I feel like there used to be many more posts on my feed… I hope I’m imagining it…
Yes. The lead singer of Motorhead died a few years ago.
No
Lemmy has minuscule portion of users compared to mainstream social media. It doesn’t mean it’s dead.
I like the current vibe. If Lemmy grew suddenly 10x, I’m sure some of that small place energy would be lost.
It could afford to grow 10x but not 1000x.
That kind of growth would probably require many new instances too. I don’t think the current ones could handle 1000x load.
Probably the architecture will need to change significantly. (A decent rule of thumb is that a given architecture is good for an increase of about 100x, then it needs to change, then that’s good for the next 100x and so on).
I don’t even think most instances would be able to handle a 1000x increase even if it was spread across new instances. The amount of traffic coming into instances would also be up by a large multiple to account for the new users, communities and subscriptions. And given some of the cost concerns I’ve seen already, that would probably cause some instance admins to throw in the towel.
Well presumably donations would increase at a similar rate. In theory.
Obviously we all want the Fediverse to grow, but it has grow at a slow rate so it doesn’t overwhelm the instances financially or in terms of management. So new tech developments can support admins and community owners at dealing with increased traffic, and the trolling that would come with that. And so instance owners can appoint new admins to deal with rulebreakers.
Piefeds relatively fast development rate will, I think, come up with many efficencies and tools here that would mitigate instance owner burnout.
Also synchronization could become an issue. On the other hand I would really like to see how robust activity pub is. Can it actually handle large scale federation like this.
There’s too much in-fighting and drama for it to be dead.
I’m smoking weed about it.
Good to see you around
Good to see you around
💚 Thanks mate. I’m never too far away. I’ve had more going on IRL lately but I spend most of my time on crazypeople.online communities these days too. Mysteriously the vibe there is right up my alley. 😜
I came across in the big Reddit migration and while I loved the idea, it felt like every third post was about the meta or Reddit. I ended up dropping all social media. A few months ago I started passively reading Reddit again and as many predicted, the whole vibe is just off. So I began checking back here a bit and it’s a bit closer to what I want now. It feels like there is a bit less going on than back then, and I’m totally okay with that.
Be active and be what you want to see. This is a community driven system and you will get a lot more out of a community by participating over just observing.
[email protected] if you want to help build communities
Dead, no, stagnant, yes.
This. There is too little new people joining and not enough incentive to join.
Imho, the biggest deterrent beside the lack of users is the ‘politics’ that’s almost everywhere (so, so often accompanied by anger when it’s not hatred). Sure, it’s more problematic on some instances than others but it’s almost everywhere. That’s also relatively easy to filter out of one’s feed but it still needs to be filtered manually which may not be the most interesting thing a brand new user may want to do… that is if they have not already been dissuaded to join just by reading the default feed?
The default Piefed onboarding process asks you how much politics you needs, hides at least “trump” and “musk” if you want to, and suggests you a list of diverse feeds/topics to join.
Maybe it could be even more agressive and add other words to the blocklist, but it’s not too bad as it is.
Like I said, it’s something that a user needs to configure. It’s already (much) better with piefed but I don’t remember being asked if I wanted to filter out anything (politics or otherwise) when I created my Lemmy account back then… and the default feed’s content was not the most thrilling experience for me ;)
It’s something I think we discussed a few months back (not 100% sure) and I still wish for the default feed of a new user to be empty save for a few tags/categories they would need to click in order to see something in their All/local feed before they even subscribe to any community. I don’t know how to put it: by default, the All/Local should only display all of whatever I’m into not all what’s published ;)
I still wish for the default feed of a new user to be empty save for a few tags/categories they would need to click in order to see something in their All/local feed before they even subscribe to any community.
I just created an account today on Piefed.social, and that’s what the default feed is: empty.
Weren’t we referring to Lemmy?
The default Piefed onboarding
I was always mentioning Piefed, which is a better option was new joiners for that onboarding experience (and other features).
totally agree on that.
i feel as if I’m seeing more engagement on posts sometimes, so i would say no
numbers seem to disagree
I get that they’ve been dipping recently, but holy crow-- could it really be true that there are well over 9M posts by day?! oO (and ~14M comments per day?) No way am I seeing a tiny fraction of that in my ALL feed, altho I understand that’s completely dependent on users at my instance being subscribed to communities around the FV.
One other interesting stat is that the running Lemmy instances have steadily been going down, which is naturally going to delete lots of user accts and communities, likely explaining part of the situation, here. So what if the users who choose to stay, decide to sign up via a different service, thereby ‘picking up the slack?’ (Mbin, PF, etc)
Indeed, on the whole the FV still seems to be growing:
https://fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=90Those stats are total posts, not posts per day. Also worth noting that the home screen stats are misleading, as they include a bot-run Reddit mirror that is larger than the rest of Lemmy and PieFed combined, not to mention a lot of other smaller (but still massive) bots and bot-run instances that most are defederated from.
If you want to be more accurate, you have to filter through individual instances excluding outliers, and collect the data from each one to add up.
Overall, the stats seem to suggest that its lost momentum and grown stagnant, although stagnant does not mean dead either.
In which case-- what should we do?
Do you have any idea what we should do?I’ve put 2+yrs in to this project, largely because… we just can’t be pushed around by other hypocritical, social media services.
Normally, I’d say post more, but from a glace at your profile, you’re already posting more than I would expect any individual to (Thank you.)
Beyond this, we need the Fediverse to expand to the point were it can achive a critical mass and the networking effect and its own momentum will keep it running. In my own personal opinion, there is two main avenues we need to tackle:
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Gaining/Keeping new users: As it stands, Lemmy has low visibility, and when new users do try to learn more, it’s extremely inaccessible. Keep in mind that even Reddit was seen as kinda niche and inaccessible, nonetheless as a defederated platform filled with elitist political and tech nerds. To improve these, one avenue is to engage in more marketing and onboarding. Things like colourful, “How to use Lemmy” image decks, screenshots reposted on other platforms, or just straight propaganda posters. We also need to improve the experience in the Fediverse, although this is more about being friendly and supportive, and calling out elitism and assholery. Larger movements like what is needed here happen through a sense of community.
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Lack of compelling content: As it stands, there is far too little content on the fediverse, nonetheless anything standout. We need both more broad appeal content and more high-quality content if we want to draw users from other platforms. Options for this range in complexity from simply asking users to post/comment more (even a simple, complementary comment helps encourage others to post more), to writing bots to make relevant posts to the appropriate communities like Reddit did in the early days, to making more original content for Lemmmy (or at least released to Lemmy early), or even sponsoring/commissioning more work to be posted here.
IMO, we need a combination of both of these avenues if we want to achive the critical mass needed to make the Fediverse successful.
Yeah, I think you put your finger on a bunch of significant issues, right there. *phew*
Anyway, that’s a lot to unpack for me, but one of the familiar ones is the fact that loads of Reddit-type users are swiftly put off by how extra-complicated it is to have a ‘familiar Reddit experience,’ here on the Fediverse. (I’m no longer technically part of the Lemmysphere, haha)
Spez melting down and accidentally giving us great PR for awhile was maybe… not good enough in itself, eh?
Spez melting down and accidentally giving us great PR for awhile was maybe… not good enough in itself, eh?
The problem is that for the average user, the Fediverse just doesn’t offer a compelling product. Think about the average, enthusiastic poster on Reddit. While yes, they might be a power user who understands the site and is passionate about it, most (esspecially in smaller communities) users are passionate about what they’re posting about, and just happen to access the community through Reddit. They don’t know nor care about the underlying tech and politics, they just want to talk to others about how to grow tomatoes or what game patch 1.16 means for the meta. These users didn’t care about the Reddit drama. They just kept going as normally as they could, and those who did try were largely met with dead communities anyway, so simply went back to what they were doing before.
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those graphs aren’t that great and easy to misinterpret: the 9M is the total number of posts, that were ever posted to lemmy. the graph just shows what that number was for each day (so for example the graph shows 8.9M yesterday and 9M today, that means 100k posts in one day)
I was mostly just looking at total active users
but fair point mentioning other fediverse apps
People are moving to Piefed
Not that I can see
Subscribe to more communities
[email protected] is good for finding new ones
Edit: Although the bot seems to have stopped posting recently, maybe it’s moved?
That bot stopped working, [email protected] is probably the place to go
It feels newborn, if anything. Like 30-40% of comments I see are from users < 30 days old.
<30 days old means nothing.
Lemmy users are more paranoid about government, could be just using discarding their accounts often.
I’ve been on lemmy since the reddit API thing, but this account is only 2 months because I’ve tried quitting lemmy a few times, and I failed because I’m bored and I need a soapbox to vent.
it feels like early reddit. a lot of the same style and content. and a lot of replies in threads that are trying way too hard to be edgelordy but just seem crude and naive.
Throwing this out there in case you are just scrolling through “all”:
Your instance is small and you won’t see content from communities no one on your instance has subscribed to. An example:
I see posts from a community on “all” that I haven’t subsribed to, but someone on my instance has subsscribed to said community. Otherwise we on sopuli would not be fetching updates from those communities and I wouldn’t see it on “all”.
There is a project (forgot name) that makes bots on instance subscribe to new communities from an instance but not sure if it’s still working/set up on your instance.
That’s the one, thanks Blaze.
A bit, yes. BUT I go away for a few months and then return to Lemmy with full force. When I’m active here it feels like an active space, when I’m not active, it feels a lil dead.
So the issue is more about the way you engage with the community.
Also I think Lemmy data is available. Posts per month, users etc.
Not even kind of.
I want a digest I can read for ten minutes a day, rather than spend six hours churning through a hellhole.
I have a life to live.
Okay, valid. I don’t, so that makes sense.
Add more channels (?) I mean, I preferred passive consumption of content too. But in lemmy, there needs to be more posters.
I sort by new and hide anything read so I always get the freshest stuff. I like that there is a limit so I am more likely to close the app and so some reading or learning rather then scroll forever.
Definitely. Really nice to “run out” of posts to remember to actually close my app once in awhile.
It’s not dead, it’s just not matching the level of activity of users as the numbers of users there is reported on paper.
I’d like to see Lemmy get a lot of microcommunities like Reddit but the problem is, one user can do so much.
