Honestly a lot of it is probably people getting comfortable lurking again, Lemmy only counts post and comments as active users
It’s funny how despite social media becoming very normal, the old phenomenon of most content getting generated by a small portion of power users persists.
[email protected] providing like 1/3 of all memes on Lemmy:
Tervell and Dirt_Owl.
I post
I’m just not clever enough to post
Have you seen the shitpost communities? Cleverness isn’t required, and in fact I think in those communities it’s somewhat frowned upon, 'cause c’mon, no polishing shit!
My biggest issue is I always forget my good shit posts by the time I have time to post. Getting old sucks
Sometimes I think of things in the shower and after I’m done I can’t find the post I wanted to post in :/
Commenting so I‘m active :)
I don’t know how long it counts it for, but I try to remember to comment something like once every two weeks or something
that‘s a good idea. I will copy your „way of lemmy“.
Me no lurk. Me comment.
Ok I am guilty of that. What about votes? Are they not counted as activity?
I’ll try to post atleast one comment every now and then.
I’m doing my part!
My comment to stop the lurk
Well in that case, ping!
Well, as they say: “I’m going my part”.
I try to make it a point to post questions on communities that have not kicked off yet, knowing that I most likely will not receive a response for a while.
So glad I decided to stop lurking and actually start participating right as the whole fediverse dies out, it’s not just lemmy.
I find it more comfortable to contribute to Lemmy than to other sites. There seems to be actual discussion and opportunities to learn, which can be much harder to come across on the other platforms.
And fewer comments that are clearly a chat bot.
When you come across a ‘user’ that almost exclusively defends one controversial politician/company/government and all of their comments seem to follow a script. Also the account is either brand new or 5 years old but only started posting recently.
Don’t worry! They’ve just become less obvious.
That I agree with. I don’t post often but when I do it’s always very positive and makes me want to post more . Compared to Reddit where it would have alot more negative comments or would just get removed by the mods for some stupid reason. Did you know you can no longer post on r/buildapc about asking for suggestions on building PC’s ? What’s even the point anymore?
Yeah, that’s probably the case.
Really? Oh
Time to count me back in!
Well count me in now
Let’s look at some numbers and do some napkin math:
Currently, the top post of Lemmy can usually get a little more than 2K upvotes, which puts Lemmy at about late 2010 to early 2011 reddit level of activity, which is right before reddit hits its explosive growth phase in 2012 with SOPA, Kony, and the Obama AMA. While active user count has been going down, the amount of post and comments have both been steadily going up.
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity. (unless you count 9gag or the_donald for some reason.)
It’s worth noting that Lemmy only had around 1000 active users for the first half of 2023. (Kbin had fewer than 40 active users until May 2023!) Currently Lemmy + Kbin have about 38,000 active users.
That’s the reality of where we are. A quiet rural village that turned into a boom town, and now is finding a new normal.
I never even new lemmy existed until the reddixit and I never went back because I think lemmy is a lot less toxic. Also worth pointing out that this post alone has more than 800 likes When I firsf came around top posts had 100 likes tops
for what it’s worth, it’s a small active community. Those that stay participate, like a pre-Eternal September internet. I’ve seen memes here before they made it to reddit, that’s a shift in “power” that can’t be understated in the landscape of the internets.
I think “the good ending” looks something like that.
We aren’t beholden to stockholders, so we don’t need perpetual growth. We aren’t driven by an egomaniacal CEO so we don’t need to be the biggest social network around. We just need to find our equilibrium.
There’s some of us!
Exactly. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in that chart, just a quick growth, that led to an overshoot, and now it’s stabilizing In the next months, we will probably see a more stable pattern of linear-looking growth, with occasional peaks here and there.
You should have seen Lemmy before June 2023. All posts were from the same five people. For now the community seems to be alive and healthy.
Yep, I’m jaded in my expectations knowing what Lemmy was prior to the massive expansion through June and July…
It was still a fun place, but it was a couple dozen posts a day across all servers, by a handful of people from the bigger servers.
We still have a lot of fixes to make on Lemmy, especially on the moderation, management, and content filtering side of things (though apps have been thankfully filling the gaps on some of these issues). Niche communities still need more participation to get off the ground. I’ll see again where we are in a few months from now.
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It’s very simple, most of the posts here are circle jerks (Linux, FOSS, boy howdy aren’t we better than Reddit, communism) or rage bait.
I only come here when I’m having a good day and I want to reel myself in a bit
Edit: see below to see how far Lemmy users will go to circle jerk how much better they are than Reddit
Yeah the “All” in particular is pretty bad for the average person. They’re not going to enjoy a Star Trek meme, followed by a Arch meme, a Self-hosted post, a grad-student Science meme, followed by a privacy post.
I’m also convinced Lemmy’s “hot” algorithm is broken; I can easily find posts with ONE UPVOTE on the all feed. Hot is supposed to be a balance between acceleration and total vote count, but it seems like it just only acceleration. Go look at the front page of reddit. The difference is night and day.
We need a normie.world that has an “all” feed that doesn’t contain 70% niche communities. We have c/humor, c/news, etc but they’re completely diluted by overpowered niche posts.
I have a potentially contentious opinion. Normies are what ruined Reddit and the crowd attracted by normie communities are why Reddit is even more toxic than it used to be.
We don’t need to attract normies, we just need to attract more people like us.
I don’t hate normies by any means, but I don’t want to hang out with them all day either.
Yeah I completely disagree. Imagine if a city/local gov wanted to use Lemmy in order to be self hosted (similar to EU govs switching to Mastodon) but the public just wonders why their local gov put their stuff on a weird circle jerk website that’s flooded with niche memes. “Why didn’t they use the normal thing (i.e. reddit)?”
We should be welcoming enough that, when someone wants to make a new subreddit, they make Lemmy community instead. And I don’t think thats the case right now.
That’s fair. Hadn’t considered that
“Memes that people don’t get are unwelcoming.”
If a person sees something they’ve never seen before, and turns around and flees, that’s a problem with them being sheltered and pathetic, not a problem with the new thing they haven’t encountered before.
It’s not fleeing as much as it is being so bored that that they never really find the motivation to come back.
The worst part of trying to appeal more to normies is how they hand out bans like they’re candy.
Gotta appeal to advertisers that want the normie eye balls.
I hate using the word normie, because these people truthfully haven’t done anything wrong. It’s the advertisers that follow them around like vampires that are the issue.
Under a centralized system, bans are terrible. But federation is awesome because it’s perfectly okay for an instance to be ban-happy. Just join another instance. (I’m on lemm.ee because I want to see everything)
Not only is it fine, but I think we actually need a variety of instances; no-bans, some-bans, lots-of-bans, and excessive-bans. People should have the choice.
Nothing more normie than tribalism.
Then go use Reddit if you want all the normies around. There’s a site that already exists that meets your desires. I still use it for niche content, but there has been an undeniable increase in toxicity on Reddit as the user count has increased.
Incredible.
Typical down vote and smarmy useless comments. Feels like you want to go back home.
Using normie unironicaly, you never left home.
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Also a weirdly large amount of “death to America” and whatnot.
Don’t forget rabid antisemitism and Hamas-shilling.
I found the American
Don’t forget firefox
Lol, yesterday it felt like there was at least half a dozen posts about Firefox, mostly claiming that YouTube was slowing them down. Which seemed really bad at first, till I dug into it and saw it was probably an unintended bug with ad handling.
And why were there so many posts? Who wants to see the same post more than once?
While I don’t entirely disagree, I’m a little confused by your description of the front page of lemm.ee, which we’re both on. My front page when viewing All here is mostly memes/shitposts/news/technology when set to Active sort, is yours not?
I’ve admittedly blocked a fair amount and have show NSFW/bot posts disabled, but the communities you mention aren’t affected by that.
Yeah I could’ve been more clear. I mean the All feed not Local. I went and updated my comment. And to be fully clear, I’ve got no complaints about lemm.ee. It’s exactly what I want, e.g. show me everything and I’ll decide what to block. That said, I know I’m not the norm.
Saying you blocked a fair amount is exactly what I’m talking about, so have I. A little bit of effort can really make the feed more palletable. We need to have a place where that is done by default. Maybe even an open source AI or even just an algorithm that tailors it to the user. I’m already glad Lemmy.world is much more moderate than lemm.ee, and we just need a place that goes all the way; NSFW blocked by default, several communities blocked-by-default (not defederated), and somehow prevents All from being flooded by niche memes. I love Linux and the memes (even if they get a bit repetitive) but we shouldn’t have 3 of the top 10 posts be linux memes.
I tried to get my lab mate, a PhD in computer science and Linux Mint user, to get a Lemmy. He took one look at the all page, laughed, pointed out the circle jerk stuff and asked how some junk posts even made it to the all page and then said “yeah, no thanks” and has never touched Lemmy since. He was already 4 times more likely than the average person, but even he was instantly turned off.
I gotcha. Fwiw I kind of agree, even beyond Lemmy I’ve been a little surprised some of these sites/instances haven’t done more to tailor themselves to accommodate more folks or focus on specific demographics.
That’s supposed to be one of the big perks of the federation approach, being able to create more distinct communities, but outside of a few, they largely seem to run the software as-is, maybe with some backend adjustments to help reduce the costs of operation or the like.
Yeah, and maybe that means I should try making such an instance. I don’t have the funds for something like lemmy.world, but I’ve got the technical background. So maybe that’ll turn into my winter break project
We need a normie.world
It’s called reddit and that’s why I left. Fuck the normies. They’ll import fascism.
That sounds unnecessarily combative so let me expand my argument.
There’s a book called The Authoritarians by a man called Bob Altermyer. Altermyer is now retired but he was a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. During his career he did a lot of research into authoritarians, both followers and leaders. In the book he describes for laypeople the experiments and the findings. If you want to do a deep dive into his statistical analysis you can because the whole thing is fully referenced but for people who just want an easy to read description that is also easy to understand then this is the book for you.
After reading the book redditors behaviour became a lot more easy to understand. I was less upset by what was going on but I stopped engaging because I now understood that reddit wasn’t a site for me anymore. It was a site for people that enjoyed being normal and doing normal things. And that’s ok, why shouldn’t they be catered for?
I use reddit and lemmy exclusively on desktop or laptop. So when the app business came up I didn’t regard it as my fight, however I thought that if I expected people to stand up for my interests if they are challenged I should show a bit of solidarity with them. So I didn’t visit reddit at all for the days it was blacked out. I didn’t like how spez reacted. I saw that people were crossing to the fediverse and I took a look for myself. I liked it. I posted. I wasn’t attacked for having a non-normie viewpoint. I liked that a lot.
The thing about normies is they don’t read scientific studies for fun, they don’t like long winded explanations about why the world is the way it is. They think they can see something in the street and extrapolate an entire social policy from it and there are chancers that will tell them, ‘You know what? You’re right. We don’t need experts telling you that you’re wrong, what do they know?’
So your Jordan Petersons and your Nigel Farages and Alex whatever his nameis, these people and reddit’s normie audience are made for each other. I’ll even go as far as to say this extends to the people that think the Democrats or the Labour Party are going to fix their problems, Team Liberal aren’t doing themselves any favours but my point is that if your goal is a massive website that caters to the largest part of the reddit audience you’re going to end up swimming in cryptofascist and sometimes outright fascist content. Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt.
Interesting, I think I’ll take a look. You sorta skipper over what ‘normie’ or reddit behaviour was mentioned in his book specifically. Was it the lack of reading scientific articles you mentioned in another paragraph, that alone can’t be it right?
Listen, just go and read the thing; it will be time better spent than listening to me precis it from memory. but if you do read it a feel like it hasn’t given you an insight into what drives a whole host of behaviour that one sees on social media or that I’ve misunderstood the book then do come back to me and I will refresh my memory of the book to have that discussion with you.
Yeah, that’s fair enough, gotta do my own homework some of the time.
That’s not lemmy, that’s all social media (albite divisive topics are a bit different among different communities).
This is a hot take, but I think humanity is slowly turning it’s back on social media because of it’s toxic nature. You can only open a browser and get your nuts kicked so many times before you finally decide you don’t like getting your nuts kicked.
humanity is slowly turning it’s back on social media
Are you living in a parallel universe or something? Are we talking for the same humanity that is 24/7 on Instagram and on tiktok?
I really wish you’re right but I’m afraid that the minorities you may know who just abandoned Facebook are not representing humanity
Hmm, yeah I definitely see how I am biased there. I’ve been on social media since its inception, so my opinion is likely influenced mostly by people who have experienced social media for ~2 decades and are sick of it now.
Would be nice if that’s the direction being taken.
The echo chamber is as bad as reddit but less diverse and smaller. Sometimes it’s really painful.
Isn’t Lemmy suposed to be FOSS? I thought that was the main reason why people left Reddit for Lemmy was that and API changes. Wouldn´t other FOSS be of interestt too? Just a thought.
Reddit’s great strength was that it was big enough that niche communities could attract enough users to have interesting conversations and a steady flow of content, and if you are a Reddit refugee looking for those sorts of communities you aren’t likely to find them on Lemmy. I’ve more or less made my peace with that, but if you’re not the kind to stand on principle, a falling user count is bad news for the hope that the Fediverse might snowball into the sort of place that can support discussions about your passions and hobbies even if they’re not the sort of thing that is popular with a specific set of tech-savvy anti-capitalist leftwing activists (and I say this with love as a fellow tech-savvy leftie… but y’all got one-track minds and it shows in what communities live and die around here).
That’s fine, there’s intelligent conversation here, it feels like reddit did ten years ago.
Yeah even a pretty unpopular car brand (Infiniti) has a pretty active sub due to the install base. I think I’m the only person here who has posted about it at all on lemmy.
I wish spez hadn’t ruined Reddit.
Hey don’t forget about the other half of the posts, which are in a language you don’t understand. Seriously, my block list is long because language settings here mean nothing, and while I’m sure that’s quality content, uh, I can’t understand it.
Fuck yes.
Good days are good!
Thats why i like this place. Arguing and discussion online is terrible and its more suited to do with friends you trust.
People had multiple accounts because servers were unstable. Now that stability has increased we’re just abandoning the alts.
Absolutely the case for me, I had like 5-6 alts, now I use maybe two.
Can confirm.
Yep, can confirm. Over the last couple of week I closed 20.000 alts.
the average lemmy user has 3 alts factoid is just statistical error. the average lemmy user has 0 alts. alts georg, who lives on linux.community apparently and has 20,000 alts, is a statistical outlier adn should not be counted
Yeah, “monthly active users” does not necessarily mean “unique monthly active users”.
I would much rather see activity statistics like posts+comments or something like that. As long as those are looking good, then new unique users will continue to join gradually.
We need more idiots who can comment “this” on everything
I completely disagree. What this place needs is a bunch of bot accounts that endlessly spam the top comments from when whatever’s posted was on the front page last week.
Or the week before that I guess…
This!
Gonna build spezify_bot which will do that, copy over comments and comment “this” and “finally someone said it!” below the top comments. Maybe even some “I came here to say this, too!” at some points?
This
i second this
I third this
I turd
I shidded and farded.
That?
This
This
This
psst
this
I’m sure it won’t just be anot- why, you little scamp!
this.
dis
this
Thizz
And my axe!
this
+1
I, too, choose this guy’s wife.
lemmy still isnt nearly as good as reddit was by a long shot. niche communities suck, porn sucks, c/all content isnt bad but if you scroll once youll just repeat everything on refresh.
but god damn the reddit app is terrible now and the content sucks there now too it literally feels like its trying to be a tik tok clone.
I mostly lurk so this is me being proactive!
I exclusively surf “top 6 hours” and I’ve actually noticed an uptick in niche community content, lately. Different kind of growth, maybe a sort of settling into itself, finally.
I sort by New. Bring it all on.
I subscribed to the communities I care the most about and sort by subscribed and new. That said, across 20 communities it’s probably something like 10-15 new posts per day so after I get through those and interact it’s off to all.
But I do try to engage in the communities I want to see grow.
New gets… Weird
If everyone is browsing by top-6-hour I think we need to rethink the sorting of things.
Oh yeah, the sort here kind of sucks. Also just using the site, you lose your place/sort if you click into a link or the comments. Like, if I’m on page 2 of Top 6 Hours, click a link, and then click back into the scroll… pretty sure I just see the first page of Active again until I either refresh or change pages.
That could definitely be improved as well.
I don’t think Voyager has this problem. Highly, highly recommend, both on desktop and mobile. The UI is slick enough that it’s kept me here. All I do is laugh at shit memes but it’s perfect
That’s a bug they’re fixing in the next patch I think
Thank God I thought it was just me!
Are you using any app, or just through a browser? On a mobile browser, I find the back button to take me to the previous page of posts (so if I clicked into a comment thread on page 3, hitting the back button takes me to page 2). It’s definitely odd.
Bro, I noticed the same, it has been a long time since I played around with the sort types, I basically settled with Active and hid all seen stuff, now I feel I get different content with other kinds of sorts.
The quality here is far better with the exception of maybe some user generated text stories. Posts don’t just get lost in a sea of posts. The users here may not be as many, but it appears to have more consistent engagement and far less people PM’ing me offering me Amazon gift cards for feet pics.
This really is a nice place. Even most engaged posts hardly get over 50 comments usually, but 48 of those comments are on topic, sane and unique even on a fandom community. Arguments are heated but mostly contribute at least some point of view rather than being rabid spoutings that either get upvoted (or awarded) to skies above or downvoted to hell unanimously.
We have way fewer posts, even fewer do in niche communities. However, the posts on the bigger communities are quite enough to pass the time. What we actually need is more people interacting with the seemingly dead niche communities of their fandoms and interests.
Big communities keep crossposting a lot of daily news or magazine-worth happenings, which kinda gets tiring after seeing the same post for the 5th time. Hiding crossposts per user settings would be nice to prevent the feeling of only same posts being posted for interested non-fediverse users.
Agreed. I do miss my niche subreddits like druggardening, centuryhomes, unclebens, and diyprint.
3d printing is one of the things that’s pretty popular on Lemmy, actually.
If you missed them maybe you can persuade those wikifeet contributors to join your lemmy instance.
NO. NO FEET PICS. BAD.
I swear that was the best part of reddit… When I was alone there was always someone to offer me gift cards for pics >.<
What about some feet pics for some blockbuster gift cards? It’s gonna make a comeback I’m sure
Less content, that is spread across multiple instances that can have duplicate communities.
You just can’t keep doomscrolling here, the “active” search repeats all the time and the “best of the day” is like two pages.
And then there’s specific communities that just… Stayed on Reddit.
I prefer social media not based on addiction. Lemmy has been much better for my lifestyle, than my reddit addiction.
Coulda fooled me, the content quality has continued to climb, and that’s all that matters. Look at this post, it’s an original meme only relevant to this community, and it’s blowing up.
I get a bit annoyed with a hit meme being reposted 5+ times across instances, it clogs the main feed with repetition and only artificially increases the post numbers while making the whole experience less good. I did enjoy the comment-stacking meme yesterday where everyone added their own take. There are a few news-posting bots that post the exact same articles and cause the clogging repetitive main feed that makes the app far less interesting as well. It gets a bit depressing seeing the same inflammatory headlines 3-4 times, ie “35 blind fingerless coal-mining orphans bombed in Gaza strip hospital, why isn’t Joe Biden doing anything?” While reporting is important, the repetition of some themes seems astroturf-y. I also get really annoyed with the bots posting NSFW/ extremely explicit sex content/ads on main feeds. I have been here less because of these things.
We should be more active to keep this ship afloat. Don’t be stingy with the comments.
Edit: spelling
