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
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.
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i suspect hes been on tankie triad isntances, before i blocked the triad i found myself accidentally engaged to too many of thier posts.
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.
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PieFed improves on those issues. And eventually when Lemmy v1.0 is released that will help too
I definitely will look into FieFed, do you have any resources you can point me to? I want to learn as much as I can to help teach people about the Fediverse and help build a wider web of folks going on and sharing.
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I'm not saying it's not an improvement but it's not sufficient, either
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I'm not saying it's not an improvement but it's not sufficient, either
What is your ideal reddit experience, so to speak?
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I definitely will look into FieFed, do you have any resources you can point me to? I want to learn as much as I can to help teach people about the Fediverse and help build a wider web of folks going on and sharing.
some features of PieFed: https://join.piefed.social/features/
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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.
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.
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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.
Back to reddit I imagine.
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Same. It greatly did not help that Google searching for "Lemmy" used to go straight to lemmy.ml (as the first hit to a specific instance, after the stuff about the singer), which if you take a look at without an account you will see shows "Local" rather than "All" posts.
Just imagine: you sent a Westerner to a place that routinely and literally calls for the actual murder and downfall of all of Western society, with such posts peaking just before any election in a Western nation. YOU might block those types of posts, but I am explaining what the people that you mentioned Lemmy to almost surely saw? (although immediately after the USA election I started noticing a shift away from it being more confined to just the triad and instead spread more throughout the entire Threadiverse - MANY people now routinely call for the guillotine, with ever-decreasing ratio of joking to serious, and remember that can be shocking to mainstream people?)
Yeah.
Although I usually tend to send a link directly to the post (which is relevant to what is being discussed), the things around that might change their impression. And considering that their is more political stuff than plain tech stuff, almost everywhere on the internet rn, that kind of a result is expected. -
It's got nothing whatsoever to do with what I want.
It only has to do with the math of how large networked systems function.
Right now the fediverse is unstable and unsustainable. balkanization is a huge contributing factor.
It's not a preference thing. If you want the fediverse to survive we all need it to be bigger and balkanization prohibits that
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Like in the 1990s?
Hell yeah.
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Wow that could be huge for us! I subscribed to that issue, eagerly awaiting the day that's enabled
Well, having an illustrated web page where it is simply explained how mastodon users can use lemmy as the equivalent of facebook groups would also give us pretty good exposure. Most mastodon users don't know the difference between mastodon and the fediverse.
![DylanMc6 [any, any]](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/0171d095-f94c-4440-92d8-8844bf815bff.webp "DylanMc6 [any, any]"){kind=avatar}
