we need more users
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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.
Reddit I think
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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.
Welcome! The thing worth knowing is that corporate social media has intentionally trained you to expect zero friction because that's the basis of their business model - to trap you. Once you spend a bit of time or watch a YT video and understand how lemmy works, it's not that complicated at all.
Consider that things worth doing in life are not so easy that they suck you in. No one gets in shape at the gym on accident. A small bit of effort pays off here.
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“Strong left bias” is not bias, it is just a reflection of normal human decency. If you mean that fake leftists like the dbzero fascists are around a lot, I would agree and it’s a problem.
Imagine being so biased that you are completely blind to the facts.
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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.
And I at least was mostly lurking on reddit, as well, only commenting occasionally.
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“Strong left bias” is not bias, it is just a reflection of normal human decency. If you mean that fake leftists like the dbzero fascists are around a lot, I would agree and it’s a problem.
Since when are dbzero users racists?
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I send my friends memes. They ask "Muad'dib, where do you get these great memes?" I say I get my great memes from Lemmy. They instantly lose interest, because Lemmy is full of tankies and kinphobes
What's a kinphobe?
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Pruning is a bad idea imo. Old communities here (like on reddit) can be great resources for solutions to technical problems, for example. And weird one-off communities that have like 2 memes from a decade ago can be really funny when you get linked to them.
Perhaps a notification-type nag, a tab of "communities you used to use but haven't posted to for a while" but with a snappier title, alongside "local" and "all".
and now PieFed supports moving posts! https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/1653370/piefed-1-5-is-released-move-posts-upload-video-files-better-chat-and-more
So Piefed admins/mods could consolidate communities by moving the posts before deleting the community
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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
it's just a matter of time until the internet gets divided into spaces like US, EU, RU and China
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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.
Yes, but you don't want to lock yourself in an echo chamber either. You want to be as close to reality as possible, at least I do. Though I realize that a niche federated internet community is a bad place for that. But this is the reason I don't block communities. I used to be on lemm.ee for that reason, but it got shut down. I have no problem reading communist propaganda and deciding for myself if it's garbage. But I have problem with censorship. Though bullying and abuse is where I draw the line. But what I see is even without algorithm based feeds, people are still polarized. Possibly because, like me, people with moderate views tend to not comment or engage, while polar opposite groups want you to firmly choose sides and denounce the other side or else you are garbage. In summary, I think it's depressing because reality is currently depressing. But it's unrealistic to just pretend everything is just fine and be happy.
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when the other big instance shut down, it just got distilled to mostly politics, which /worlds only. i was enjoying the cinema/movies, tv show communities until it just mostly disappeared. some rare subs too.
There are still active cinema and TV show communities, the ones from lemm.ee mostly moved over to piefed.social.
- !movies@piefed.social
- !television@piefed.social
- !fullmoviesonyoutube@piefed.social
- !trailers@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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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?
