Who is being driven off lemmy by who and why?
Comment on Lemmy's active userbase has been stable since September 2025
Skavau@piefed.social 1 day ago
So what’s going on here, most likely, is that the intake of new users is declining as opposed to people specifically being driven off the platform (as some users allege).
hector@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Skavau@piefed.social 1 day ago
Oh people making the claim that Lemmy being too political or too hard-left drives users off and is responsible for the user malaise. I’m sure that’s true, but not to an appreciable level.
Bazell@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
The difference, one would assume, is that on the whole, Reddit’s political biases influence more what is not shown (much like lemmy.ml banning people for any criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea, or the echo chamber in hexbear), whereas Lemmy’s tankie issue also manifests as people actively sea-lioning (e.g. Cowbee) and (especially from hexbear) overt trolling, which shows up more in people’s faces. Both are issues, neither are good.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
Here is one such very relevant post: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/16hkxua/why_im_giving_up_on_lemmyfediverse/
A really interesting discussion in particular is below the reply saying:
The issues you brought up are very much on Reddit too. They are just more noticeable on Lemmy because there aren’t enough niche subs or fluff to drown them out.
Other replies included “I did end up shutting down my instance.”, which continued on with “But, for me, seeing people blindly bash the USA every chance they get, It’s a turn off.” - like, I get that the USA is unpopular (especially now), and also I am okay with the Threadiverse remaining small, but I did want to push back against this magical type of thinking that we can both have our cake and eat it to, in the form of both bashing people from it and also reaching out to invite people on Reddit (who are primarily from the USA) to join us here. Maybe Lemmy will have more success by marketing itself as more “European” (or at least “non-USA”, so maybe European + Global South)? Whatever goal we want to aim for, we should keep our eyes open as we aim directly at it, imho.
I do not think that all or even most Threadiverse instances should defederate from lemmy.ml, but on the other hand it would be extremely nice if just ONE instance would do so, which we could then share to people on Reddit as a nicer entry point for those more centrist-leaning users who are primarily people from the USA. Or else decide that that goal is (collectively) not what we all want. The latter being what ended up happening, whether intentionally or no.
Fwiw, Lemmy has gotten much better over the years in this respect, imho, with many more instances having banned lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net specifically.
Like, look at those contortionist comment replies trying to state that, e.g.:
(if anyone’s out of the loop - lemmygrad isn’t “lemmy”, they are usually defederated by regular instances and their content isn’t visible in “lemmy” as it is colloquially understood)
This topic is a MAJOR, oft-repeated reason why people on Reddit refuse to come here and check us out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1jjl8g5/i_tried_lemmy_again_after_a_year_long_hiatus_and/ (the title there gets cut off but continues with “it’s still beyond terrible"), and here is that post’s concluding paragraph:
If you have a very narrow worldview, politics is your entire personality, and you enjoy dry, charged humor then I guess Lemmy is a good alternative for you, but if you’re anybody else it’s not worth it. Reddit is not good, everybody here agrees. However, despite it’s numerous flaws it’s still a product than Lemmy at it’s very best. It’s simply not a viable alternative imo. Even Instagram and Tiktok are better alternatives than Lemmy.
Note that I do not agree, just stating how these people said that they felt, if that is helpful for a diagnosis of the state of affairs and what we could potentially do to help mitigate those concerns. e.g. I successfully petitioned for discuss.online to defederate from hexbear.net, thinking that could help make Redditors feel more welcomed here. Although now I am placing my hope more in PieFed (which e.g. allows users to perform their own personalized defederations without needing admin approval to block all users from any specific instance), while giving up much hope for Lemmy to keep up with its wondrous pace of adding new features.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
i’m glad to hear lemmy is turning fascists away.
they can go back to reddit or twitter.
Blaze@piefed.zip 1 day ago
Those two links are 2 years and 9 months old.
The Threadiverse gets regularly okay feedback on Reddit, as show the several posts on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Sergio@piefed.social 1 day ago
Fwiw whenever I tell my friends about us, I point them to my feeds of lemmy communities with less politics and tech:
Klear@quokk.au 1 day ago
To be honest the tankies made my transition to lemmy a bit smoother, since they fill the same niche as the idiots of t_d, so it made lemmy kinda familiar.
hector@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Idk this left and right directionalism is worthless online, where half of users are fake influence agents with bots and mechanized troll legions.
Now with chatbots, certain parties have the better ones, to flood social media, pretending to be all rypes. I imagine are a factor.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
Is it not both though? I’ve noticed several users that joined here only recently - mere days or a few weeks or months - so are we not observing both users leaving and also new ones joining? Although this graph only shows the net traffic differences, so is insufficient to make claims beyond that. You could theoretically make a different one, overlaying the new subscriber numbers on top of this, that could disambiguate those two effects (people leaving vs. new ones joining)?
Dagnet@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s stabilising so either we are down to the really stubborn user base or it’s the start of a steady growe