It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.

Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren’t attracted enough to become regular visitors.

Curious to see at which number we’ll stabilize.

Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)

Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

168 points

Maybe it’s because the content here just isn’t as vast. I’m nkt going back to reddit for awhile, but there’s so little to see on lemmy to me. Despite numerous subscriptions, I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same. Sometimes this place feels like a hive-mind. Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale

permalink
report
reply
125 points

I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same.

That’s funny because the meme subs still far outpace posting from politics subs for me, and I mostly see memes.

In fact, a few weeks ago, there were lots of complaints in meme comments of how the only thing they saw on the site was memes.

permalink
report
parent
reply
22 points

Memes may be thriving but niche interest communities can’t even get off the ground.

permalink
report
parent
reply
36 points
*

So just like reddit 14 years ago when I first left Digg for greener pastures. When I joined, it was years before my local city subreddit sprang to life, and for years, it had around 1000 active accounts and only now has over 10k accounts.

Man, if the people on reddit back in the day had sat around complaining about lack of content like this, the site would have died. Instead they started making fucking content.

It takes time for communities to grow, and it feels like a lot of the folks who left reddit only ever knew reddit as a ready-made-community filled with thousands of people already. As in, they were latecomers and missed all the slow growth.

permalink
report
parent
reply
13 points

Maybe I need to be on ml then. I feel like world is just full of the same.

permalink
report
parent
reply
22 points
*

I quite like beehaw and their communities, and yeah, you’re missing out on those if you’re on world, from what I understand. (Fairly sure they’re still defederated.)

I personally like lemmy.ml, but I know it’s not for everyone, and the admins would prefer to keep it a smaller instance, I think. I’m only here because there weren’t as many federated servers three years ago when I made an account.

You also might check out !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone, they flood my feed with good memes.

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points
*

Kbin is a nice alternative. Content cycles out of Hot a lot faster on here.

You also get microblogging support on here, so you have access to the Mastodon side of the fediverse as well without having to copy and paste links.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

Try out Kbin, as well. Personally I have none of the usual Lemmy complaints

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

Even the memes are pretty stale, definitely not dank. Many of these memes are reposts of stuff I saw years ago on Reddit.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Political memes are so stale these days.

permalink
report
parent
reply
40 points

I see very few memes and far too much political content

Where are you even looking? My timeline is flooded with memes all the damn time. They’re practically drowning out any posts of value at this point.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

You should block the meme communities if you dislike it, keep the communities with contributions you like.

permalink
report
parent
reply
15 points
*

Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale

Been saying this for months. No one seems to understand what made reddit grow, and it is ironically very much like /r/place when you get down to it:

Reddit was a singular canvas that all users worked on together. Posts, comments, and voting shaped the site as a whole. The front page of Reddit was the result of it’s userbase, and it’s userbase was diverse. Because Reddit forced all users, of all backgrounds and ideologies, to exist together in the same space, and work on the same canvas, it created something living and varied.

You may not have ever gotten along with people from a certain subreddit in th comments, but I promise, the two of you worked together at one point to get a post to the front page or a comment to the top, and you didn’t even know it. Thos little moments where diametrically opposed people shared a liking of something by how they voted. On the surface, everyone bickered. Under the hood, they were all unknowingly agreeing and cooperating all the time, and that was what powered reddit’s engine: it’s diverse userbase’s activity.

That’s why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

That’s why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.

The phrasing here kinda implies this is a bad thing and everyone should be focused on 🚀 constant growth 🚀.

Tildes in particular has an extreme focus on quality over quantity and has some really interesting ideas on moderation (that haven’t been implemented due to lack of time on Deimos’ part). The site is still considered an alpha after all this time.

permalink
report
parent
reply
12 points

I think the default activity sort is part of the problem. Sorting by activity means everyone is just looking at and engaging with the same topics for 24 hours or so. There needs to be some “hot” category or something so that new stuff gets churned through a bit more regularly. New is too new, top is even more stale, activity causes things with high activity to stay high. It makes for very samey content.

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

Hot exists, doesn’t it?

permalink
report
parent
reply
14 points

In my experience, Active and Hot have been opposite extremes of freshness. Active shows posts that are more than a day old, and Hot shows posts that have no comments and are just a couple of minutes old.

Not to say it’s all bad. Your post was just a couple of scrolls down on my feed.

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

Have they finally fixed this to not show old posts out of nowhere in the “Hot” feed? I’ve been avoiding this sorting because of that and hadn’t read anything about it being corrected… yet.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points
*

I see very few memes and far too much political content.

This is what is turning me off from lemmy, worst of it I see a lot of shitty political memes, it wasn’t this bad at the beginning of the reddit exodus.

And then there isn’t seem to be a neutral instance, I was in world and then they banned the piracy community, I moved to lemm.ee and all I see is stupid hexbear posts, I appreciate that they don’t defederate willy nilly but Lemmy urgently needs the block instance feature from user level.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

In the meantime there are some apps that “block” instances. Connect has it, but it doesn’t fully block the instance, more like it shows up in the feed with a content warning that the message is from a blocked instance and you can choose to view it if you want. I also do think lemm.ee will defederate from hexbear pretty soon. The admin has had personally horrendous experiences with their users and that meta thread about it was a dumpster fire of hexbear users making unrelated political comments and blocking the actual instance users from having a discussion. It got locked at almost 2000 comments so I’m sure he’s still digging through that toxic waste to make his decision.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points
*

Noted! Good feedback.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Every time I peek into reddit, it’s just a dumpster fire of toxic comments screaming at each other with strawman arguments and reeing that videos are fake. It’s exhausting.

permalink
report
parent
reply
127 points

The cope is strong. Let’s not pretend fewer active users is a good thing. It just means people are unhappy and are leaving.

permalink
report
reply
47 points

If the stats are accurate then this is not necessarily due to people being unhappy and leaving as both comments and posts are still stable - indicating that the lower active count are lurkers, duplicates or otherwise non engaging accounts.

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

That said, you can come up with statistics to prove anything! Forfty percent of all people know that.

permalink
report
parent
reply
12 points
*

duplicates or otherwise non engaging accounts.

Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if duplicate accounts are a part of this but that seems like it would be a natural part of growing pains for lemmy. The way the fediverse is built would suggest that people who are serious about long-term participation may bounce around a bit. For example, I joined in June but in that time I still managed to test out two other instances before settling on a third that seemed to strike the ideal balance between admin policies and reliable uptime to suit my needs.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Good point!

permalink
report
parent
reply
39 points

Yup if I hadn’t blocked several communities from appearing constantly in my feed, I would leave too.

permalink
report
parent
reply
23 points

Right. Everything negative about Lemmy is being turned into a positive for some reason. Truth is this is still a difficult concept for a lot of people to get on board with and the overall reliability of instances leaves much to be desired. All we need to do is continue to contribute and see what takes off.

permalink
report
parent
reply

But just remember: Some of those people that are not staying are the types of people you wouldn’t want to interact with anyway. If the roughly 10k people who quit were Nazis (for example), it’s a good thing.

permalink
report
parent
reply
19 points

But they obviously aren’t all Nazis

permalink
report
parent
reply
12 points

Hmm… I think we need to conduct some exit interviews to gather data before we start making any assumptions.

“Hello, you have selected ‘Delete Account’ is this because you are a Nazi?”

Y/N (circle one)

“You have selected ‘no’ and yet you still wish to delete your account? Why are you lying about not being a Nazi then?”

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

Exploding heads is literally shutting down. So he may have a point.

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

Yeah, I tend to think that most of the people who left wouldn’t be valuable members of the community anyway. Maybe they’re too impatient to deal with software that isn’t fully mature, maybe they can’t deal with the fact that most Lemmy instances are somewhere between leftish and outright communism, or maybe the somewhat chaotic nature of the fediverse turns them off. Whatever. I hope they find something that suits them.

I also hope, for their own sake, that the “something” doesn’t involve going back to reddit.

permalink
report
parent
reply
13 points

As I said in a comment below, I would like this to be a signal for interest groups to choose one of the dozens communities they have, stick to one and make it grow.

Looking at gaming or books, always seems detrimental to have the . world, .ml, .sh.itjust.works and so on with the same content posted everywhere.

permalink
report
parent
reply
-1 points

Almost like there should be one central hub… that’s what Reddit did right

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

Having android related communities be on one, specific instance has done wonders for the community imho

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

There doesn’t need to be one central hub, more like a few core communities

permalink
report
parent
reply
106 points

There is no infinite doomscroll on Lemmy and that’s what I used to do on Reddit. Now, I just read the top headlines and touch grass :)

permalink
report
reply
37 points

The reason I’m still here instead of there is that I absolutely can’t use their official app. I just can’t. It’s so awful. Lemmy isn’t perfect but at least it isn’t that. So I do spend less time doom scrolling and that’s probably good for me.

permalink
report
parent
reply
0 points

@lagomorphlecture @Oppawaifu what is the best lemmy client you think? or overall [[fediverse]] client?

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

Client as in app? I go back and forth between Connect and Voyager. They both have some benefits and drawbacks but overall I really just want something super simple and plain. I used RIF for so long and it was just to the point and functional. I never had a single issue with it. The lemmy apps will improve though. They’ve been developed fastly and furiously (haha) but it usually takes a little more time to put something together that’s really good.

permalink
report
parent
reply
14 points

Same here, I actually have a much healthier relationship with social media when on Lemmy vs Reddit. That might change as Lemmy grows in user content but for now I’ll enjoy the quieter experience

permalink
report
parent
reply
13 points

There is a middle ground between “infinite doomscrolling” and just barren. I miss a lot of communities I used to browse on Reddit and they aren’t taking roots here. Losing more people isn’t a good sign.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

Yep, I’m finding about half of my Reddit usage satisfied. I’ve got all the technical talk I want, but no gaming or writing communities.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

What are those communities you miss?

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

A variety of fandom and franchise-based communities, some artistic communities, some more specific sub-communities like Patient Gamers which exists but it’s pretty slow.

permalink
report
parent
reply
9 points

That will change soon enough.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points
*

Precisely. And maybe bring the grass to Lemmy a little bit

E: see my posts

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

I agree, I finish up my daily feed (at the moment I am subscribed to 628 communities).

permalink
report
parent
reply
102 points

lemmy.world being down half the time probably made a lot of people think that this platform is trash and left.

permalink
report
reply
32 points

The number of times Lemmy.world was down made it unusable for me to use. Switched to Lemdro.id and it’s so much better now.

permalink
report
parent
reply
24 points

I am on Lemm.ee and haven’t had a single issue

permalink
report
parent
reply
13 points

lemmy.ml was also down recently for half a day or so. But lemmy.ml was never knwon for being reliable, even it it works fine since some time now.

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

Tbh it did affect me, I had just joined and it was out often, & it seemed like a hassle (being new) to find and join new instances or w/e especially when I had to create a new account for every one. Didn’t necessarily think it was trash just buggy and unreliable especially for that to be happening during such a big migration (after Reddit changed the api’s)

Idk it’s nice here but that did reduce my usage. Something that I’m new on being down for a day or two means I’m less likely to use it the next day and incorporate it into my daily routine

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points
*

You probably figured it out by now, but you don’t need to create a new account for every instance. You can just go to www.yourinstance.com/c/community@otherinstance.com and comment or subscribe there.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points
*

I think a good third of what I have typed or posted so far on Lemmy has never succeeded as submitting them would cause it to stop responding and never compete. Refreshing will bring the page back up and allow me comment, but it’ll not work most the time.

Their downtime has been pretty severe… growing pains, I get it, but it’s not just that.

After several attempts at retyping it all, then trying to copy and paste to try to post again just got to me a bit. It’s taking a lot out of me as I’m personally struggling in life to try to communicate with people, with it being flakey all the time, it’s feels like when you have to repeat yourself, then just give up.

It’s a shame because I wanted to post in me communities, but I couldn’t. I keep seeing “View reply” on my comments, but they frequently never load or just vanish. I do wonder if they’re broken/incomplete replies.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points
*

you should have left lemmy.world a month ago. those issues dont happen elsewhere

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

You are definitely right that it’s not that common an occurrence on the other instances. But yes, I should have clarified these issues are with lemmy.world.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

You should probably move instance.

https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim can be useful

permalink
report
parent
reply
96 points

And at the beginning everyone was worried about “Eternal September”. It’s only been two months.

People will come in waves, instances and communities will grow and die, just like how it was on reddit, we’ll probably start seeing meme/politics free or even more specialized instances soon. But all of this is going to take time.

The turning point will be when companies/websites start spinning up their own Lemmy instances as their official one to replace their forums, which I think will happen.

So, being on Lemmy is a long term investment for me.

permalink
report
reply
28 points

Same for me, good to still see you around

permalink
report
parent
reply
25 points

Hopefully this works out, gotta get that first mover advantage in, then Lemmy’s only real celebrity will be recognized as the marketing genius that she is. :)

I like Lemmy better when it’s when it’s nicer and quieter a month ago honestly.

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

Are you the actual Margot Robbie? Seen your profile before, but just assumed it was someone who liked them and was capitalizing on the movie.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

Ha ha :)

Same feeling here, browsing All now is cumbersome due to the low quality of the average content dropping

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

Yeah, lemmy seems like a great alternative to discourse.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

The turning point will be when companies/websites start spinning up their own Lemmy instances as their official one to replace their forums, which I think will happen.

I don’t know if this is going to happen, and to be honest I hope it doesn’t. Lemmy is not designed to be a forum and shouldn’t try to be used as a replacement for one.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

How is Lemmy not a forum?

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Lemmy is a link aggregator. Yes it can serve a lot of (if not all) the functions of a forum but it’s not designed to be a drop-in replacement for something like Discuss or phpBB. It’s different enough that I feel like calling it a forum is not the right term.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Fediverse

!fediverse@lemmy.ml

Create post

A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”.

Getting started on Fediverse;

Community stats

  • 436

    Monthly active users

  • 821

    Posts

  • 12K

    Comments