Submitted 1 year ago by asmodeus@programming.dev to fediverse@lemmy.world
For me the biggest issue is user engagement and missing communities.
I enjoyed /all to see news and discussion about that news, which isn’t really a thing on lemmy yet.
And i enjoyed small communities for the discussions and posts which are also not really a thing on lemmy yet.
I agree, I get excited seeing one comment in some of the smaller communities and then it’s always that awful tldr bot.
The automatic bot posts need to go away as well imo.
I agree, I get excited seeing that tldr bot.
The automatic bot posts go well imo.
This post has been reduced by 69%. I’m not a bot.
I hate the bots that just repost from Reddit and don’t allow comments in the repost.
Why even subscribe to that at that point?
Yep. The graph above shows the significant drop in active user, meaning there’s gonna be even less engagement if this goes on. The drop in total user maybe due to some small instance just vaporised, which usually caused by lack of active user on that instance and the admin just pull the plug. After all, why spend money on something people don’t really use?
The country instance i’m in, for example, had goes from 30± daily active user earlier last month to 12± daily active user, likely due to people migrate to bigger instance, or gone back to reddit/somewhere else. With most admin team missing or barely active, including the head admin, this instance will vaporise as well.
Popularize the apps that exist. I couldn’t figure out how to browse it in a Reddit-like way until I tried an app. That was all I needed to make the switch.
Lemmy seriously needs kindergarten-level SEO. None of the communities barely show up on Google.
Hell, many of the communities barely show up when you search within Lemmy!
I know there are places on this site that I have no idea where they are, and I’ve been here like 2 months now.
Lemmy seriously needs better federated search. The fact that you need a separate website to find all the communities is just silly, especially if you’re on smaller instances, which everyone seems to encourage.
Another way of looking at it: Lemmy is retaining the engagement of the vast majority of new users who have joined recently.
Yeah I agree. I think it’s pretty amazing that so many people are continuing to use Lemmy after the initial migration. I’d have been more surprised if there was no drop off, as you’re obviously going to get some people who’d try it and it’s not for them.
At least a short time after… we still need to do more to build out more niche communities. It seems we have the big topics covered like news, politics, and memes, but what was great about Reddit was the ability to find a place to discuss and research niche stuff.
This happens with Mastodon too. But each wave more people stick around.
I’ve found great content in here and it has the good vibes of early reddit I miss so much.
I really only use reddit for search engine results now.
This is normal for any platform that gains a burst of users. You’ll have significant attrition, but probably end up leveling out at somewhere higher than you started.
If you think about it, it’s very hnlikely that every new lemmy user would stay
And there were a not trivial number of bots.
I bet money there are farms of fake accounts, waiting for the right day when the fediverse is mainstream
I think we’re great where we’re at. Exponential growth for the sake of growth is not a good thing.
We have a decent and varied user base with plenty of subject matter experts. We tend to upvote more than downvote. The app still needs to grow, find more security and discoverability, but it’s pretty pleasant where we are now.
Those stats aren’t particularly distressing. We lost the .ml domains. Defederation happened. We had crapload of bot accounts created then dealt with.
If DAU doesn’t flatten out by november, it might be a bad sign. At the moment I’d say it’s more likely that the graphs have a bunch of hidden data in them and it’s not just a clean and clear indication that people are fleeing.
I’ll take 40,000, nice professional pleasant people over a million random redditors any day.
We have a decent and varied user base with plenty of subject matter experts.
Do we?
For anything I’ve needed, YMMV
Exactly. Seeing people fret over loss of users reminds me of corporate “always be growing” mindset.
I’ve said this before, but I also have 5 or 6 accounts and I only use 2 now. The other ones are counted as lost users.
The biggest issue I have with lemmy isn’t even about anything but meme communities being tiny. It’s that I don’t have a way to find the tiny ones that do exist so I can’t join them. I don’t know how to look for anything, and when I just use the search built into sync the lemmy’s that do pop up are unclear as fuck to me
I have found that this website makes finding communities really easy: lemmyverse.net/communities
This needs to be built into the apps. Discovery is important.
memes from many sources. And a lot of people created several logins on other instances given all the instability of Lemmy.
I can’t speak for losses, but I can say I visit almost every day. I get my news from here and feel informed.
Since all of the Reddit changes happened I took the time to try and back away from social media as I had a sort of addiction and probably still do. Now I consume much of my social media in the form of RSS feeds, even took the time to add all of my YouTube subscriptions to a RSS feed reader and unsubscribed from channels that I felt were too clickbaity, don’t get me wrong there are a few I still follow.
This is great. I seem to be less into social media since Twitter died and Reddit became whatever the heck it is now. I do occasionally go back there but it feels weird. I feel disconnected from it. I can see people still using it, but there’s a pall over everything, a frost. Lemmy on the other hand may not be as active, but its smaller community feels more personal.
What news communities or instances are you a part of? Always trying to find new ones.
World News at Lemmy.world and WorldNews@Lemmy.ml are the two I consume the most of.
The nature of a social network is to become big enough to attract most people or to stay a niche community.
But the process takes time. Right now the niche expanded significantly, but didn’t reach the critical mass yet.
How the dynamic happens though is still mysterious. Accessibility is the first and most important feature though. Then, you need to keep up with the time and innovations, but it might be hard to see.
IMO the focus should be accessibility. Which will become difficult because elitist asshats are already fighting against growing the community, and accessibility is the easiest place for gatekeeping.
The federated nature also means it’s a big set of interacting niches, which hasn’t really been done before.
How can we make it more popular?
Defederating tankies, nazis, fascists, bigots and other awful elements; forcing moderators and administrators to do their job when bad behaviours occur, and respectfully disagree with other people instead of calling them names or mocking them.
Censor me harder daddy
Censoring nazi and fascists is always morally correct.
Ironically, this comment is posted from an instance that has defederated from the large tanky instances.
So we need to make it easier for mods to moderate? Better Modtools?
I haven’t had a single issue. My admins are on point.
I have been pretty comfortable here because I’m into nerdy things and most of us here are nerds. In fact, the only people that cared about reddit locking down the API were nerds or people jumping on the bandwagon because it was the next big thing. Others didn’t care and just wanted reddit back and a lot of people that were here in the beginning went back to reddit. We will probably grow overtime but there’s point in wondering why lemmy isn’t more popular, just participate in the communities you like.
Yeah. It just feels like we need about 50% more users to help populate things a bit more here. Mastodon feels much more active/full to me, probably because it has a year or so already, and Xitter has done some many things to help drive people to alternatives.
I’m pretty happy with Lemmy as it is, but would certainly welcome another influx of people
And a lot of people are happy/used to be smashed with Ads…
I tried participating and got this bs: “As it is, your post is off topic and not understandable to most community subscribers.”
100% agree.
there’s no point in wondering why lemmy isn’t more popular, just participate in the communities you like.
I think we can and should nerd the shit out of this.
A good nerd can understand why a space is appealing to nerds but less to others, and adjust it accordingly to fix that.
Let’s move this tech from “it works great if you know how to use it” to “it’s great and I have no idea how it works”. Remove server talk from join-lemmy.org. Auto-assign instance for newcomers so they don’t need to care. Make switching instances easy and seemless so it does not matter they did not care. Make links and IDs work cross-instance out of the box. Complete documentation (there’s a wiki which could use some love). Things like that. Improve user experience until using something else feels like a pain.
I overall completely agree with your comment, just wanted to nitpick on this one “no point” point. I think this is important, even for the nerds.
Address some of the issues. Like not having multiple similar posts, on different instances with similar named communities.
Also to reach critical mass, we need to keep posting. Addition of new apps such as Boost will also increase popularity
It was like that on reddit too. Hell, Seattle alone had around 8 subreddits.
Reddit has the users to sustain multiple communities. On Lemmy, it turns what could be a community into a bunch of individual people screaming into the void alone.
To be expected. After any exodus and reaches a peak and dies down some. The real question will be long time retention and addition if new users over the course of a couple years, not months.
More porn (not joking, porn always decides the winners and losers)
I only use Reddit for fapping these days
For real, my nsfw account gets way more use, lol!
LOL, I have a feeling you’re not wrong. I introduced Lemmy to a friend of mine and his first question was, “okay, what about the nsfw content though?”
I’m a long time Mastodon user, and I’ve observed multiple cycles of user influxes (usually caused by some unpopular decision at Twitter) followed by slow but steady decline as these new users got frustrated, disappointed, attacked or something similar. Each wave however did leave a portion that stuck around. I can’t tell you whether Mastodon or Lemmy will “succeed”, but it’s clear by now that both their respective user bases couldn’t even agree on the definition of success.
This might sound like a negative, but if you look at corporate social media which has a pretty clear vision of what its own success looks like (is this fair?), it might also be partly positive. Also, while success might be hard to define and agree on in the Fediverse, I think that these networks are more resilient to total failure than traditional social media (though again, this statement hides some implicit assumptions).
Ultimately, I’ve learned to stop worrying about this. People will talk about what they want to talk about, and this will continue to change and evolve. Lemmy needs better moderation tools (as demonstrated by the recent CSAM attack), but I believe it will get them in time. If you want to talk about something different on Lemmy: do! Just post it, or create a community. It might not explode over night, but it might catch on.
Mastodon and now Lemmy are the only social media I actively use now (permanently deleted my Twitter account on the day the Tate interview was published “exclusively”, but was less active there for years) , and I feel the better for it. I’ve observed tremendous progress in the Fediverse during the past six years and it’s very encouraging in the long term.
I can understand. After the initial excitement, the content is lacuster and scarse compared to reddit (due to lack of large userbase)
It’s just a question of content quantity.
We should have a Lemmy Drive Day. Where every user is encouraged to make five posts and twenty-five comments.
It would be a kickstart.
I don’t think so, because forcing users to post means shitposting.
Just wait until the next Reddit fuckup.
We need to make Lemmy a more interesting and mature place for when it, inevitably, happens.
I visited /r/space the other day and everyone there was complaining how the mods weren’t doing their jobs and their sub was being spammed to death with shitty posts, OT content, porn etc. Kind of funny and exactly what was predicted.
It’s natural - reddit does something bad, people look for an alternative, join up then start losing interest either after a while either due to toxicity, seeing content they don’t like, not having reddit features they used, or the low amount of content and start migrating back.
The user count will probably not stop dropping anytime soon, unless reddit does something again and blackout 2.0 happens.
Why on Earth would we want to make it more popular?
I want more people to leave. Things have noticeably gotten better over the last few weeks, but there’s still a ways to go.
The people who are leaving are presumably mostly people who are frustrated by the relative complexity of decentralized forums and people who can’t find enough “content” to scroll through here, and good riddance to the lot of them.
Something I realized on Mastodon years ago (well before the Twitter/X thing) is it quickly doesn’t matter so much to me how many active users a platform has. A platform is good enough if there’s some activity, and I like being there. Lemmy was already something I checked when I saw only a handful of new posts a day.
Anyway, that’s just my perspective. I’m not too concerned about downtrends of active users.
Quality > Quantity
Even if it were half the size, but the same quality, I’d think that it was a success.
It’s also a naturally busy time for living organisms in the northern hemisphere. I’ve just got things going on, man.
I have a few alts that have gone inactive as instances become more reliable, I’m sure there’s a bit of that
So, I’ve added Lemmy.world and Kbin to my social media browsing habits but they’re not the only sites I spend my time on like in the old days with Reddit a decade ago. I would imagine it’s the same for other users too.
How can we make it more popular?
Not by bots designed to increase content creation.
Mastodon has went through a similar bump, but more recently has had some larger figures begin usage (local government broadcasts, b-level ‘thought-leaders’/‘influencers’, etc). In order to get to the next level, lemmy needs to show it can survive test of time and is worth the effort to establish an online profile. For example, reddit has corporate organizations creating and maintaining subreddits which act as an avenue for community engagement. Having active community engagement leads to advertisement, which can be a double edged sword, but useful if pursuing ‘growth’ metrics. I’m not sure what the lemmy devs (or it’s users) have planned for this.
It’s normal, people come and go, same on mastodon. We will have times where people join like crazy, just wait :)
We don’t have to prove ourselves to any investors though, so slight decline is totally fine!
MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What Lemmy ultimately needs is original content for people to come back. Reposting memes and links can only get you so far.
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 1 year ago
But… it’s a link aggregator…
MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Reddit ceased being a link aggregater when it added comments and self posts , “content aggregater” is a more accurate term, although it is really a modernized version of internet forums.
The best contents posts on reddit are all originals in comments: Ask*, buying guides for hobbists, various fictions like writing prompts, nosleep, and AITA. People have made successful YouTube channels by solely reading out these reddit comments and self posts, it’s lazy but shows where the value of reddit really lies. Somebody even made a movie on the GME stuff. (This is also why I will NEVER admit to lurking reddit or this place in public.)
Instead here we just get the worst part of reddit posts here like politics and memes.
Again, if you actually want Lemmy to take off, stop wasting your time and your energy arguing politics and start writing high quality Lemmy original contents here.
Annoyed_Crabby@monyet.cc 1 year ago
Yeah, AITA is basically bot repost, the other AITA didn’t even have chance to grow.
MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 1 year ago
All of AITA is ragebait creative writing anyways.
Some people just have too much energy. We don’t even have visible karma here to farm.