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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It’s quality and quantity. The quality has held despite a drop in users. Just wait and let Reddit have another controversy and we’ll get another infusion of converts. Popularity may only threaten more bots and scams.
Just wait and let Reddit have another controversy
You know, there was a great blog recently that wrote about this, that now is the perfect time to popularize the fediverse. That’s because as tensions with the US are rising, more people in europe are looking for alternative internet platforms to communicate over. So the fediverse can jump in here and offer itself as an alternative.
When I look at some generic instance’s unfiltered feed all I see is posts about USA/Trump. I can see how this might deter a lot of Europeans who are looking for alternatives to Reddit.
It’s quality and quantity. The quality has held despite a drop in users.
This is my experience too; I haven’t really noticed a change. I still see about the same number of conversations and the same depth of conversation as I always have here. I was very surprised that the change in user count was so high.
I wonder if there’s a committed/stable subsection of the userbase, that is mainly responsible for posts and comments, and has largely stuck around throughout? And then most of the swings in user count are from people who were less active to begin with?
its also the fact that we can ban whole communities too, from popping up your feed. since there are less users, blocking the users that are obviously tankies or conservatives, reduces us seeing more posts.
I like it here
It is. It’s one of the reasons i’ve pivot back to reddit these last few months.
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More then Reddit this place is an echo chamber for the far left anti capitalist crowd. While I don’t mind a discussion, everything over simplified to EAT THE RICH was getting tiresome.
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No company or institution is here. If I have a problem with my [insert device or appliance here] chances are good someone on reddit will reply and 50/50 there is a useable answer somewhere. Here it just stays silent. Or you get the anti capitalist reply that everything is fucked and we should just eat the rich.
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There are no real gaming or device or brand communities. Want to ask something about modding game x? Not here. Want to hook up with other players of game y? Not here. Want to know how to fix your [household appliance here]? Not here…Have a problem with mainboard from brand z? Not here.
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When you ask something here about Linux or any other gpl software the answer often times boils down to RTFMI! (I= idiot) That also happens on reddit to be honest. But here it’s just more extreme. And I know I’m an idiot. That’s why I asked. I’m too stupid can someone please explain.
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Where the fuck is LJDawson. Sync is dead it seems.
And yes. Reddit more and more feels like an AI test site. For example the AITA posts are getting more and more out of this world. They are unbelievable, that’s just for clicks. So the enshittification is not slowly but very fast becoming a problem and within a few months it will be another youtube, unusable. But for now… It’s the best we have.
- More then Reddit this place is an echo chamber for the far left anti capitalist crowd. While I don’t mind a discussion, everything over simplified to EAT THE RICH was getting tiresome.
That must be so difficult for you compared to all the wonderful corporate platforms full of rightwing hateful trolls who genuinely harass people.
I’m going to tentatively upvote this. There’s a good reason the left wingers on this platform sound bitter (myself included). The Overton Window has shifted right, so they’re pretty much surrounded by toxic right-wing stuff on every other platform.
Still, it doesn’t help Lemmy attract moderates.
What conservatives want is for us to treat them like babies with tiny little fragile baby beliefs that we have to coddle.
I don’t care if you think differently than me, what I care about is babies demanding we take their hateful and irrational ideologies seriously while they simultaneously target vulnerable groups with at a minimum hate speech and harassment.
If we coddle conservatives this place becomes less welcoming to new people, that is how it is.
Yeah you’re absolutely right. Though we are talking about two separate things here; OP and I are talking about “eat the rich” left rhetoric. Like people coming here and seeing comments like, “wheel out the guillotines”, and “kill all CEOs”.
You’re talking about the fact that we shouldn’t welcome conservative voices after they’ve ruined the rest of the internet. I absolutely 100% completely agree with you.
I’ll give you an example; I’m more leftie than my wife. So it surprising to her when I said that people should be allowed to just punch Nazis with no legal ramifications. Like to her it was actually confronting to hear someone she knew advocate for violence. I explained my reasoning. They are corrosive to society’s norms, and really need a different set of rules to regular people to be contained. The only language they understand is violence.
But the point is the average person is going to be immediately repulsed by calls for violence and extreme rhetoric, regardless of whether it is morally justified and the reasoning is technically correct.
So imagine a moderate “regular” person coming to this forum. Without the context of history that you and I have, how do they interpret these comments? Will they want to stay on Lemmy?
I’m not saying Lemmy should change, by the way. I have no problem with the rhetoric, and there’s a case to be made that getting rid of it may make it easier for conservatives to get a foothold here. But it’s worth a discussion, I guess.
And that all said, there’s a chance that by “eat the rich” OP means anything complaining about the rich, in which case they can fuck off to their own instance.
For example the AITA posts are getting more and more out of this world.
What’s this AITA sub you speak of?
It’s called r/AmateurStoryWriters ffs, get the name right
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The quality has held despite a drop in users.
I feel like I’m going mental over here because this has not been my experience. The quality has always been spotty, but the last few months I’ve noticed more and more posts linking to awful “news” rags or no source at all. Worse, I rarely see people questioning the lack of quality information, simply gobbling it up because it aligns with their world view. Plus 70% of the comments on this platform could be generated by a classic r/subredditsimulator style bot and nothing would change; the same 5 points about AI, capitalism, and Linux are made in every thread in the exact same style every day.
And yes I’m mostly talking about news communities because Linux comms are usually fine but repetitive and while I’d love to interact with non-news content there just… isn’t much being made.
the sudden rise in 2025 early on, was the massive purges reddit was doing, banning almost anyone left and right, and hitting all thier accounts at once. when they usually never try to multi-ban you before. they did take thier foot of the pedal though, because they realized they were banning too much, lowering thier faux engagements with bots. reddit switched to more insidious bannings in the background.
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.
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.
Is this strictly Lemmy or does it include related platforms like PieFed and Mbin? Because it seems like there has been some shift to PieFed
I thought this too at first: I expected Piefed to have been the main cause. But, it turns out that Lemmy monthly active users have dropped by around 30k, while Piefed has risen to about 5k
Yeah Piefed is great. It’s a night and day difference in experience really
From my own experience with Lemmy, I can absolutely see why it’s declining.
Lemmy is packed full of miserable people constantly calling for violence. 90% of the feed is packed full of US politics, it doesn’t matter how many filters I use I still see that greasy orange cunt’s face every time I open Lemmy.
The amount of hostility towards outsiders just getting into Lemmy is astounding, and I’ve absolutely seen the whole “quality over quantity” crap that only drives people away from the platform. The IT tech snobbery is also incredibly offputting to people who aren’t tech enthusiests.
In short, Lemmy has a toxic shithead problem that a platform this small can’t afford if it wants to survive long term.
…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 :’(
I’m a very new user who wanted to give this a chance, here are the friction points from my point of view:
- The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn’t help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.
- Content discovery sucks ass. My feed stayed mostly the same since I started using Lemmy. I’m presented the same shit over and over again. I’m not sure if it’s something that I do wrong, if there is just no content or if that’s a side effect of ‘no tracking at all’ but either way the experience is just bad
- Someone in here already said it, but ‘Lemmy’ is a horrendous name. That alone was the reason why I didn’t bother to try it at all for a long time. Only recent events pushed me towards it but tbh I’m not sure I’ll stay.
In short the user experience is abysmal.
I’m presented the same shit over and over again.
Do you sort by active? Use hot or scaled instead.
Yeah, no idea why Active is still the default.
Yeah, it was sorted by active. Changed it to hot, let’s see how that goes. Thanks for the hint.
Active is basically like old forum logic, where new comments will bump it up back to the top. Scaled is my go to view first as it does a pretty good job balancing out communities of widely different sizes, so smaller communities that you’re subbed to have a chance of having their post be seen if it’s new and larger in upvoter count.
Someone in here already said it, but ‘Lemmy’ is a horrendous name. That alone was the reason why I didn’t bother to try it at all for a long time. Only recent events pushed me towards it but tbh I’m not sure I’ll stay.
You can say that again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy
Really muddles up the search results about lemmy.
Lemmy standing for “Marxist-Leninist” surely is off-putting to some. Might be better to re-brand it as “Feddit” (federated Reddit).
Names are a discrete and contested domain and honestly I don’t see how Lemmy being also a person is a hindrance. Coke is also a drug yet no one complains, certainly not the big corpo.
Protip: you can search for more than one word on search providers. Something like “lemmy social” or “lemmy server” for example.
It just makes it more annoying to search for anything lemmy related
Have you considered trying out Piefed? Piefed has custom feed options currently.
The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn’t help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.
I don’t really know how you make the onboarding, the instance selection easier at this point. What do you propose?
What site did you use when you found lemmy?
I’m a reddit user and that’s also where I first heard about lemmy the first time.
Yesterday I decided to give it a try, current events pushed me away from everything American and so I thought it was about time.
I searched for something like ‘lemmy getting started’ and landed on this site: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html
So the first greeting is a wall of text. After I read through it, I found myself here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances
Now I got a bunch of options with no real way to evaluate what’s what. I spent some time there looking through the options and didn’t really know what to choose and what the impact would be. I used a search engine again to look for some opinions about the biggest ones which lead me nowhere, mostly.
So I kinda gave up and selected programming.dev because that’s close enough to what I do professionally. I clicked on join and was presented with this https://programming.dev/signup
So I don’t know if that differs from instance to instance, but you need a moment to process this. The first few fields are obvious but then it starts to get a little weird. Instead of a checkbox or even implicit accepting of TOS and privacy policy (by registering here you agree to…) you have to take or copy paste that exact sentence into that answer box with a preview button(?) and then fill in the captcha. After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.
But it didn’t end here. Because I found that the webui wasn’t that great on mobile, I wanted an Android app. So I ended up here: https://join-lemmy.org/apps
And yet again was confronted with a bunch options I somehow had to evaluate. I’m still in the process finding an app I really like.
Now I know this is no rocket science, and having options is a good thing usually.
But still considering the average usually not tech savvy user, all of that is too much by quite a bit. That’s overwhelming for the majority of people.
This whole thing needs to be a 10 second streamlined process. There should be one button to get you started. The instance selection site tells you: ‘You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn’t matter which one you choose.’
So if that’s the case, why bother the user with it? I admit I know jack shit about the fediverse, but if I were to design such a thing, I’d separate the IdP (identity provider) from the service/content providers. Have a couple of them redundantly, hosted by different parties so one entity can not shut down everything. Let the user register once, replicate that identity across the IdPs and let some interest selection wizard determine which content instances the use should be added to.
I know that’s a big architecture change and will never happen. So maybe have that one obvious registration routine for a user and choose a first instance for the user based on interests or randomly (from a curated list to prevent users landing on some extreme instances) if the user can not be bothered to fill in their interests.
Have one default app which is good and recommended that. Let the app have sensible defaults (like the sorting thing), present most popular content first to hook the user.
Let the user look for alternatives later if they want to do that.
Don’t let the user do all the homework upfront before they even know whether they even care and if it’s worth the effort. Most people simply won’t do it.
PS. Nope I do not know about ‘Piefed’. I’ll check it out later. It wasn’t mentioned on all that sites that I looked at and that’s part of the problem.
That’s just my 2 cents.
Thanks for your feedback!
You landed on https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html to get started but you should have landed on https://join-lemmy.org/ which is a much simpler UI, i think. Somebody sent you the wrong link. I think, there should definitely be a more prominent link to the actual “sign up here” page.
I’d separate the IdP (identity provider) from the service/content providers
That is indeed a good idea and i’ve never heard it formulated like this before, but i gotta think about it now.
After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.
That is definitely a big problem that should be changed; I’m not sure but maybe you should get an E-Mail after your registration is successful and maybe you should also be able to log in and use the account immediately (up to a limited extent) without waiting for manual confirmation.
Here is the instance chooser that @Skavau@piefed.social mentioned.
There are a ton of features that PieFed has that Lemmy lacks. Like Reddit’s, PieFed’s “search” feature sucks ass (by design, as it is not the top priority right now), and Lemmy’s btw is super fantastic, though you don’t even need to have a user account to use Lemmy’s search feature, and everything else is better on PieFed, often by a lot (but, some very few not as good though). PieFed even has features that Reddit itself lacks - which makes sense when you realize that all features that Reddit has pumped out in the past 10 years or so have been to increase their profit margins rather than offer any functionality that users themselves wanted.
PieFed is the future of the Threadiverse. Many instances have already or are currently in the process of switching over to it. At least give it a look? The sign-in process will surely convince you to stay, but if not then we’d all be interested to know your thoughts on what turned you away too?
Oh, one major caveat: most of PieFed’s most advanced features (such as polls, user and post flairs, categories of communities, topic areas and user-customizable & shareable feeds, etc.) are not available yet from 3rd party apps, which having been designed for Lemmy originally they are still mainly restricted to the basic functionality that Lemmy offers. Even there, imho having to visit the PieFed website UI rarely to turn on an option that would affect daily/hourly interaction via a 3rd party app still makes PieFed more worthwhile compared to Lemmy that does not even offer those kinds of features at all - e.g. the ability to block all users from an instance.
Ah, no in this context I was referrng to the join-lemmy instance chooser that I think they joined through which removes lemmy.world (because of their idea that it’s too big) and randomises the servers a new user automatically sees. You can change it to sort by most active but because lemmy.world is not there, lemmy.ml and hexbear are right at the top (and it won’t mention that hexbear is widely defederated).
Thanks for the clarification. I thought at some point you were mentioning how the wall of text at https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html somehow never once mentions PieFed as an option, but I think that’s excellent that you mentioned those additional details.
After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.
This is wrong or outdated, Lemmy definitely sends an email once your registration is approved or denied (if you provided an email during registration). Worth contacting the programming.dev admins to change this line.
PS. Nope I do not know about ‘Piefed’. I’ll check it out later. It wasn’t mentioned on all that sites that I looked at and that’s part of the problem.
Piefed was made much later, and many of the Lemmy documentation sites simply haven’t been updated.
The problem with join-lemmy is that they removed lemmy.world from their listings because they thought it was too prominent, and now it just randomises servers. Which is not a good idea. At the same time, I don’t think a process in which everyone is bundled into lemmy.world is good. It just entrenches centralisation.
I am also new (coming from Reddit) and it was confusing that there was no register button anywhere.
There is a “Join” button which goes directly to the registration page of the respective instance. Would it be clearer to rename this? Other than that I’m also happy to make improvements if you have concrete suggestions.
Edit: Made a PR to rename Join to Sign Up: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/509
Well, I don’t understand exactly how it works yet. My steps were to search in the Play Store for Lemmy, but there were multiple apps and all had different names. When I downloaded Boost now, there was not directly a register or sign up button. So it’s probably an issue of Boost.
There is nothing preventing apps from providing a registration flow. For example Voyager has it. I suppose the problem is again which instance to choose for signup. You can discuss this in https://lemmy.world/c/boostforlemmy or https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyapps.
As for multiple Lemmy apps being available: Most of the current Lemmy users came here in 2023 when Reddit locked down the API and killed third-party apps. Thats why a lot of apps are now available, and everyone can decide for himself which one he prefers.
I agree. New user introduction is very poor. Took me ages just to choose an instance - and that was in no small part because I’m here not only to escape the enshittified chokepoint capitalism of american big tech, but also because I’m utterly sick of the domination of US centric points of view and censorship. Even though i know communities are not instance locked, I wanted an instance that is not likely to be managed in the same way. Time will tell if I chose well or poorly
Fwiw that’s a very popular instance you are on, so I think you will likely enjoy it? But if not, then that is the beauty of the Fediverse: you can always hop over to some other one if you wanted.
Like email providers: if gmail doesn’t suit you, then switch to another one, or even self-host your own if that sounds appealing:-P.
Note here there is zero advertising: none. Therefore, no incentive to try to “(ab)use” you as the product. Conversely, features offered to you are significantly slower to be developed (honestly PieFed is so very far ahead of Lemmy in that respect, e.g. offering keyword filters such as “Musk” or “Trump”, and advanced AI slop detection, etc.). So instead of thinking how different platforms will fall over themselves trying to compete for your “business”, think along the lines instead of how you can match up with other like-minded folks. And at some point you’ll want to contribute - perhaps code development, or donations, though what the Threadiverse needs most is just participation, as in content posted to it, the more thoughtful the better.
So far you are off to a fantastic start, welcome! :-D
Thanks for the kind reply.
@dessalines@lemmy.ml for the love of god please fix the onboarding
Also go full Elon Mulk and artificially boost lemmy.sdf content they have a lot of good OC
I don’t think he controls join.lemmy.org. Unless I am completely wrong.
I checked the contact section and it uses the .ml support account so maybe he does
That just might be where they set up for support questions.
That would mean that lemmy.ml chose to remove lemmy.world from there, which I would think would upset lemmy.world mods.
I believe they publicly stated they removed .world from it to prevent centralization because everyone was going to a single instance, thus defeating the fediverse purpose. But this is all from memory and I might be wrong
The logic it uses is to hide any instances with more than 30% of all active users to prevent centralization, just like you say. There are also some other filters like requiring at least 5 active users.
Understandable but something needs to be done to lower the barrier of entry of new users joining.
Yes, that’s correct. But I’m not aware of lemmy.ml mods running it is all I mean. That it randomises the instances for newbies on first view isn’t great either.
Good point, I made a PR to use biased random sort again that we had in the past, so larger instances are always shown near the top.
The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn’t help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.
The solution to this is that people should not recommend Lemmy, but a specific instance such as programming.dev (depending on the audience). The Lemmy software and join-lemmy.org are mainly targeted at potential instance admins, or those who are already familiar with the Fediverse.
Well, you are technically correct. That would’ve made it easier for me. But I see a few problems with that:
How are you gonna make sure people start doing this?
And even more important: If people start doing this, it might actually harm the network IMHO.
I personally knew that something like Lemmy exists at all because I saw multiple people on Reddit recommending it as an alternative to Reddit. Often enough that I was able to remember this after some time.
Now if people recommended programming.dev in one sub, literature.cafe in another and discuss.online in a third - there is no way I would’ve remembered any of it and most likely wouldn’t know that it belongs to the same network. Looking at them individually emphasizes the feeling that those are some ultra niche little sites with hardly any users on them.
Just my gut feeling, anyway.
That is true. I made a post just now to gather suggestions for improving the website, please have a look and comment if you have any ideas: https://lemmyverse.link/lemmy.ml/post/41719890
The onboarding being a bit difficult is a good thing IMO, it keeps the standards a bit higher and the Facebook boomers and TikTok children out. The internet was better when it wasn’t so easily accessible.
Funny enough, a lot of that ends up feeling similar with the move to Linux (and its many distros). It got a very good shift because of Microsoft voluntarily deciding “This OS will be horrible for everyone now.” but Reddit hasn’t had anything so egregious. Even Linux has a few issues with content/apps from not having enough contributors.
I’ve been using Lemmy less because it’s so depressing. It feels like a majority of the engagement is with depressing US politics and a strong left bias (to be clear, I also hate the current government). Unlike most, I really like most of the nerdy tech content.
Which is why I’ve been lurking more on Hacker News lately, it’s tech minded forums with an appropriate level of politics and more nuanced takes. And as a bonus the interface even less bloated (in terms of resource usage) than any Lemmy frontend I’ve tried.
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.
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 call it the mirror version of conservatives, they talk like right wingers, respond like them, post nonsense like them, and often uses the same BUZZWORDS. they think they are clever buy calling things shitlib, if its not just a shoe-in for libtard, and wokeness.
Just as there are facts and then there are uh… ah… “alternative facts”, so too there is an Alt-Right, and they represent basically an Alt-Left.
Or something, I have no fucking clue what is really going on over there. It does seem more like whatever they are, their beliefs are not genuine - as in they even troll themselves so hard that some of them forgot that they were doing it!?!
I’ve seen the same arguments against liberals here used against Bernie Sanders on Instagram. “Why aren’t you doing more about Palestine?”, “Why’d you let this happen?”, “why are you too powerless to influence policies?”. I know some bots follow a script. The only difference here is the framing.
And it worked. So many did not vote for Harris… (tbf the electoral system in the USA is fairly bork3n and complexicated, with the vast majority of votes not actually mattering, especially in blue states that would have voted for her regardless) and looking back, who can say if the campaigns had any effect? Though they did seem to try to have an effect, and that alone should mean… at least something to us? (in terms of actions taken, it seems to have not, but should it have?)
I gotta say, Xi’s version is way more effective than Donald’s
even the banners and display they use its obviously very “pro-communist”
all yea, new users are more likely to get confused that you can only sign up for 1 account per instace, and not 1-for all like with reddit, so they get fustrated because they couldnt understand why they made a lemmy account on world, and cant login in anorther.
I posted in an ADHD community about how I’m fed up with managing my symptoms and I think I finally need to talk to a professional. Someone tried to blame my symptoms on capitalism.
As someone who simply left Reddit because they took away RIF and only stays here because I’m stubborn, Lemmy is the left wing version of Truth Social. A great deal of the users here are the absolute embodiment of the people from Sanfrancisco in South Park huffing each others farts about how progressive they are.
Like, I get it and I do agree in principle on most things with Lemmy which is the only reason I dont leave, but make no mistake THE FEDIVERSE IS AN ECHO CHAMBER.
I wanted to see it and did take a look into your profile: That was one user and he was rightfully criticized and downvoted for that stupid post. It’s not great that this happened, but I’m not sure if it is fair to judge all of us here based on that
I know there tends to be a disagreement about this on Lemmy, but this is also what I have observed.
For example, If someone has a computer problem and its windows, there’s a good chance the top comment will be “Stop, use linux”. Almost any conversation can turn into “you’re supporting capitalism”. It discourages people from wanting to post and engage, because of the likely hood of something turning into an argument. Not everyone has the mental bandwidth for it, and they just want a place to come and chill.
Hell I used to be active in making Cassettefuturism grow when lemmee was a thing, and we’d get people coming into that niche community to argue with us about our hobby.
The difference between Reddit and Lemmy was that niche communities would usually not hit the front page and you could be off in your own little corner. Here since things are smaller, you are more likely to run into some niche communities through discovery.
I guess it is? But so is every other online forum. The fediverse as a whole just seems to attract a certain group of people, and I think that is fine. If I signed up to a diy forum I would also expect to mostly interact with people interested in diy. (First comment btw, op finally convinced me)
Today is my first day here and I’ve mostly just been wandering hobby/interest groups!
I think the biggest barrier for new users is that the whole system here is pretty complicated with the “decentralized” model. I don’t really understand what it means or how it works, what the difference between the various servers are, or what to join or even which app to download. There are a lot of options and complicated technical terms (like “federated”, “fediverse”) you need to research just so you can sign up. The fact that you have to write all of these explanations about it doesn’t really help. A platform like reddit (which I migrated from) is clean, easy to understand, and makes sense to the casual user.
As for the political stuff, I think people here should engage more with positive content. We should make the wholesome, fun stuff popular because it’s appealing. Post about the cool/funny/awesome/interesting stuff you encounter every day; talk about the arts, your hobbies, your funny life fuck ups, your non-serious relationship woes, your pets, etc.! In my exploration today I noticed those kinds of communities barely get any interaction whereas the news/political ones are always active.
I’ve been here a few years now and I can say Lemmy’s got issues. You can’t come on here and have a good time anymore when all it’s about is trump trump trump and Linux Linux Linux it gets old. I wanna escape from reality a bit sometimes and there’s few areas to subscribe to that gives any joy anymore.
I’ll commit to commenting more. I prefer to lurk, but the fediverse needs me 🤣
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 :(
and here I thought it was because I’ve blocked close to 300 users.
same, i blocked almost as much. condescending even from non- tankies will be blocked, or smartass.comments. probably those people posts the most, since the most chronically online are the controversial users/posters.
me too i noticed, the problem was when lemmy.ee went down and all the users scattered to other instances, or the piefed but would not engage any post on lemmy. i saw massive reduction in posts like movies, entertainment tv shows,etc. also the tankies i blocked, or the problematic accounts are likely posting themselves. i dont even come on during daytime, only a 1-3 hrs before sleep at night, because i know there will be less content overall, its probably healthier for people anyways. people are still addicted to reddit unfortunately.
Well yes, lemm.ee hosted the movies and television communities. You know movies and television reformed over on piefed.social? The content you’re referring to didn’t disappear. You can still access it.
The addiction thing is so true. Bug tech invest a lot into making their user experience as addictive as possible. The mainstream social networks are highly optimized attention catchers create for making people spend as much time as possible in them, and the fediverse can’t provide with that addiction, so the more people are addicted to social media, the worse their experience around here will be.
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.
Maybe I should admit defeat and go back to reddit… Perhaps everyone is supposed to be slaves to the shareholders
It is your choice, but if you stay you could put in some real EFFORT to make things better. e.g. people keep saying how difficult it is to make an account - and as a result now https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser exists. There is no hexbear or lemmy.ml on there, but even if theoretically there was one day, there’s specifically an option for “Good for newbies”: Newbie-friendly vs. choose your own adventure, to accommodate both desires, effectively making such controversial places as opt-in rather than having to opt-out, which requires first understanding and awareness of the details and ramifications of the decision.
Another problem is community discovery: yes entire communities are dedicated to helping with out, but how does one find out about those communities in the first place? They are not mentioned in any instance side-bar that I have seen, and rather most side-bar links to places are to expired or dead communities, e.g. Discuss.Online points to !new_here@discuss.online with 3-year-old pinned posts and the most recent post was 1 year ago, plus only one more from all of 2025. But in contrast, PieFed has a new user sign-up wizard that asks the user questions and subscribes them to communities based on their interests - memes, news, whatever - plus long after that aids greatly in community discovery, e.g. with Topics, Feeds (user-shareable and customizable), and combining comments across all cross-posts.
PieFed gives me hope for the Threadiverse.
In the meantime though, if you need something specific, then yeah you have to go to wherever it is located at. I haven’t posted or even commented on Reddit, and made probably <5 votes in all of 2025, all to help promote either PieFed or Lemmy, but I do read it occasionally because that is the only place I know of where the discussions that I was looking for were taking place (other than Facebook or Xhitter that are 1000x worse). Call this defeat if you will, I call it strategic assessment of the current situation, even as we strongly push forward to make this a better place, i.e. realism.
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.
i find out alot of people i blocked are the likely posters, yea thats probably why im seeing less and less posts now.
I’m not talking about people I block (I am not exposed enough and don’t suffer enough harassment so I don’t block almost anyone)… I’m talking about about mods of the instancr that hosts people I care about suddenly blocking instance that hosts my account - not because anything we did but because they didn’t like that mods of my instance didn’t block another instance that has some weird (e.g. transfobic) content. I follow a friend and suddenly we are out of contact because some entirely unrelated drama. And that’s how fediverse works by design.
Ah yes, cancel culture. The Left always eats its own (and btw the Right does the same, eventually, but usually waits to win against the Left first).
Edit: moral purity beatings will continue until morale improves.
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
Genuinely, why would they do that? Like does Mastodon software work differently than Lemmy’s - is there some way that someone from one of THOSE places could post content onto your instance (I dunno, CSAM? or just some trolling or piracy or something that someone considers offensive), and thereby it could come in indirectly to theirs? It makes no sense to me, at least if we were talking Lemmy, but I am interested how Mastodon differs there.
it’s activitypub thing so lemmy as well. you sign up on one server, subscribe to community on different server, mods of the different server will decide they don’t like your server for any reason (e.g. explicitly because mods of your server didn’t blacklist some other server) and you are out of that community. it sucks. imho something based on the old news system would be better (i.e. community exists independently and servers just subscribe to them or not).
Yeah, i feel the same, for a lot of reasons i’ve noticed around here
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a lot of niche subs usually were created turing the apicalipse 3 years ago, but were quickly deserted, so anyone curious about thoses interests right now on lemmy would just find old communities where no one has spoken for years, and get back to reddit out of boredom.
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the few staying for the mainstream communities where there is still some activity are continuously hit by the same topics (lemmy is small and divided enough nowadays to act like echochambers unfortunately) and either participate, or feel excluded and leave.
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Echochambers, stereotypes, and hatred contribute to make lemmy more small and divided.
The cycle continue, and that’s how you kill a defederated service. Honestly, i see more people arguing about communities or users from lemmy itself than people simply debating or talking about things from their interests. That makes me a bit sad.
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Just wait for Reddit to finally ban porn and we’ll have more users than we know what to do with
