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
…I am drifting away from Lemmy myself.
Political communities are echo chambers like Reddit, in a different color. Discussing tech or helping others is better, but still feels like talking in circles.
Wholesome subs like /c/SuperBowl are sublime, but I mostly lurk there.
Information hygiene is awful. Big subs upvote tabloids and Tweets to the sky, as long as they align with their beliefs. I just saw a discussion on a not-obviously AI generated photo with the community sentiment of “misinformation? Who cares. It’s a pro-lefty meme, so spread it.”
Anyway, all this scrolling and impulse commenting eats time. I get the same feeling of shouting into a black hole that I get on corporate social media.
Much of this is my fault, though.
I have several niches I intend to make original posts for, but never do.
It’s somewhere in the giant pile of my IRL executive dysfunction :’(
This is it. People are leaving because there are problems and not enough resources to fix them. Because that’s dEcEnTtAlZaTioN.
Yeah. We have monkey brains, and overcoming intertia is hard.
I think the site could be better structured to address this, specifically by organizing communities into a “taxonomy,” so posts from niche interest automatically filter up into bigger subs. Thus, participation would feel easier/more enaging, and folks would have more focused and active niches to participate in.
Making that suggestion on the Lemmy/Piefed repos is on my messy todo list.
While (I think) I totally understand what you are saying here…
… Yeah I’m honestly fine with lemmy just being more or less a tiny cluster of neo forums.
I like the cozy.
At the same time… from I guess a less selfish perspective… yeah, this is the exact time an alternative to Reddit and other corpo social media needs to be popularized.
But, somewhat alleviating myself from that… I don’t really know anybody that I could ‘word of mouth’ spread lemmy to, that I haven’t already.
And I’m too crippled to put stickers on really anything outside my own apartment, lol.
Every person that keeps saying it’s good that there is no one here sounds like scrooge in my head going,
“Good, all to decrease the surplus population”I agree! There is not enough people here
I’m feeling very burnt out. Lemmy is kinda an endless stream of political doom and gloom. For context, I’m in the US and already stressed out by our political situation. But I don’t come here to see more doom and gloom. It’s getting to the point where I think I need to get off for my mental health.
Then there are all the people who if you don’t agree exactly with their opinion they downvote you to hell. You have left leaning politics but not my flavor of left? Downvote! You hate enshitification and big tech privacy practices, but you use a single piece of software that isn’t FOSS? Downvote!
It’s so exhausting. I absolutely hate Reddit but I miss going on there and just laughing at how someone’s TV is too high. I miss laughing at how some restaurant serves food of shovels instead of plates.
And that’s not even getting into the lack of content. That part I understand requires users like myself to be as active as possible. But it’s hard being active when I feel so burnt out from the other stuff here.
Tbh, idk if these issues are specific to Lemmy or just the internet as a whole. I can only speak to the slice of the internet I find myself in. But I just wanna see people that are excited about things: photography, 3d printing, weird keyboards, etc. And that exists here, but it’s drowned out by all the doom and gloom.
Agreed lemme is probably one of the most negative places on the Internet. I joined because I was hoping this place would grow to be a proper alternative for Reddit, with fun niche content, and its own culture of obscure inside jokes. Instead even after several years it still feels like we are the angry trolls living under reddit’s shadow.
One of the biggest things I’ve found that helped me avoid the politics was to leave lemme.world and fill my personal feed up with subscriptions to content that fits my interest. Politics has ways of working its way into content none the less, but at least I’ve got a fighting chance.
I really do believe lemme is going to struggle to find people who want to stick around unless it starts to embrace fun light hearted content. I’m not sure how we’d do that as a platform, but I do believe that’s one of the big reasons people will struggle to adopt this corner of the Internet as their own.
Join !cool_rocks@lemmy.today if you’re sick of doom. It’s just cool rocks and discussions about rocks.
Indeed, I believe that the Fediverse is a paradise island where one can escape the noise created mainly by AI bots on centralised, proprietary social networks, but many users get a dopamine rush from eliciting an emotional response on the network, and that rush is provided by Reddit’s algorithms.
I really like that you get to see both downvotes and upvotes, but maybe that reinforces your experience of being downvoted often?
I just wanna see people that are excited about things: photography, 3d printing, weird keyboards, etc. And that exists here, but it’s drowned out by all the doom and gloom.
Yeah this is a general problem, even if you’d just want the ”doom and gloom” – no matter what thing you want to sort out or get more of - you’re left with a ghost town. It’s everything or nothing and the things generating the most discussion are for sure the catastrophic stuff happening.
I’ve always been more of a lurker/commenter than a poster, but posters are what Lemmy needs if we want more users to come. People need to want to come to Lemmy for content.
In my experience, the best poster on the platform is the person making the comics on /c/unix_surrealism, in that sometimes I find myself wanting to check the comm to see if there is anything new.
And this will be disagreed with heavily, but the second best posters are the memers at Hexbear. I just think they make the funniest leftist memes (so political content, sorry people who are tired of politics), and they’re the only instance that actually has a site culture, with their own in-jokes and history/lore.
When Reddit was young, that was a big part of it: Posts that went viral among the community and became in-jokes/lore. Comment chains (as much as I grew to hate them). And original ideas for content (AMA, TIL, AITA, etc.). There was a kind of culture to the site (that’s mostly been diluted now).
That said. I like Lemmy perfectly fine at the size it is, even if it doesn’t fully replace Reddit. Though it’s concerning to see it declining.
Goes to ‘All --> New,’ here we go again…
Come on everyone, let’s do our part. The only way to get less doom and gloom on the main page is to engage with the stuff you want early. Like it was mentioned by others, that primarily means comments not just upvotes
Yeah, same here. Let’s try to post more fun content on here
Hot take: the biggest issue is actually ever entering a community and seeing zero comments. Most reddit addiction stems from wanting to read comments, so I think people should add a comment to something if they’re upvoting and they see that the thread has zero comments.
Nothing eliminates enthusiasm like seeing 0 comments on every post in a community, especially if that community is driven by bots.
Yeah, same here honestly. Well said, lemmy needs more people here
Yep. Engagement drives more engagement.
I think this is it. Posting is reinforced by getting feedback on posts, both up votes and comments
Communities driven by bots should die
I’m doing my part. I can’t stop making communities and having debates.
This site is seemingly for hardcore left-leaning people. Center and right wing are censored, banned, without violating rules, just like reddit mods. So it’s no wonder people are leaving.
Yes that is the reason.
Not because of the many other reasons like we don’t have an algorithm set to be as addicting as possible, dark patterns, rage bait, millions of dollars in marketing and astro-turfing, so many other things that go into your average popular social media network - there is a reason facebook has so many employees.
It’s because right wingers get their fee fees hurt when people don’t abide their rhetoric.
Mods or instance owners? This place was never designed to be a free speech zone.
Tell your musician friends to find me here:
https://lemmy.world/c/IndepthIndie
Actually, you know what? I’ll give a free guitar lesson to the first 10 people to make a post in that group.
Aww man i would really like that guitar lessons! But i don’t have enough knowledge/context to post in that community (yet) :P
This is quite concerning indeed.
We should start by being better at retaining what we already have.
Every person is valuable now.
I’m worried that mods here are starting to abuse their power as have happened on Reddit and have seen some instances of it. A lot of people fled Reddit because of it and will not stick around for the same bullshit here.
So making mechanisms to prevent this kind of behavior must be a priority.
Much progress has already been made.
In Lemmy, the federated nature offers freedom not so much to the end user but to instance admins who can pack up and move or even make changes to the codebase rather than simply blindly deploy each new version.
PieFed takes this several additional notches forward by allowing democratization of moderation, e.g. rather than a community making it a rule to allow “no USA politics”, instead users can turn on their own keyword filters, or a much gentler rule of “USA politics must use the USA community flair”, thereby allowing the decision to remain in the hands of the end-users rather than one mod team ruling them all.
Then don’t ever say anything that someone might disagree with or…
I have seen people banned with no reason given, just left to wonder what happened…
Yeah, and at least Reddit sent notifications to tell people that their content was removed. Also there’s a modmail allowing people to ask questions. Also a post was merely removed from the community stream, but allowing discussions in it to continue including answers as to why it was removed, rather than deleted entirely and for all eternity, destroying all of the conversations that had taken place therein, even between users unrelated to the person posting that supposedly triggered the removal, i.e. innocent bystanders.
Lemmy has turned out to be just as if not more authoritarian than Reddit - not to the instance admins tbf but to the individual users. And moreover, the amount of such seems to mainly increase over time, e.g. mod names are now obscured in the modmail even if you go looking into it, and soon Lemmy.ml will become baked into the codebase as the source of new communities, giving it veto power if it wants a new instance to not sign up to anything defederated from lemmy.ml. Centralized, authoritarian control is not what most of us signed up for when attempting to flee Reddit.
Fortunately PieFed is fighting that trend mightily, e.g. allowing democratization of moderation features. Though even PieFed does not send a notification when someone is banned or their content removed (in this case though likely just low priority as it is still being developed, at a much quicker pace than Lemmy, rather than with lemmy.ml being an actual choice to do things a certain way).
I recently noticed that when a user gets banned, all of their posts and associated threads also get removed but with no notice.
I’ve also seen entire discussions removed because they included some heated words, despite also including useful discussion or even one sided rebuttals. While I’m under no illusion that things can get solved here, it’s annoying to see shit get deleted just because someone got upset. Even if there isn’t anything useful in comments, it breaks up the discussion because any replies have lost context.
IMO if it’s a disruptive user, ban them, but leave the evidence of their disruption up, unless it was spam or the kind of illegal shit that can get anyone who sees it in trouble.
Hehe, check out one of PieFed’s latest new features: Deleted posts and their comments can still be read. Mods can either delete entirely (if as you say illegal or some shit) or simply remove from the normal display from the community thread, but leaving the discussion intact - e.g. answers to questions that people would like to preserve, even when the OP deletes their own post.
In short, each person is the owner of their “own” content - like a question asked to a question community - but the resulting answers and discussion do not belong to them, but rather to the individuals who offered those answers in good faith, hence are now allowed to remain (it takes active participation i.e. it is opt-in, but now it is an option whereas before it was not).
Alright, I’ll make more content. Give me a month or two. I’m slow at drawing.
Then start breeding yall
me asf
