.
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I mean... (to be, what's the word, pedantic?:-P) hexbear.net still exists though? And it is their choice if they want to convert to PieFed rather than remain with Lemmy. I am 100% certain that lemmy.ml will never do so though:-D.
So fwiw I agree whole-heartedly with what you said, and that, imho, is what https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser provides? Any other new instance can make their own choice, and I like those GUI options much better. Like when I think of "lemmy.ml", the "Technology" aspect and the phrase "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers" is nowhere close to the top few thoughts that spring into my mind. And hexbears aren't even leftist, only pretending to be such. But the "choose your own adventure" category, in opposition to "Newbie-friendly", I feel like MUCH better describes both lemmy.ml and hexbear, wouldn't you agree?
Ah I misunderstood your example, I thought you were saying instances were intentionally excluded from the picker rather than "instances that don't support this platform don't appear".
I'm not going to opine on what constitutes a "real" leftist apart from saying that left/right dichotomy really doesn't describe reality well.
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The primary problem here is that because lemmy.world isn't visible, the instance picker when organised by activity determines lemmy.ml to be the most popular instance and then not far-off, hexbear. That's not good long-term if people are shepherded into those instances without really knowing their context.
Right, that's why I suggest providing both an opinionated option and an opinionated option. Like a "recommended" section and a "full list" section.
Let people without contest and who don't care to learn the context in advance use an opinionated picker, but don't withhold from people who want to dig in.
But it turns out I misunderstood the example that was given - those instances aren't shown because they simply aren't piefed instances.
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it kinda correlates with what the "p47" have done controversial and it also correlates with/timing of reddits purges too.
But they should be offset. Monthly MAU departures shouldn't reflect in half-year until 5 months later. And half-year departures shouldn't influence the MAU at all.
The fact that they line up to they day strikes me as very suspicious.
But I'm not a statistician -
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 it is kind of a mistake that Lemmy tries to replicate or replace Reddit. If you want your "niche" content (which I can never figure out what people mean but this but I digress), it requires the network effect of Reddit. Reddit still exists and both Lemmy instances and Reddit are websites. You can easily have two tabs or like both apps on your phone so I'm not sure why it has to be all or nothing.
I think a better use of Lemmy is to provide things that don't work and don't exist on Reddit. A good example is https://crazypeople.online/c/eternalplaylist where we post whatever we're listening to and then sometimes comment on what other people are rocking at the time. I started https://crazypeople.online/c/streamingmovies just to post whatever bullshit I'm watching, maybe if you stream something from https://fmhy.net/ post it and we can all watch it.
I think the people using lemmy as a personal blog are more like what the platform excels at like https://lemmygrad.ml/c/spacedogschronicles and https://crazypeople.online/c/bitofarambler which became https://crazypeople.online/c/travel
Lastly I think the real win for Lemmy as a whole would be to figure out how to better interact with other fedi software. Maybe turning mastodon and pixelfed tags into communities and figuring out how to better integrate there would provide more and interesting content but in a scenario i find much easier to follow than subscribe to poster type twitter style microblogging.
TL;DR being Reddit 2 won't ever happen until Lemmy has a reason to exist that isn't being Reddit. Some people are building that and this is still early in the game.
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That does sound like a decent idea, that way the content being mirrored would be only that that genuine users accessed.
Perhaps immediately mirroring the content as the browser itself reads it, preventing additional requests that could be flagged.
Only issues are:
- some people don't use reddit whatsover anymore
- many people only browse reddit on mobile
- a browser extension might require too much trust and involvement to generate much output considering the development involved.
Though this does answer some issues and have some clear use cases.
Cheers for the suggestion!
The nice part about my idea is that even with those hurdles in mind, I still proposed it knowing that all it would take is one person to happen upon whichever post or subreddit to auto-scrape and get the discussion on Lemmy going.
Let's be real; 99% of the reason Lemmy is less popular than Reddit is copy+pasting a link, writing your own title, etc. is more effort than 0, therefore the Lemmy-Reddit hybrids like myself don't bother.
Hell, even the staunchly anti-Reddit Lemmites who could be parasitically "stealing" posts and comments to steal Reddit's thunder don't do it. There are other things they'd rather do, evidently.
Now that I think of it, after using the word "scrape," it could be that Reddit ToS follows most websites' in that scraping is explicitly forbidden, so displaying the open source code (or even using it) would incur legal action from Reddit.
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Tankies are the communists who scream and harass anyone who isn't communist like them, and think anyone who doesn't believe what they believe is fascist and should be eliminated.
I've been called a tankie several times only because my account is in lemmy.ml and I sympathyze with some communist ideas. Granted, these are some fundamental or radical ideas.
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I've been called a tankie several times only because my account is in lemmy.ml and I sympathyze with some communist ideas. Granted, these are some fundamental or radical ideas.
guilt by association is a hell of a drug.
but i'm not gonna lie, most of the crazy hostile comments I get are from .ml users or other far-left instance users. which makes sense. I'm not far-left, so in their eyes I am a Nazi and I should be violently suppressed for not believing what they believe.
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I think it is kind of a mistake that Lemmy tries to replicate or replace Reddit. If you want your "niche" content (which I can never figure out what people mean but this but I digress), it requires the network effect of Reddit. Reddit still exists and both Lemmy instances and Reddit are websites. You can easily have two tabs or like both apps on your phone so I'm not sure why it has to be all or nothing.
I think a better use of Lemmy is to provide things that don't work and don't exist on Reddit. A good example is https://crazypeople.online/c/eternalplaylist where we post whatever we're listening to and then sometimes comment on what other people are rocking at the time. I started https://crazypeople.online/c/streamingmovies just to post whatever bullshit I'm watching, maybe if you stream something from https://fmhy.net/ post it and we can all watch it.
I think the people using lemmy as a personal blog are more like what the platform excels at like https://lemmygrad.ml/c/spacedogschronicles and https://crazypeople.online/c/bitofarambler which became https://crazypeople.online/c/travel
Lastly I think the real win for Lemmy as a whole would be to figure out how to better interact with other fedi software. Maybe turning mastodon and pixelfed tags into communities and figuring out how to better integrate there would provide more and interesting content but in a scenario i find much easier to follow than subscribe to poster type twitter style microblogging.
TL;DR being Reddit 2 won't ever happen until Lemmy has a reason to exist that isn't being Reddit. Some people are building that and this is still early in the game.
Maybe turning mastodon and pixelfed tags into communities and figuring out how to better integrate there would provide more and interesting content
yeah, i've been thinking about the same thing. how to properly embed mastodon content into Lemmy? Maybe one community for each poster? Is that the right approach?
Or should one Mastodon hashtag turn into one Lemmy community?
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guilt by association is a hell of a drug.
but i'm not gonna lie, most of the crazy hostile comments I get are from .ml users or other far-left instance users. which makes sense. I'm not far-left, so in their eyes I am a Nazi and I should be violently suppressed for not believing what they believe.
I'm okay with your point of view. I can say the same about the lemmy.world instance. Maybe we belong to a third instance, but as long as lemmy.ml has me uncensored, I'm happy here.
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I'm okay with your point of view. I can say the same about the lemmy.world instance. Maybe we belong to a third instance, but as long as lemmy.ml has me uncensored, I'm happy here.
i will say .world has had a massive infux of crazy douchebags the past few months. i have been on here two years, nad it was rare to get harassed/reported/banned, but things have changed recently whatever the last reddit exodus was.
to me it's just general rage posting and rage baiting taking over, from what was a much more chill place a year ago. across multiple instances. but on the flip side, the engagement is way up. irrational rage and hate drives engagement. people love to scream and insult other users more than they like talking to them as if they were people.
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I'm going to be frank.
I'm highly empathetic, and studied history, sociology, economics, international relations, and a few other subjects in university. I dabble in reading as well.
It's really, really hard for me to stomach the news coming out of the US right now. I'm Australian, so in comparison I live in a utopia. But I just want to cry whenever I see how innocent people are being hurt in the US, Venezuela, Palestine, or really anywhere else. I get angry when I see how the US government, and many others are fucking everything up right now. Things don't have to be like this.
There is so much American news on this platform. There is so much bad news in general. I don't come to the internet to stress and worry. I come here to learn stuff about niches and chill out. And every time I'm on Lemmy I'm left with the same bad feelings I get from reading world news subreddits.
Let me be clear; I have no problem with the fact that American news gets posted. It's that when I get on the lemmy.zip or lemmy.world page, some days 9/10 links are to American news, that is very, very, bad news. It makes me miserable.
So why should I be here instead of just switching off? I love Lemmy, but I find that I just can't justify coming on here. It makes me feel awful.
Block those communities, if you want.
But Americans are very hostile and angry people, and yes it's true that anger boils all over lemmy now in a way it didn't even a few months ago.
There are just a lot of people who go around wanting to pound everything with all the anger they are harboring.
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The more niche communities really suffer I feel from the decentralized pattern. Tv shows, movies, video games, etc. you have everyone trying to be the "de-facto" instance and none of them really get traffic.
Really, Lemmy is just a US political platform with some weak notions of being anything else. And if it wants to survive, it needs more people, with more interesting topic. To many subs are just ghost towns.
Agreed.
The politics here is also so hostile and violent, and one-sided. It's gross. Even moderate/chill points of view are mercilessly attacked and told the are awful bad people for not being extremists. Anyone who isn't on 'their side' is the 'enemy'.
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i will say .world has had a massive infux of crazy douchebags the past few months. i have been on here two years, nad it was rare to get harassed/reported/banned, but things have changed recently whatever the last reddit exodus was.
to me it's just general rage posting and rage baiting taking over, from what was a much more chill place a year ago. across multiple instances. but on the flip side, the engagement is way up. irrational rage and hate drives engagement. people love to scream and insult other users more than they like talking to them as if they were people.
Now that you point it out, I think that's exactly it. I'm glad people like you are still around there.
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You are railing about moral issues I don't even disagree with. But there are basic, physical properties that networks have, that are scale dependent. There is no moralizing around that issue. And de-federation can and does occur all the time, its basically the norm between the major instances. And that has fundamentally crippled the growth of the fediverse (at least the lemmy side).
Just because I'm not bothering putting effort into responding to a slathering wall of text like you've composed, does nothing to change the fact that social networks, and actually, all large networked systems from the internet to a fungal colony, all base their survival in scale. I've done the work and shared it with those I've deemed worthy, here, regarding the network analyses I've built to run on the fediverse. Here's a hint: you aren't one of those.
Without scale, networked systems collapse. Without scale, complexity can't emerge.
A big part of this is architectural and we had that discussion years ago here. There are design constraints built into the original envisioning of lemmy that pretty much force these limitations. The biggest issue being that each lemmy instance is built to effectively be an "entire clone" of a reddit like system. The second is activity pub related, in that users can not "migrate" their accounts or community's to new instance, neither can we fork, clone, or merge a community.
The result is that we end up with duplicated communities, balkanized content, and an overall reduction in activity, which further suppress growth. There is no disagreement that the de-federation issue contributed directly to Lemmy's decline. We were all here for it.
You can whine about it... or find a way to deal constructively with it.
Disinformation != Misinformation != Information
To hear your defeatest talk, Reddit has won. Survival of the fittest and all.
I think we can do better. But never by ignoring the consent of the governed. Perhaps by listening to people, a way could be found to move forward? e.g. by allowing a true block of all users from an instance, as an alternative to defederation. Which Lemmy will likely never do, despite their promises for years and years to do exactly that.
i.e. it's a skill issue. Do better.
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It wasn't due to only one instance, but more so the way federation works. They got tired of seeing a few political posts when trying to explore what the federated feed has and I ended up doing some work to help them curate a personal feed and set up for things they enjoy the most.
I've helped them curate what they want to see. But since there are so many copies of communities that have varying levels of activity that's what also put them off of using it as a core platform.
PieFed helps solve that with categories of communities, and also by gathering together all comments across all cross-posts. Seriously, it's an enormous difference, check it out, e.g. on PieFed.social.
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You can whine about it... or find a way to deal constructively with it.
Disinformation != Misinformation != Information
To hear your defeatest talk, Reddit has won. Survival of the fittest and all.
I think we can do better. But never by ignoring the consent of the governed. Perhaps by listening to people, a way could be found to move forward? e.g. by allowing a true block of all users from an instance, as an alternative to defederation. Which Lemmy will likely never do, despite their promises for years and years to do exactly that.
i.e. it's a skill issue. Do better.
Its not defeatism. Its a basic understanding of how systems work, which you clearly don't have. You being obtuse doesn't change that. You and I can't change the issue at play. Without scale, lemmy dies. Its not a debate and its killed plenty of projects long before it.
In other words, hope in one hand and shit in the other; see which one fills up first.
Without growing the user base, this project dies. Its not a debate.
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Maybe turning mastodon and pixelfed tags into communities and figuring out how to better integrate there would provide more and interesting content
yeah, i've been thinking about the same thing. how to properly embed mastodon content into Lemmy? Maybe one community for each poster? Is that the right approach?
Or should one Mastodon hashtag turn into one Lemmy community?
This is something I think whatever lemmy 2.0 is going to be really needs to focus on.
Just be a content aggregator for ALL of the fediverse. Everything. One feed.
Or maybe more clever ways of integrating. But right now, we're still relying on video mostly from YT (not peertube) and screenshots of things happening on mastodon. We need more connective tissue.
