we need more users
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I posted in an ADHD community about how I'm fed up with managing my symptoms and I think I finally need to talk to a professional. Someone tried to blame my symptoms on capitalism.
As someone who simply left Reddit because they took away RIF and only stays here because I'm stubborn, Lemmy is the left wing version of Truth Social. A great deal of the users here are the absolute embodiment of the people from Sanfrancisco in South Park huffing each others farts about how progressive they are.
Like, I get it and I do agree in principle on most things with Lemmy which is the only reason I dont leave, but make no mistake THE FEDIVERSE IS AN ECHO CHAMBER.
I guess it is? But so is every other online forum. The fediverse as a whole just seems to attract a certain group of people, and I think that is fine. If I signed up to a diy forum I would also expect to mostly interact with people interested in diy.
(First comment btw, op finally convinced me) -
I think part of the issue is new users not understanding or feeling comfortable with the fediverse (myself included a while ago). Even after searching for a bit and looking it up I can barely get how it works, but there's really no guide with the common terms anywhere, how to get started, the difference between platforms and what they have in common etc.
The benefits are the first thing you hear about, but they seem more like jargon terms than actually anything functional.Reddit has better accessibility and user retainment, alongside with a library of old posts that are good for searching some niche stuff up.
For example, if I were to get a friend into lemmy, I'm not really sure how I can explain it to them, or where to start other than the copy paste "decentralized" "federated" stuff. It doesn't really answer stuff like who moderates it, develops it, owns it, or what's the difference between lemmy, piefed mbin, how do they interact with each other.
I believe that an introductory "oficial" post on the front of each platform in layman's terms would be great to get new users to stay.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.
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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 one huge missed opportunity is within sharing stuff from lemme...
Other sites will allow you to share media, often with a banner or link back to the original content or source.
For lemme I download the media and there's no branding or linkage that brings you back to the platform (at least not through the Boost app) -
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.
Hacker News is currently drowning in "I did something with AI" posts.
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it's just a matter of time until the internet gets divided into spaces like US, EU, RU and China
Hate bating much?
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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.
"Blusky is too political"
This feels like a very weird reason to not like bluesky, when there are many other reasons.
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I think one huge missed opportunity is within sharing stuff from lemme...
Other sites will allow you to share media, often with a banner or link back to the original content or source.
For lemme I download the media and there's no branding or linkage that brings you back to the platform (at least not through the Boost app)Thank god there’s no branding. But I also have found it difficult to share posts to Mastodon for example. They just don’t look good (shared from Voyager)
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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
![Tywèle [she|her]](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/85dc7b5d-7ecd-45e9-b996-df26b97d7b9a.png "Tywèle [she|her]"){kind=avatar}
