Lemmy's active userbase has been stable since September 2025

[ultragigagigantic@lemmy.ml]

Maybe I just gotta shitpost harder then.

[dimik@lemmy.world]

I'm completely new to Lemmy and fediverse in general. I wonder if there have been any initiatives to promote Lemmy more and help it attain the critical mass of people.

For exampe, having a Lemmy or Fediverse month, when the community attempts to advertise to friends that don't know about it yet. If a few of the main instances participate in this, I'm sure the community could come up with some great ideas for spreading the word.

[sine_fine_belli@lemmy.world]

Same here lol

[zink@programming.dev]

So are we living in some kind of Bizarro Eternal September?

Where instead of being flooded with normies, a few dozen thousand of us are walled in behind barriers to entry that the greybeards of old could only imagine.

It's like a social experiment that would be unethical if we weren't all self-selected to be here. Will we flourish or will we go mad?!?

Given my experiences so far, I'm gonna ride this thing as far as it takes me. Just today I was inspired by a fellow lemming to format my entire hard drive just to switch to a slightly different Linux distro. On my work laptop!

[pissingintothewind@lemmy.world]

Niceeee. I think people are starting to consistently leave Reddit to keep the stagnant user percentage down.

[ragallos@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

[blaze@piefed.zip]

Hey, nice to see you around!

[valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Thanks Blaze!

Thanks for having me, hopefully soon on piefed!

[hector@lemmy.today]

I think certain subjects they do not want to violate you for if not against the rules so they find a pretext on an unrelated subject, automation is their excuse.

Just like uhealth putting ai in charge of denying claims that qualify, or the uk putting ai in charge of post office fraud, or michigan in charge of unemployment insurance claims. They were all set up to deny legit claims and flag legit claims. They deny there is a problem with software until they cannot, then oops, only the ai is at fault, as if it was not knowing.

We have no rights in the us so social media will never get to that admitting stage. The government is the one telling them to find pretexts to violate accounts oftentimes too.

[comfy@lemmy.ml]

The sealion in the comic overheard someone being racist against them, and stepped in to say, “Hey, why are you being racist?” And for some reason is wrong because… they’re persistent? Or because they’re annoying? How is that not literally just every “anti-woke” argument?

I think the point is that the sea lion is feigning civility while harassing someone over a casual opinion.

My response would be that if we extend the metaphor, like you did, and substitute the absurd 'sea lions' for a race, then harassing the racist doesn't bother me. Bigots don't deserve peace. It's absolutely harassment to stalk and interrogate someone who doesn't want to talk, I just wouldn't care that they're being harassed for airing such bigotry.

(On the other hand, if we assume the original opinion is not a metaphor and replace it with a similarly absurd statement, like enjoying pineapple on pizza, then the sea lion would be acting unreasonably. If someone followed you around online and kept bringing up how you prefer pizza to be prepared, demanding a calm discussion and insisting on peer-reviewed proof that pizza tastes better a certain way, while you ask them to stop, that harassment would obviously be uncalled for. For what it's worth, the author made a comment that it wasn't meant to be "analogous to a prejudice based on race, species, or other immutable characteristics." - but I say it's a though-provoking interpretation to explore regardless)

[whyjiffie@sh.itjust.works]

some users solve that with keyword filters, but be careful not to block too broadly

[periodicallypedantic@lemmy.ca]

Im not sure how these stats are collected, I assume that they query each server for its to make the chart, rather than query every server every day and copy the results.

If they're really copying the results, then you're absolutely correct that temporary instances outrages would cause those correlated downward blips, but I'm surprised to hear you wouldn't just be able to query servers to get this data on demand.
But then again if a server went permanently offline you'd lose that data forever. Hmmm

[blackdragon@slrpnk.net]

If it wasn't meant to be analogous to prejudice based on immutable characteristics why did they make it prejudice based on immutable characteristics? Sea lions in the universe the comic takes place in are clearly sapient people, capable of complex thought, communication in English, and the ability to navigate human society. The person in the comic isn't being "metaphorically racist" or expressing something "analogous" to racism; they're simply being racist.

As you say, what the sea lion is doing is harassment, it is hostile, it is aggressive, and the racist depicted in the comic deserves it. It is model behavior, we should make people dread the idea of expressing racist views in public.

If you substitute the racist opinion for a mundane one, of course the comic changes and the sea lion becomes unreasonable. You've completely changed what the sea lion was responding to. If you swap all the Nazis in Wolfenstein with peaceful dogs who aren't doing anything, now it's a game about being a cop. Now you're being completely unreasonable by shooting them. But that doesn't tell us anything about the validity of shooting the original Nazis. When we look at the original context of Wolfenstein, shooting the Nazis is completely reasonable because they're Nazis and not dogs.

Furthermore, even if we do substitute the racism expressed in the comic for a more mundane opinion, like enjoying pineapple on pizza, it still seems inapplicable to internet arguments. A significant part of the reason the sea lion is unreasonable is its persistence. At no point do the other people in the comic engage with the sea lion but it won't stop harassing them. But on Lemmy, this behavior is so universally punished that it almost never happens because it would obviously get you permabanned from your home instance no matter what it is. Most people I've seen accused of "sealioning" are simply replying, one comment at a time, to people who are actively engaging with them. You can't be "sealioning" unless you are following someone who isn't engaging with you somewhere else, meaning in this context a different thread, to demand further engagement in the conversation. Which, again, would get you banned so fast that I don't think I've ever actually seen it happen on Lemmy.

On no level do most accusations of "sealioning" seem to hold up to scrutiny, in my opinion.

[comfy@lemmy.ml]

On no level do most accusations of “sealioning” seem to hold up to scrutiny, in my opinion.

Agreed. While I haven't seen many accusations of it, all the ones I've seen have been false. And like you said, Lemmy has sufficient moderation that I've never seen it happen here.

[quacksalber@lemmy.world]

If the userbase has held steady, the AI scraping must be astronomical. Shitjust works stops working every evening.