Lemmy's active userbase has been stable since September 2025

[openstars@piefed.social]

That is a superb idea. Plus PieFed.social defederates from hexbear, so there's no chance of them accidentally wandering into let's say !Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net and get dunked on without understanding why. That community has a right to exist, but it most definitely should be properly labelled so that users are forewarned - unlike how Lemmy handles it where you can get into a post via All without ever once seeing its sidebar text.

[openstars@piefed.social]

Has anything changed since a year ago in this regard though? Tankies are still here, lemmy.ml not defederated from anywhere, hexbear almost disappeared but managed to come back. We made discuss.online a better landing space for newbies, but now the shift is more towards PieFed, which I mentioned several thoughts about in a separate thread.

Not only on Reddit, even on Lemmy there are a bunch of people bashing on the tankies being present on Lemmy, in that community e.g. in the recent discussion at https://piefed.zip/c/fedibridge/p/795307/r-redditalternatives-comments-ask-for-alternatives-piefed-and-lemmy-are-mentioned-a-few-ti, like this comment:

That’s the problem, they do manipulate it. There was a thread a while back that showed how ml basically shows up as one of the random instances to join, like 95% of the time. So it’s not actually random.

We can say all we like how we wish that it were not a problem, but people on Reddit seem to disagree and not want to join regardless. Though I have noticed that either positive or negative opinions are very rarely delivered these days in r/RedditAlternatives. I wonder if people are simply tired of the subject and now just tune it out like noise. If so, then we missed a major opportunity to offer a true alternative to Reddit. Hopefully there will be more, and I am not suggesting to give up, only trying to highlight a major issue of concern so that we can move forward.

Chiefly imho, by recommending PieFed rather than Lemmy instances (and strongly preferably one that defederates from hexbear).

[nightwatch_admin@feddit.nl]

It’s been 6 hours, may I out of friendly nature inquire after the hopefully most entertaining intercourse with @Klear@quokk.au? I trust it was most fulfilling?

[openstars@piefed.social]

Ah, searching is super difficult on Bluesky but I finally managed to find something relevant using Google and the site: function. Here is what it had to say in https://bsky.app/profile/lagotrasimeno.bsky.social/post/3lzwma6eg7k2l:

New here
Just exploring some alternatives to the always more nazi-like policies and TOS of Reddit and X.
So far I've tried Mastodon (which is dead btw) and Lemmy, the so-called best alternative to Reddit whose community is even more toxic than the original.
This seems pretty chill maybe too much?

(Bold emphasis added)

I am not trying to be negative, at least not for its own sake. This is legitimately what I see that people are saying about us here. Certainly not all of them to be fair - some people on other platforms love us here - but from the perspective of diagnosing why are many people leaving, and what do they say about us when they do, this is the top #1 cited reason that I have seen: our toxicity. And I cannot think of any better example of that than hexbear.net, which is why I am such a fan of either outright defederation if that is the only option, or at least making that instance opt-in rather than force it to be opt-out, which apparently seems to cause many people to flee us and go either back to Reddit or to Bluesky or whatever, hence opting out of the entire Threadiverse. Basically: either hexbear goes, or the newbie users do. And even that is only a start to reducing our overall toxicity level as presented to newbie users, though PieFed at least has several wonderful tools to help with that built-in already:-).

[kwezelaar@mastodon.nl]

@Blaze The last 3 things you mentioned are good tips for the fediverse in general, not just lemmy/piefed

[chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Someone's gotta stay behind to tell people to check out Lemmy

[openstars@piefed.social]

I could criticize China right now, here in this community on Lemmy.world, but if I did so in a community on Lemmy.ml I would get banned from not only the entire instance but from communities that I've never so much as heard of. We have censorship here too.

And we have toxicity here as well. As too does Reddit. It is a little odd to hear Redditors of all people complain about toxicity:-). Maybe they were used to smaller communities on Reddit, avoiding the big ones, but then here with far less content you pretty much have to subscribe to the large communities (like is there another one talking about the Fediverse besides this one that is more worthwhile?), where the toxicity is more visible?

I don't know, I haven't wanted to actually talk to people on Reddit for several years now:-).

[openstars@piefed.social]

People seem to still be posting to them though? Like Lady Butterfly made 6 posts to the latter one just today alone. And much of that content does not look to be reposted anywhere else, like this post in the former community:

You might want to shut those old ones down then if people are not supposed to be using them anymore?

[bazell@lemmy.zip]

Well, I agree that there are some specialized comunities for people that want to believe in 1 idea. Like Lemmy.ml. And if you don't want to be the part of a brainwashed herd, you either leave by yourself or get banned. This is normal. I am talking about the active platform wide banning regardless of comunity. I don't see such thing on Lemmy unless you are really harming the platform like mass spamming or sharing dangerous software. On Reddit you no longer can have a normal conversation, since you can get banned not only by a toxic mod but also by shitty AI system. And then you cannot even expect for the appeal to be normally processed by a human, since either they are also being reviewed by AI or the workers are too lazy to properly work(which is quite relatable since there are thousands of appeals and not enough workers because of a greedy management).

Due to the decentralization on Lemmy, even if you get banned from even 2 or 3 instances, you still have a lot of parts of platform available for you. While on Reddit your ban affects you and your account dramatically. Especially, if you are not paying them for the pro version.

[blaze@piefed.zip]

!wholesome@reddthat.com is the active community, it's !lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world that's inactive

!goodnewseveryone@piefed.social is supposed to be active, we prefer it to !upliftingnews@lemmy.world

About your last question, every time we suggest to lock down communities people come and start arguing that locking communities makes us like Reddit

https://piefed.zip/post/507615#post_replies

I've dealt with enough of those discussions in the past, I don't want to deal with that kind of drama again.

[blaze@piefed.zip]

!meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works is a very toxic community as well, you don't see SJW defederated from most instances.

Lemmy.ml is defederated from infosec.pub and lemmy.cafe.

Piefed having actual instance blocking at the user level make defederation less of an issue.

[blaze@piefed.zip]

Indeed, but on this community we tend to focus on the Threadiverse

[klear@quokk.au]

Nah, he kept screaming and it kinda ruined the mood =/

[jimmy90@lemmy.world]

it's going to take more than that

the lemmy line is going down much faster than the piefed line is going up

looks like losing 1500 users per quarter when you take both into account

[alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Your Don Quixote RP in this thread is going really well, congrats!

[vga@sopuli.xyz]

Reddit has so much more content and frankly 80% of their real non-bot userbase seem to be ok. Wouldn't hurt at all to get like 10% of the best of them here. That'd be about 5 million people.

Ok, now that I think about it, 70k => 5M would probably hurt the servers a bit.

Let's go for the top 1%, we all love the top 1% right?

[shiroininja@lemmy.world]

Lemmy is the only Corporate social media replacement I've stuck to for years. I've never gone back to reddit. I don't need it. I like the vibes here and it's just busy enough to suit my needs without allowing me to doomscroll nonstop new content.

[surp@lemmy.world]

Wow a blurry graph...I cant read a single thing on this is it just me or something?

[crypticcoffee@lemmy.ml]

No, they just don't have the same principles as us. I love Lemmy, but it doesn't have the same level of smaller active communities. There is more work for us to do.

[comfy@lemmy.ml]

I've come across some people who have no idea what "sealioning" even means. There used to be a hb user "Ulysses" or something, like three years ago, who accused me of doing it after I replied to their reply to my reply, and that's the only conversation we'd ever had. I pulled up the definition of sealioning and the comic which the word originated from, and they just say "no that's not true, stop sealioning".

I feel like some people just think sealioning means "this person keeps replying to my posts", as if conversations on a public forum are somehow uncalled for, or unusual.