Lemmy's active userbase has been stable since September 2025

[openstars@piefed.social]

I saw this post on lemmy.ml just prior to the USA election, seemingly portraying the bOtH sIdEs myth that helped encourage people to not vote and thereby get Donald Trump elected:

Make of that what you will.

[openstars@piefed.social]

Is it not both though? I've noticed several users that joined here only recently - mere days or a few weeks or months - so are we not observing both users leaving and also new ones joining? Although this graph only shows the net traffic differences, so is insufficient to make claims beyond that. You could theoretically make a different one, overlaying the new subscriber numbers on top of this, that could disambiguate those two effects (people leaving vs. new ones joining)?

[cowbee@lemmy.ml]

Always claims of sea-lioning, but never any evidence. You've had me blocked for over a year now, why continue this crusade?

[atro_city@fedia.io]

I wouldn't know I don't use the other site

[witty_username@feddit.nl]

Yes. Give me one boutique antisocial media with strong political focus please

[openstars@piefed.social]

Here is one such very relevant post: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/16hkxua/why_im_giving_up_on_lemmyfediverse/

A really interesting discussion in particular is below the reply saying:

The issues you brought up are very much on Reddit too. They are just more noticeable on Lemmy because there aren't enough niche subs or fluff to drown them out.

Other replies included "I did end up shutting down my instance.", which continued on with "But, for me, seeing people blindly bash the USA every chance they get, It's a turn off." - like, I get that the USA is unpopular (especially now), and also I am okay with the Threadiverse remaining small, but I did want to push back against this magical type of thinking that we can both have our cake and eat it to, in the form of both bashing people from it and also reaching out to invite people on Reddit (who are primarily from the USA) to join us here. Maybe Lemmy will have more success by marketing itself as more "European" (or at least "non-USA", so maybe European + Global South)? Whatever goal we want to aim for, we should keep our eyes open as we aim directly at it, imho.

I do not think that all or even most Threadiverse instances should defederate from lemmy.ml, but on the other hand it would be extremely nice if just ONE instance would do so, which we could then share to people on Reddit as a nicer entry point for those more centrist-leaning users who are primarily people from the USA. Or else decide that that goal is (collectively) not what we all want. The latter being what ended up happening, whether intentionally or no.

Fwiw, Lemmy has gotten much better over the years in this respect, imho, with many more instances having banned lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net specifically.

Like, look at those contortionist comment replies trying to state that, e.g.:

(if anyone's out of the loop - lemmygrad isn't "lemmy", they are usually defederated by regular instances and their content isn't visible in "lemmy" as it is colloquially understood)

This topic is a MAJOR, oft-repeated reason why people on Reddit refuse to come here and check us out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1jjl8g5/i_tried_lemmy_again_after_a_year_long_hiatus_and/ (the title there gets cut off but continues with "it's still beyond terrible"), and here is that post's concluding paragraph:

If you have a very narrow worldview, politics is your entire personality, and you enjoy dry, charged humor then I guess Lemmy is a good alternative for you, but if you're anybody else it's not worth it. Reddit is not good, everybody here agrees. However, despite it's numerous flaws it's still a product than Lemmy at it's very best. It's simply not a viable alternative imo. Even Instagram and Tiktok are better alternatives than Lemmy.

Note that I do not agree, just stating how these people said that they felt, if that is helpful for a diagnosis of the state of affairs and what we could potentially do to help mitigate those concerns. e.g. I successfully petitioned for discuss.online to defederate from hexbear.net, thinking that could help make Redditors feel more welcomed here. Although now I am placing my hope more in PieFed (which e.g. allows users to perform their own personalized defederations without needing admin approval to block all users from any specific instance), while giving up much hope for Lemmy to keep up with its wondrous pace of adding new features.

[bazell@lemmy.zip]

By my experience, Reddit has some influence from government that they unofficially confirmed. And Reddit admins(not even talking about moderators) are actively promoting some political ideas in their actions. Like, protecting ICE and mass murders in Gaza. The most interesting thing is that this mostly works in large comunities, because of in small ones you will not see such thing except for rare occasions.
This also affects their filters. In one subreddit your comment will trigger ban, while in some others the same quote will have no effect at all. This is really annoying.

[blaze@piefed.zip]

Those two links are 2 years and 9 months old.

The Threadiverse gets regularly okay feedback on Reddit, as show the several posts on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com

[buddahriffic@lemmy.world]

It's very difficult for a set of volunteers to combat people being paid to manipulate their platform, so I'm happy with this platform remaining small enough to not be worth spending money on to manipulate.

[sergio@piefed.social]

Fwiw whenever I tell my friends about us, I point them to my feeds of lemmy communities with less politics and tech:

• https://piefed.social/f/highsignal
• https://piefed.social/f/highmemecontent

[brachiosaurus@mander.xyz]

People who keep using reddit are idiots, simple as that.

[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.