we need more users
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It's not that we're missing more user, but rather that we are missing communities where people would come for the community specifically.
Lemmy is filled with people that want something that is reddit without being reddit.
We will start winning the moment we have communities were people join Lemmy to be part of said community.
I have been using "social software" for decades now. In the early 90s I ran a single line BBS networked across Canada and USA (every modem in the network called the nearest modem and we shared posts this way). I went to friendster (before that "makeoutclub", if anyone remembers that thing), myspace, then piled onto facebook like everyone else.
The only thing that seems to make a social media tool relevant is when a critical mass of young people, in that 15-30 demo, decides that it's time to adopt a new social media platform. This has been because they want a place away from their families, but there's also all kinds of memetic reasons behind it that have nothing to do with function.
Young people need to flood to open source, distributed networks like Lemmy. I don't mean to be a token old guy and speak poorly of an entire generation, but I'm not impressed with the embracing of Tiktok, Facebook and reddit. I find it hard to take anyone with a cause who inhabits these spaces seriously. I told my niece about why Facebook sucks, and she said "that's so boomer." Like, wtf?
So yeah. Young people, stop using twitter and all that junk. I promise if you come here I'll go somewhere else.
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Unfortunate shortening for the username lmao took me a while to understand. Maybe let them decide about it?
I will. But unless anything has changed in the last 9 or so months, I expect the answer to be no.
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I will. But unless anything has changed in the last 9 or so months, I expect the answer to be no.
I see, wasn't aware of that. Thanks!
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Oh, I don't think I've witnessed one here.
They tend to pool in a certain subset of lemmy instances, and some of the main instances have defederated them, because at one point it got pretty bad.
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Because Lemmy, to this day, doesn't do what Reddit does. Yes, the UI is similar, but there's two big downsides to Reddit. One that's important now, and one that's important later.
- Lemmy is tiny. Like, really small. The Linus Tech Tips form and the Crackberry forum each have more users and more activity than all of Lemmy combined. That means, you can talk about general things of Lemmy, like e.g. US politics, but there aren't a lot of niche communities. On Reddit I can post a photo with some weird electronics component from the 60s and within minutes someone will post an answer identifying the component and telling me where to buy a replacement. On Lemmy, a corresponding community doesn't even exist.
- Lemmy scales terribly. Every instance holds a copy of all data that was ever posted in any community that any user on that instance ever subscribed to. That has two very negative effects:
- Storage requirements are insane. Since most traffic is in big communities and most users will subscribe to the big communities, most instances need to store a copy of almost all of Lemmy. If Lemmy were to ever get to the size of Reddit, every instance would have to store data in the order of magnitude of all of Reddit. Imagine small hobby admins having to host data in the region of Petabytes or Exabytes. Nobody can afford that.
- Admin work is insane. Since every instance holds a full, independent copy and doesn't only cache, they are legally responsible for the content and have to moderate it. So if someone posts e.g. illegal pornography on one instance and it's federated to another instance, the admin of the second instance needs to delete it or face legal consequences. That means, instead of the mods or admins of the original community/instance being solely responsible for keeping their stuff clean, everyone is responsible for everything and the same work needs to be done hundreds of times, once per instance.
This horrible scalability means that right now instances are getting close to their limits (see e.g. lemm.ee closing down exactly due to these reasons).
Lemmy has 40-50k monthly active users. Reddit has 5.16 billion monthly active users, so about 100 000x. If everyone on Reddit were to move over to Lemmy, Lemmy would be done. Just one day of Reddit-level traffic would be enough to jam up the history of Lemmy content so much that nobody could ever afford hosting a Lemmy instance again.
Admin work is insane. Since every instance holds a full, independent copy and doesn’t only cache, they are legally responsible for the content and have to moderate it. So if someone posts e.g. illegal pornography on one instance and it’s federated to another instance, the admin of the second instance needs to delete it or face legal consequences. That means, instead of the mods or admins of the original community/instance being solely responsible for keeping their stuff clean, everyone is responsible for everything and the same work needs to be done hundreds of times, once per instance.
Eh, if the original instance removes the CSAM - the ban and removal federates out to everywhere else, so this isn't always true.
As for the scaling of Lemmy - absolutely, but it'll never get to Reddit sized levels. Down the line, the answer here would be for the federative structure to change so that an instance only hosts its own local content, and doesn't need duplicate content viewed from external instances.
This horrible scalability means that right now instances are getting close to their limits (see e.g. lemm.ee closing down exactly due to these reasons).
That's not why lemm.ee closed down. It wasn't financial.
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One thing I've noticed with Lemmy is that it feels way more like a social bookmarking and commentary platform. I see fewer posts that are "original content" here than for example Reddit.
This and just so much negativity. I'm not saying the posts are wrong, but I often leave this site feeling worse than when I got on. It has the shortest daily app timer on my phone. Not good for engagement or growth
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i found out recently that my mastodon server is blacklisted on many of mainstream ones not because there is some bad content there but because it federates with some servers that mods somewhere else consider harmful
Genuinely, why would they do that? Like does Mastodon software work differently than Lemmy's - is there some way that someone from one of THOSE places could post content onto your instance (I dunno, CSAM? or just some trolling or piracy or something that someone considers offensive), and thereby it could come in indirectly to theirs? It makes no sense to me, at least if we were talking Lemmy, but I am interested how Mastodon differs there.
it's activitypub thing so lemmy as well. you sign up on one server, subscribe to community on different server, mods of the different server will decide they don't like your server for any reason (e.g. explicitly because mods of your server didn't blacklist some other server) and you are out of that community. it sucks. imho something based on the old news system would be better (i.e. community exists independently and servers just subscribe to them or not).
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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.
I don't mind other opinions. I don't mind different points of view. I don't mind culture and mentality differences. I'm Ukrainian living in America so the views I have, while leaning heavily left, differ to the point of leftists vehemently opposing even the slightest push back to some policies or views.
For this reason I never delete my comments and never block anyone. I need to see more. I need to see the different people and cultures. Otherwise we set up a community like parts of Seattle (where I live) that is in this political bubble that get shocked when anyone has views that differ. It creates this perspective that these other people don't exist and that the world was stolen from them. And the reason they can't comprehend other views is because they're involved in communities where these views get erased.
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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
When this post is two days old and still on the very top of my feed you know that it's either a ghost town or the sorting algo doesn't work.
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When this post is two days old and still on the very top of my feed you know that it's either a ghost town or the sorting algo doesn't work.
It can be both.
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Either we will have a huge spike in activity soon or Lemmy will become a ghostland. It is no wonder that we have low activity here with those numbers of users. But, on the other hand, Reddit has too much users + bots which leads to information overflow. Thus, Lemmy would be nice if it had only a few several hundred thousands of users.
I don't quite get it:
Lemmy has started in 2019 with 0 users and 0 instances. In 2023 there were still less than 100 instances... now the platform has oviously jumped to a few thousand instances and about 100 k users. To me this is the opposite of a ghostland.
If we consider that bigTech will mostly screw over their customers bowing to Trump I don't really get all the negativity around here.I've joined two days ago and you know what? I'm actually willing to contribute by posting instead of lurking at reddit because if I create content it's not for somme multi million dollar corp to fill their pockets with revenue but for this community to thrive...
I my eyes this isn't the right time for doomerism... on the contrary.
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Admin work is insane. Since every instance holds a full, independent copy and doesn’t only cache, they are legally responsible for the content and have to moderate it. So if someone posts e.g. illegal pornography on one instance and it’s federated to another instance, the admin of the second instance needs to delete it or face legal consequences. That means, instead of the mods or admins of the original community/instance being solely responsible for keeping their stuff clean, everyone is responsible for everything and the same work needs to be done hundreds of times, once per instance.
Eh, if the original instance removes the CSAM - the ban and removal federates out to everywhere else, so this isn't always true.
As for the scaling of Lemmy - absolutely, but it'll never get to Reddit sized levels. Down the line, the answer here would be for the federative structure to change so that an instance only hosts its own local content, and doesn't need duplicate content viewed from external instances.
This horrible scalability means that right now instances are getting close to their limits (see e.g. lemm.ee closing down exactly due to these reasons).
That's not why lemm.ee closed down. It wasn't financial.
Eh, if the original instance removes the CSAM - the ban and removal federates out to everywhere else, so this isn’t always true.
But if it doesn't, then other instances removing the content on their side doesn't federate. So you can either trust every instance that you federate with with your legal security, or you will have to moderate everything yourself as well, just in case someone missed something.
Down the line, the answer here would be for the federative structure to change so that an instance only hosts its own local content, and doesn’t need duplicate content viewed from external instances.
This would be extremely important, but I don't know if such a low level conceptual change can still be performed with a reasonable amount of work. Remember, for such a change you need to get every instance on board. That would be difficult now, and only more difficult later.
Tbh, it would have been much smarter if the setup would be basically a bunch of independent phpBB-like boards with federated single-sign-on and an app that transparently connects you to whatever instance hosts the content you are looking at.
That’s not why lemm.ee closed down. It wasn’t financial.
No, it was specifically because of the moderation issue: https://lemmy.ca/post/45390962
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Most of the major instances do federate with each other though. The only notable difference in terms of content you'll get is if you like hexbear/lemmygrad currently.
Yes. And its been detrimental to the growth of the fediverse.
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I don't mind other opinions. I don't mind different points of view. I don't mind culture and mentality differences. I'm Ukrainian living in America so the views I have, while leaning heavily left, differ to the point of leftists vehemently opposing even the slightest push back to some policies or views.
For this reason I never delete my comments and never block anyone. I need to see more. I need to see the different people and cultures. Otherwise we set up a community like parts of Seattle (where I live) that is in this political bubble that get shocked when anyone has views that differ. It creates this perspective that these other people don't exist and that the world was stolen from them. And the reason they can't comprehend other views is because they're involved in communities where these views get erased.
Yeah, this is generally my philosophy. I have exactly 1 user blocked, as well as a pure bot community or two.
But the problem for me is magnitude. With its sheer number of upvotes, /c/politics is blotting out my sun, reducing diversity; it does no good leaving it in my feed.
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I don't quite get it:
Lemmy has started in 2019 with 0 users and 0 instances. In 2023 there were still less than 100 instances... now the platform has oviously jumped to a few thousand instances and about 100 k users. To me this is the opposite of a ghostland.
If we consider that bigTech will mostly screw over their customers bowing to Trump I don't really get all the negativity around here.I've joined two days ago and you know what? I'm actually willing to contribute by posting instead of lurking at reddit because if I create content it's not for somme multi million dollar corp to fill their pockets with revenue but for this community to thrive...
I my eyes this isn't the right time for doomerism... on the contrary.
I agree with you. I just say the possibilities based on statistics. I also like Lemmy more than Reddit. The only issue is that there are missing some specialized comunities like the one about Pyrotechnics(the only one existing on Lemmy is on the dead instance, thus having no activity), for example.
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I don't know if you've convinced me to stay or go, but you've certainly convinced me of either or.
Wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything. Just offering a reality check.
Lemmy vs Reddit is like this meme where the one side says "I hate you" and the other side says "Who are you?" (or was it "I don't even think of you", can't remember).
Lemmy is cool. It being small has benefits and I like the political direction here much more than on Reddit. I like that most people I interact with on Lemmy genuinely are humans. On Reddit, that's much more difficult to be certain of.
But Lemmy is not Reddit, it's not a Reddit alternative, it's not even a Reddit competitor. It's a nice little niche forum, a little anti-capitalist experiment, that kinda copied the UI and UX of old Reddit. That's totally fine and it's got it's value. Otherwise I wouldn't have >3000 comments on this platform.
But it's a factor of 100 000x off of being on the radar of Spez and his crew.
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Hexbear is super trans inclusive (50ish% of users are trans per the last survey) and bans transphobia instantly, you may fit right in
Hexbear is tankie space
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I see, wasn't aware of that. Thanks!
Yeah, i unfortunately don't agree with the tankie censorship of people who disapprove of dictatorships.
Cowbee you especially are a gross person when it comes to licking authoritarian boot.
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This and just so much negativity. I'm not saying the posts are wrong, but I often leave this site feeling worse than when I got on. It has the shortest daily app timer on my phone. Not good for engagement or growth
I have kind of the opposite experience. When I go on reddit, I feel depressed and angry, when I go on Lemmy I laugh and learn stuff. Probably the communities I subscribe to though. I get political and regional news from Reddit (and don't have an actual reddit account anymore). I get funny science and Star Trek memes from Lemmy and cyber security and tech news.
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I don't know the motives of others, but I've been spending increasingly less time on the internet and more time listening to podcasts & reading.
Lemmy attracts only certain types of people who like reading articles and replying long paragraphs arguing with each other or small details. In a time when literacy is falling, means there's
only a smaller and smaller pie left. Maybe we need a book club or pen pal system or a noobie hub to make it a friendlier environment. There's a cloud of hostility in the air friends, don't let it take you. Ape strong together.And the obvious new use case of a centralized space to coordinate regime change has some daunting externalities that preclude it.
![∞🏳️⚧️Edie [it/it/its/its/itself, she/her/her/hers/herself, fae/faer/faer/faers/faerself, love/love/loves/loves/loveself, des/pair, null/void, none/use name]](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/1adef085-c064-4ad2-9fc8-1c860e1aaab6.webp "∞🏳️⚧️Edie [it/it/its/its/itself, she/her/her/hers/herself, fae/faer/faer/faers/faerself, love/love/loves/loves/loveself, des/pair, null/void, none/use name]"){kind=avatar}
![Cowbee [he/they]](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/c18ce632-5fb5-4888-8226-3dc55a07acc4.jpeg "Cowbee [he/they]"){kind=avatar}