Comment on What happened with active users on Lemmy?
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
That’s easy - Lemmy devs decided to exclude lemmy.world because it’s too big.
That’s stupid.
The main problem with lemmy now is adoption, there isn’t a critical mass of users yet.
When users see the stats without lemmy.world, they’ll be discouraged from joining. Add to that the issues with federation and the few who join will leave because of the steep learning curve.
Way to alienate potential users.
Yeah. If they pushed it to the bottom of the list, or even removed them from the list but kept the user count, I could kind of understand it. But censoring them completely for being too successful seems like shooting yourself in the foot.
Lemmy.world is doing great and I'm happy for it and all that, but... 20 000 monthly active users does not exactly make them a tech giant that needs to be kept in check just yet. Ideally, instances of 20 000 active users should be quite normal at some point, and having stress tested the software before then should, one assumes, be a good thing.
You probably also have the friction been .world and the developers’ Lemmy.
There is also a problem that Lemmy seems to be having problems maintaining a good middle ground of Lemmy servers.
buT mUh DeCenTrAlIZatiOn!
It’s because the devs suck
The devs are working hard providing a public service that they make available for everyone. And the product they've developed is pretty impressive, in spite of its shortcomings.
They hold some opinions I disagree with pretty strongly, and I'm not a fan of every decision they make. But they're creating a truly common good, and for that they deserve praise. From a technical perspective, they have created something completely new that serves thousands of users and constitutes a system of huge complexity. They very much do not suck.
Anyone who thinks any person maintaining an open source project "sucks" should feel free to fork the project, fix whatever they're not happy with, and maintain the repository and handle commits and all the shit that goes down in managing a large open source project. After dedicating all this time to people, some random ingrate will inevitably disagree with some minor decision they've made and decide that they "suck".
I mean. They’re torpedoing that open source’s projects chances for growth because of their ideology. It’s pretty sucky.
I agree with the rest of your statement regarding the development of Lemmy.
They are okay as devs, not that good as admins, which is fine, it is known by now, and people can move easily.
To the people who are going to answer that they are bad devs too, which other devs are that much better than them at this moment for link aggregators in the Fediverse?
I like Piefed and Mbin as much as the next guy, but Lemmy is still the most polished software as of now. Maybe that will change in the future, but let’s face it: with the amount of pushback the Lemmy devs are getting regularly, the fact that most of the instances still use Lemmy is a sign that there the alternatives aren’t that much better.
the few who join will leave because of the steep learning curve.
what steep learning curve? what’s so steep about thinking of social media like email?
Oh come on, let’s not pretend that the fediverse is just super intuitive and easy for regular users (i.e. non-techie people). Same ridiculous notion as when people say Linux is just as user-friendly as the more mainstream OSes. It’s sad and I wish it was better but it’s just not right now.
It might be a little more complicated than normal social media and email but it definitely is not that complex.
Nah we’ll keep dropping instances when they hit 20k users.
I want the biggest Lemmy you have.
No, that’s too big.
It’s a genuine concern though. If you want one centralised server hosting all the content, just use reddit.
so lemmy.world became too big to fail and the other instances decided didn’t want to risk a bail out?
This has nothing to do with other instances. The join-lemmy.org is run by the Lemmy developers and they decide what happens with that site. They think it’s problematic that lemmy.world is as big as it is (as one of the points of the fediverse is decentralization). So they removed lemmy.world from the listing on join-lemmy.org.
Note that this is in no way a defederation or anything of that sort. The site just doesn’t show lemmy.world, that’s all.
my comment was mostly a joke, but it doesn’t contradict your point, lemmy.word got too big(relatively) so it got de-listed to flow new users to other instances
my comment was mostly a joke
Sorry for not getting it, it’s just that sometimes people (understandably) get very confused about the technicalities of the fediverse and mix up things like defederation and stuff like this. 😅
Consider a /s in the future :)
Right, I didn’t think how it would affect the total active user count. Will have to think of a solution for that.
I guess a new flag to only exclude it from the list but not exclude it from the stats 🤷
Or even some logic to automatically exclude from the list any instance with more than x% of active users.
That is a very weird thing to do, unless they are looking to boost their own instance.
You can read their motivation in the linked pull request. FWIW I don’t think there’s any ill intent here and certainly not an attempt to boost their own instance. I think they just want Lemmy to be decentralized and lemmy.world being as big as it is kinda prevents that.
I’m not sure I would’ve done it that way personally but I can see the reasoning and it’s not entirely unreasonable.
In my humble opinion, join lemmy should only exclude the instances that is harmful.
They should not choose the instances to include for the users.
I think I generally agree with you, but I don’t think this is a big grievance. Lemmy.world has enough traction as it is, they don’t really need the “publicity” from join-lemmy.org.
It would’ve been better if they had written this as some kind of policy beforehand. Like if they had written somewhere before this pull request something like “any instance with more than 40% of active users may be excluded from the join-lemmy.org listing”, then it would’ve been more reasonable too.
Lemmy.world becoming the default Lemmy instance, and it growing to outsize all other instances is a danger: it makes the Fediverse centralized, easy to take down and easy to take over.
I very much doubt that they have discouraged signups to their instance many times
@Blaze@feddit.org falling asleep with a smile on their face tonight :)
Not really, pretending a third of the monthly active users do not exist isn’t really anything I’m happy about.
LW is still in these stats, so there’s that
Why does removing them from the site also mean cutting their user count from Active Users though?
That’s just how it works at the moment. It only counts active users from the sites listed.
101@feddit.org 2 months ago
Holy shit, the most active instance right now on the website is LemmyNSFW.
Image
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
🎵 the internet is for porn 🎵
elvith@feddit.org 2 months ago
Rule 34 in action
Heartwotalk@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
Image
Mr_Blott@feddit.uk 2 months ago
Ahem maybe not the best choice of character there old chap
borf@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
I missed when reddit had more porn so here I am
Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Welcome!
I’d shake your hand, but, well…