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
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I send my friends memes. They ask “Muad’dib, where do you get these great memes?” I say I get my great memes from Lemmy. They instantly lose interest, because Lemmy is full of tankies and kinphobes
This is the central reason I choose not to engage with most posts. It’s a toss up whether I’m talking to a rational human being or I happened to walk into the side of the antinatalist hyper accelerationist ML willing to die to defend the most obscure take about consent or something.
I would love a more healthy, less terminally online discourse on Lemmy.
Here is my super unpopular take: ultimately you / some / we have misunderstood “quality over quantity”.
It doesn’t mean “we don’t want more users”, it means that the best way to attract more users and growth of the platform is to focus on being the best fediverse we can be. Actively trying to attract more users is a foot gun - even in the unlikely event you’re successful, you reduce the quality of the experience for everyone.
Focusing instead on the health, vibrance, management, and activity of the platform is the best way to attract more users.
Perhaps another way of saying the same thing: the most fertile market segment are those users who used to be active monthly. They were here trying to participate at some point but lost interest. Why? Pretty solid guess is that they were still logging in to reddit for the special / niche interest subs, and after a few months got sick of checking lemmy.
IMO, dead special interest communities are the cancer consuming the fediverse. Nothing wrong with a small active community, but a small community with a half dozen posts from 3 years ago is a big sign saying “go back to reddit, this place is dead”.
How about bridging over to bluesky? If they could follow and comment threads, the userbase explodes 10-fold (compared to the current exposure to mastodon).
See this thread: https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/372
I think you’re right
Unfortunately, most people are too unintelligent and lazy to learn about the reasons to support reddit-alternatives, and move to them.
Part of the issue (I feel a large part ) is that the learning curve is too steep to get on Lemmy
Now I’m not saying it’s hard at all; but it’s significantly higher than simply “go to a main page and create a user name and password”. Lemmy needs a sign up page that just random signs you up to an active instance (per the instances permission) and automatically subscribes you to the 50 most active instances to just get you started up.
Making a getting started page that’s as idiot proof as any .com would probably go a long ways into upping our numbers here.
Random instances are problematic. As others have said you might end up on one of the weird instances. More likely though… you just end up on a dead instance, take one look at the “local” feed and think that’s all the content.
The random one can send you to places like hexbear.net (I’ve tried the randomizer, and I’m not joking it actually truly did pick that very instance for me). Have you ever visited that place? It’s like being sent to a leftist MAGA rally. If I was sent there, I’d nope out and never return to the Threadiverse again.
Another place the randomizer can send you is lemmy.ml. Have you seen all the posts calling for outright murder of people living in the Western world? Well, let’s just say that a mainstream non-technical normie user who is currently living in a Western world is not likely at all to feel terribly welcomed there.
Hexbear is nothing like a leftist MAGA rally. It’s more like a MAGA rally.
I’ll commit to commenting more. I prefer to lurk, but the fediverse needs me 🤣
As someone who’s never made a post…
Thanks, WhirlpoolBrewer.
I have been noticing a drop in post/comments diversity and quantity. The diminishing users is something noticeable and sad.
We’re in times where we need to seek alternatives to big tech more than ever, and yet, people don’t seem to care :(
it’s not just not caring. lemmy is currently not a viable alternative for e.g. reddit (there are no active conmunities for any of mine hobbies and posting to any of those that are here doesn’t make sense - there is nobody out here who could respond to a specific question about analog photography or something similar). fediverse as a whole will never reach the momentum of old centralized social media - by design. it turns out that having many small servers with different moderation policies is great for resilience but sucks for bringing people together. 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… and so i am missing large swats of content from those.
and here I thought it was because I’ve blocked close to 300 users.
We have to earn it if we want it. Oftentimes someone will mention some event or trend or something that happened and being only on the Threadiverse, not also Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or X or Bluesky or even Reddit I have no idea what they are talking about - it’s not good to be too isolated.
So… bring on the downvoting I suppose, because I started checking some of those places, including Reddit. Not like daily but not never either. That’s where the content is, so where else can I go to get at that?
It is so easy to say that “something should happen”. It’s much harder to MAKE that thing actually happen.
What is that spike in activity in December, I wonder? I see a similar increase in December of 2024 as well, although there it remained sustained instead of dropping.
I hate that it’s true but the people on the Threadiverse are toxic as fuck. I have almost universally always regretted making posts here, so I primarily stick to comments.
This in turn is due to the fact that the moderation tools suck ass - I hope PieFed will offer some strong hope for that, but as it is only a small percentage of the Threadiverse uses it.
PieFed also offers some hopes in other ways too - e.g. highly contentious users (who let’s say receive 10x more downvotes than upvotes) have labels attached to their username. It doesn’t block any content, but it helps new users from other platforms realize what they are getting into, if e.g. they engage with a known sea-lion.
And PieFed helps in so many other ways besides - e.g. a recent addition will automatically convert URLs pointing to other instances into one that will work on your home instance, where you are currently logged in and so can vote, reply, bookmark, or whatever. Lemmy will probably never add all the various features that PieFed even already offers - like post and user flairs, polls, combining comments across all cross-posts, and things like that that even Reddit does not offer. I don’t mean to be annoying about all this but I said it to help illustrate: look at all that PieFed offers, and yet how many people remain on Lemmy? Now you understand a tiny bit better why someone remains on Reddit.
Plus Reddit is where the content is, and the user base too, so why would content creators want to post their stuff here, only to get trolled in the comment section? The Left always eats its own - and it rejects even more all the centrists and even ring-wingers, i.e. mainstream non-technical normie users i.e. the vast majority of content creators, who don’t like to visit a Nazi bar (even a leftist tankie flavored one) and be told how they didn’t vote properly or hard enough.
You said it yourself: you were one of those very people who did not want others to come. What could you possibly have said to your past self to have changed your mind earlier?
Is this like all Lemmy everywhere or just a selection of large instances? Does it account for people that host their own instances and come into the larger spaces to interact? I feel like there’s context missing before jumping to conclusions.
It will grab most of it. Some instances are not on there though. I believe Lemmynsfw.com removed themselves a month or so ago.
The source data shows that while active users are down, the number of posts and comments are near all-time highs. While you need new users to help counteract churn, I think the higher post/comments count points to what I think a lot of people feel here: that quality seems to keep getting better and better.
Regarding how to bring more people in, I personally like how different lemmy servers have slightly different characteristics but each seems to appeal to larger groups. I see a future where there’s probably a small-ish number of large servers that cover broad groups of people.
It’s the same 10 people repeating the same shit-tier political takes that make /pol/ users look like intellectuals.
That’s NOT a good thing.
For me I had so much issue actually making an account, I almost gave up. I think it is cool how Lemmy looks, very simple and very direct, but it does need a bit of more user experience.
Have you tried the PieFed sign-up wizard? It’s like night vs. day…
Please link
A) “Lemmy” is an embarrassingly bad name.
B) Most of the content I see on here seems to be shitposts. Not saying it all is, but the immediate impression for new users is terrible.
C) Lemmy’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. Moderation is near non-existent and the comment section of posts always devolves into shit.
C) Moderation varies wildly based on the instance, and the community. I wouldn’t say Lemmy comment sections are any worse than Reddits though.
Most people on Reddit avoid the larger subs like the plague though - but then when they come here, they don’t know what to avoid or even to pay attention to, e.g. is !Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net a lively and fun, exciting place, or a toxic cesspit hellhole?
And at least that one is honest about what it is, whereas lemmy.ml markets itself as a community dedicated to discussing FOSS! (Which, among other things, yes is one of the variety of things discussed there, although somehow that description seems to be missing a fair bit of information that would have REALLY helped out a ton in educating people what communities to participate in).
If we defederate Hexbear and ml, that will go some of the way to easing those bad experiences for new users
ml is run by the devs of Lemmy so unfortunately that’s not realistic, you could be missing on a ton of information if you want to subscribe to Lemmy development or information related communities
The devs can make accounts on a less controversial instance if they want their news to be heard by the rest of us
they’re definitely better than reddit’s in my experience
I would place them at a quality on par with reddit at the latest five years ago
you still get people who insist on not understanding what words mean, but less frequently
