we need more users
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Fair enough. Just grabbed one of the first images a search threw. Sorry if it was out of context or portrayed you unfairly. And of course people propagandize about you too. Anyone with a strong enough voice will get bad faith critiques thrown against them and many will be with political intent.
I do think this is a fair example to exemplify the point I was trying to make, though. Your quote being out of context does not nullify its dychotomical political intent and makes my point stronger.
Propaganda is hard to identify when you're predisposed to believe it, it's everywhere and people propagate it without even noticing.
Sure, there are a lot of bad-faith critiques going around. I do think that your point using me as an example doesn't really work if your example is out of context. The thing about propaganda is that anyone pushing a particular view is propagandizing, but that doesn't mean it's inherently misinformation. Identifying bias is important, as is developing media literacy to see where people are being less than truthful.
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From my own experience with Lemmy, I can absolutely see why it's declining.
Lemmy is packed full of miserable people constantly calling for violence. 90% of the feed is packed full of US politics, it doesn't matter how many filters I use I still see that greasy orange cunt's face every time I open Lemmy.
The amount of hostility towards outsiders just getting into Lemmy is astounding, and I've absolutely seen the whole "quality over quantity" crap that only drives people away from the platform. The IT tech snobbery is also incredibly offputting to people who aren't tech enthusiests.
In short, Lemmy has a toxic shithead problem that a platform this small can't afford if it wants to survive long term.
Yeah the corn movement barely helped and you still have people whining or raging in the comments regardless of subject matter. I just want muh memes
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I guess ragebait really is what the people want. Its a bit sad but oh well.
It’s addictive. It’s not like I haven’t steeped in it either.
This is what I keep hammering; people can’t help themselves, especially under stress. Perverse engagement incentives need to be fixed structurally to give us a fighting chance, otherwise Lemmy/Piefed will end up like Voat and all the other Reddit clones.
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Wow. This is peak "I am so smart". You're not smart for downloading an app. Embarrassing
Lemmy is a website, not an app. I never download an app, but it appears that is what you did. It sounds like there's a knowledge deficit on your end, in addition to you being eager to apply labels to people to make yourself feel superior. You should definitely be embarrassed by your ignorant and childish comment that references a very immature and unintelligent subreddit.
I will reiterate that there are very good & important reasons to leave platforms like Reddit, Facebook, etc. Most people are too unintelligent, ignorant, and lazy to learn about them and move away from those platforms.
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Lemmy is a website, not an app. I never download an app, but it appears that is what you did. It sounds like there's a knowledge deficit on your end, in addition to you being eager to apply labels to people to make yourself feel superior. You should definitely be embarrassed by your ignorant and childish comment that references a very immature and unintelligent subreddit.
I will reiterate that there are very good & important reasons to leave platforms like Reddit, Facebook, etc. Most people are too unintelligent, ignorant, and lazy to learn about them and move away from those platforms.
Wow. This is top notch cringe.
Everybody is stupid except me
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From my own experience with Lemmy, I can absolutely see why it's declining.
Lemmy is packed full of miserable people constantly calling for violence. 90% of the feed is packed full of US politics, it doesn't matter how many filters I use I still see that greasy orange cunt's face every time I open Lemmy.
The amount of hostility towards outsiders just getting into Lemmy is astounding, and I've absolutely seen the whole "quality over quantity" crap that only drives people away from the platform. The IT tech snobbery is also incredibly offputting to people who aren't tech enthusiests.
In short, Lemmy has a toxic shithead problem that a platform this small can't afford if it wants to survive long term.
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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
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.
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I came here looking for something different than Reddit but I’m actually pretty done. I try to post, start threads and conversations but the ones that don’t get deleted because of some vague rule get questioned to hell as to why it exists that it makes me wish I hadn’t posted at all.
I've lost track of how many subs I've been banned from cause I pissed off a friend of a mod.
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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.
This. This is the main complaining I see over the Fediverse when I try to suggest it to people. They enter Lemmy to give it a check and go "It's all politics?"
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I'm just going to restart my point for clarity.
Any barriers to bringing on users into the fediverse at any level is destructive to the future survival of the fediverse. This is specifically an issue that came up during any of the waves of migration we see from the bad place.
At various times there have been bans, both temp and outright, for all kinds of reasons, for both agreeable and disagreeable reasons, but regardless the impact is destructive to the fediverse.
Social networks thrive on users and through scaling aquire different properties. It's more about the math of what it takes to keep a stable network and there is no getting around that. The "come one come all" approach things like the bad place use allows them to capture that kind of growth and without it, it's just not possible to have the kind of detailed and varied and populated network you would get otherwise.
There have been specific moderation choices that have significantly curtailed and hurt the growth of the fediverse on all sides. Defederation is a huge one. Overly dogmatic moderation is another.
Like I agree that I don't want tankies content or their spam, but realistically the "tankie"-verse versus the rest-of-us-verse has crippled the projects growth.
HARD disagree.
Like I agree that I don’t want tankies content or their spam, but realistically the “tankie"-verse versus the rest-of-us-verse has crippled the projects growth.
First, it's the actual reason cited by many people, over in r/RedditAlternatives, as the reason that they left. They did not inquire as what place they might go to that has more tankies - they wanted exclusively fewer.
Second, lemm.ee tried to federate with everyone, and look how that turned out? Literally nobody word-wide was willing to step up and put up with all the crap slung at them on a literally daily basis, so the entire instance was shuttered. Hexbear likewise almost died off, as they pissed off their admins and then one forgot to keep the domain license renewed, plus remember that time that one of their admins was caught literally lying to other instance admins? There is zero possibility of calling that instance one that "engages in good faith".
Third, the developers of Lemmy for years lied to us and told us that the ability to block all the users on an instance would be coming - but then when they delivered it, we found out that users blocked in that manner could still read, vote on, and respond to you, even send you a DM, and then a subsequent release of Lemmy weakened those walls even further by adding the ability for blocked users to trigger notifications to your account. Why should incels collectively have more "rights" than the people who do not want to have to put up with them? You can say that I am a bad person on the internet because I do not enjoy walking into a Nazi bar... and you can say that about all of the other people that took one look at Lemmy and noped right back out to Reddit, but whatever you call us, your rights end where ours begin. And you cannot force those people who left here to come back, and offer us content. That's just not how people work.
Fourth, tankies are calling for the literal murder of people in and the actual downfall of Western civilization. I feel like it is perfectly understandable then that people who live in Western civilization might not feel entirely at home and welcomed here?
Many of us only came to the Threadiverse because of Kbin, not Lemmy. And now many of us remain only because of PieFed, not Lemmy. Tankies are causing people to shy away from Lemmy, not the anti-tankies who want to expand it to make even more people feel welcomed, by e.g. making dealing with them be opt-in rather than something that takes thousands and thousands and thousands of clicks as you have to block people one by singular one. Your rights to freedom of speech and by extension to let them have the same should not allowed to trump my own rights to not have to listen, unless I explicitly want to. They are free to speak, but why should an instance be forced to platform them and spread their message further, without the ability to withdraw consent? Defederation should only ever be used as a last resort... and against echo chamber instances not operating in good faith, it's a great tool to carve out safe spaces on the Threadiverse where people can not have to listen to their disingenuous edge-lord crap. Thank you for listening - I hope I have offered something interesting to think about - and have a good day.
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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 remember hearing about when the empire State building was first built, the would light up some of the offices to make it look busy, to attract other people.
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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
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.
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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'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.
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I'd say monthly active looks pretty much stagnant. Of course we would all benefit from greater adoption.
For me it was spezgate that brought me to abandon reddit. Yes, a platform is only as valuable as its userbase. Someone else here boiled it down to "quality over quantity". I don't expect this to be the final verdict on the trend.
To me this is a lot like Linux vs Windows market share. Microsoft are currently doing everything in their power to enshittify Windows 11. But the endgame for a community first product like Linux isn't to promote itself better towards potential switchers. People need to make that switch themselves.
The big tech product will probably always "win" in terms of adoption, even if it is inferior in terms of its own merits. At the end of the day nobody wants to be Microsoft (reddit) in this analogy. And Apple (bsky) isn't that much better.
Hard agree there - growth at any costs should not be our motto, just improvement in terms of features for our own sakes, and if people enjoy that and want to join us, then that's wonderful as well.
Though at one point we had 55k active users, and now we "only" have ~35k, so it seems like it has gone down over the years. Though to be fair, then it cycled back upwards, then downwards, then upwards again, then downwards - and yet always decreasing from that peak of 55k to where we are now, an overall negative trend. Even just six months ago we had 41k, a loss of ~15% now compared ot then (correspondingly, PieFed only has ~2k users total across all instances, so this loss of 6k for Lemmy was nowhere near balanced by a corresponding increase in PieFed as would be explained by a migration effect).
But even if you are fully right, and this all reflects relative stagnation, that's still not a good thing imho, given the waves of Reddit migrants that we've seen coming here during the same time-period. It means that in roughly equal numbers to new people joining we are also losing a LOT of people, to parts unknown (perhaps they went back to Reddit, as many claim to have done in r/RedditAlternatives, or perhaps they moved instead to BlueSky?).
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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.
Lemmy/Piefed is defederated. I feel like that in itself is an improvement.
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I'm just going to restart my point for clarity.
Any barriers to bringing on users into the fediverse at any level is destructive to the future survival of the fediverse. This is specifically an issue that came up during any of the waves of migration we see from the bad place.
At various times there have been bans, both temp and outright, for all kinds of reasons, for both agreeable and disagreeable reasons, but regardless the impact is destructive to the fediverse.
Social networks thrive on users and through scaling aquire different properties. It's more about the math of what it takes to keep a stable network and there is no getting around that. The "come one come all" approach things like the bad place use allows them to capture that kind of growth and without it, it's just not possible to have the kind of detailed and varied and populated network you would get otherwise.
There have been specific moderation choices that have significantly curtailed and hurt the growth of the fediverse on all sides. Defederation is a huge one. Overly dogmatic moderation is another.
Like I agree that I don't want tankies content or their spam, but realistically the "tankie"-verse versus the rest-of-us-verse has crippled the projects growth.
If you want maximum federation in your instance, lemmy.zip exists.
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https://join-lemmy.org/instances will send you to places like hexbear.net and lemmy.ml, whereas https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser literally never will.
Honestly I think this is a problem. I don't think the instance picker should be so opinionated that it blocks (legal) instances. I want extremist to be directed away from the normie and moderate instances. I prefer to clearly characterize instances and let people pick their own, while also providing opinion for people who don't care or lack understanding.
Although this is clearly a point of preference, and I can see why some people would prefer the opposite to possibly prevent the radicalization of a moderate.
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?
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I've used this one quite a bit: https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/
thank you so much. i am going to fall so much asleep to this
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Maybe we could join a webring
Like in the 1990s?
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https://join-lemmy.org/instances will send you to places like hexbear.net and lemmy.ml, whereas https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser literally never will.
Honestly I think this is a problem. I don't think the instance picker should be so opinionated that it blocks (legal) instances. I want extremist to be directed away from the normie and moderate instances. I prefer to clearly characterize instances and let people pick their own, while also providing opinion for people who don't care or lack understanding.
Although this is clearly a point of preference, and I can see why some people would prefer the opposite to possibly prevent the radicalization of a moderate.
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.
![Cowbee [he/they]](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/c18ce632-5fb5-4888-8226-3dc55a07acc4.jpeg "Cowbee [he/they]"){kind=avatar}
![DylanMc6 [any, any]](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/0171d095-f94c-4440-92d8-8844bf815bff.webp "DylanMc6 [any, any]"){kind=avatar}