Help retain users by discussing more than just politics
For real we need more uplifting subs, my feed is just Musk and Trump diarrhea.
be the change you want to see. Post and upvote.
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Yeah, I feel like people on here have a bad habit of relating even completely unrelated posts back to US politics. But if you keep reading the news then your brain tends to do that.
I think this is an artifact of what’s oddly the biggest weakness of the fediverse: decentralization.
When I used reddit back pre-api stuff, my front page was 100% niche subs I’d subscribed to, but those niches have trouble le growing here because there’s so many instances.
I was super active in the scuba subreddit. Here on Lemmy, there’s several scuba groups that tried to form, but none of them stuck because they were all on different instances instead of one central location where everyone could work together to make the community.
As a result, most of us haven’t been filtering out 99% of Lemmy because the 1% where we’d be active doesn’t exist. It’s like joining reddit and having your frontpage be /r/all. It’s a shitty experience that g9ves a lot of weight to political posts.
I don’t think the subs failed to get off the ground because of federation, I think they did because they didn’t have a dedicated person tirelessly filling them with posts and single-handedly carrying them. Because that’s still where we are population wise. 50k+ MAUs is very nice, but not nearly enough for niche subs to be self-sustaining. Look at any small but active Lemmy sub right now and it’s often a single person doing 90% of the posting. The only real way to get a new sub going is to be that person.
At least now we have stuff like Lemmy Federate and places like [email protected] and [email protected] that are both fairly active, so getting a new sub off the ground should be much easier than two years ago.
It doesn’t matter almost at all which instance a community is on. People could just unite the different scuba groups into one. Basically any they see fit. I’m not sure the decentralization really causes this effect. Or does it make it too difficult to find communities? I’ve been plenty able to find communities from various instances, at least.
If people have to follow breadcrumbs to find which of the dozen groups is active, if any, very few people are going to join.
On reddit, if you wanted to find a sub for airbrushing, you would type in /r/airbrush. That was it.
On Lemmy, there’s no central location for communities, but even worse is that most of the big instances WILL have a community with that name - it’ll just be a dead community that someone started but never took off, so there’s a bunch of false leads.
You aren’t wrong with that :)
The problem exists, although its scale isn’t as big as it first seems. On Lemmy you can write “Airbrush” and join the biggest of the communities. It’s quite visible that this is what is happening in several communities. One starts growing and then that’s what people choose to join, etc.
Help retain users by discussing more than just politics
One of the things I feel like Lemmy is still missing or is under developed is the niche hobbyist and tech help communities. I’m referring to places users can go to ask questions and start to build up a knowledge base of sorts that people will find and reference. Kind of like how if you want to actually find useful information for something, you used to add “Reddit” to every search to get meaningful results. Hopefully, that can become Lemmy. Assuming of course search engines even index Lemmy well enough
One way to start could be just having people post small tutorials or solutions for popular problems or topics in respective communities. I know the internet has changed a lot but “back in the old days” that was a great way to get engagement going at least on tech forums.
Wouldn’t that be closer to stackexchange?
search engines hardly index lemmy unfortunately. Probably due to having too much repeated content on different URLs.
Probably due to having too much repeated content on different URLs.
It seems like its gotten better in the last 2 years as I can at least get lemmy results now, and popular instances show up more but yea, still not great.
I have a gimmick sublemmy, [email protected]. Post images that may or may not contain horses!
Worth noting is that what counts as an “active user” has changed between now and then. During the Reddit API exodus, an “active user” was a user who had posted or commented in the past month. Now, it includes users who have voted. If the 54k MAU record was set using the first algorithm, it is likely that the MAU using the new algorithm (which includes voting) would have been much higher.
Huzzah, us lurkers now count towards the global stats!
Good point
I think that change was done way back when. Do you have a reference for the algorithm change? I tried a quick search and came out empty.
The change was merged in Dec 2023 (see here). The Reddit Exodus was in summer 2023.
Slow and steady wins the race. Also helps to not be shit. looking at reddit.
Also helps to not be shit.
Yeah, we also turn a lot of people away by having boring UI and no Algorhythm, but I consider those to be more of a personality filter.
Fuck the algorithm. Idk why people like that shit.
Especially on Lemmy, the only thing it’s really doing is bringing some discoverability but the discoverability isn’t all that bad on Lemmy you have to look around for like 2 minutes to find the communities, okay, well you have to understand that there are like communities on multiple instances, figure out how to switch from local to all, then look around for 2 minutes
After hanging out on Blue sky for a bit I’m pretty sure Mastodon could use a little algorithmic help. The communities on Mastodon are so loosely formed they can be a little hard to find, you end up looking for people with the same taste and follow their followers. It works but nothing ever gets surface to you that you didn’t actually actively look for and it seems to be kind of a mess in a Twitter scenario.
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Block lemmy.ml
Woo! That’s awesome. I am seeing quite a few more people.
We are already successful, I’m seeing stories, news articles, and videos that normally would never get pushed to the top. We can actually talk about things without overwhelming censorship, strange algorithms, or ads.
We can actually talk about things without overwhelming censorship, strange algorithms, or ads.
Fantastic! New people (and old as well), please give to the community! Post and/or comment as much as possible, to make Lemmy an even better place!
This!!
Help the communities you like to see grow.
Just making one or two posts in communities that seem dead gets the ball rolling in making them alive.
It also motivates others to post.
I’ll just say, the more I hang around Lemmy, the more I enjoy the genuine conversations. It feels like less snark, less joke replies, and just a generally more community-type feeling. Reminds me of when I first tried Reddit after leaving Digg way back when.
Hopefully, us exiles can leave the Reddit back at Reddit.
I feel the exact same, and I’ve been hanging around here for almost two years (the great 3rd party app exodus of ‘23).
This place feels more like a community filled with people versus a firehose of internet wrapped in layers of corporate and right wing BS.
Reddit was almost exclusively read-only for me. Here, I am commenting all the time.
I find a bunch of snark here, but it absolutely feels more genuine. With reddit it felt like half the comments I saw were from bots. More than half, maybe.
I hate everyone on lemmy but at least I’m hating people
Aw. We hate you too.
Yeah in a few days I’m going to delete my Reddit account, liking this place so far, you get news and genuine discussion.
Please keep it, it can be useful to promote Lemmy a bit, like we do on [email protected]
Glad that you like it here!
Don’t close it. Get permabanned instead. Make those fuckers miserable.
Get in some good trouble.
There are dozens of us.
I am one of the proud new users, and this is great to see!
Welcome! It feels fresh to not be on a big tech platform.
The MAU of lemmy.world is ~18,600 which is a bit greater than the combined MAU of the next 7 instances (a big help here is lemm.ee which has ~7000 MAU). This is a really healthy spread of users and it means we don’t lose lemmy if the biggest instance goes down.
Compare that to Mastodon, where mastodon.social has more MAU (~372,000) than the combined MAU of the next 30 instances at least (I gave up counting). Thats not healthy for the ecosystem. Though tbf the total MAU of mastodon is ~899,000 so without mastodon.social they will still have ~527,000 but it will be very spread out.
I don’t think it’s healthy enough but certainly better than the mastodon ecosystem
It’s mostly because people keep recommending LW instead of other instances.
I didn’t really understand this on the way in. Is there an explanation somewhere. I found a mobile browser app and it sort of stuck me on one without me being able to select.
I think I’m with lemme ee?
Got it. Is there a way for me to transfer or do you just register into a new account once I figure out the best server for me?
Register for a new account, but you can also export, then import your subscription list and other settings.
You have to make a new account in order to move instances. But I think you can export your subscriptions.
Awesome thanks! I will scan around for a couple weeks and then register into a new account. Being a reddifugee with the recent censorship and a big “Center for humane tech” nerd am excited to be shifting in a better direction - so will for sure be invested in server and site health.
I think the biggest instance, lemmy.world, not being operated by the Lemmy devs is also a good health indicator - on every other Fedi service I can think of, the server run by the devs is the biggest by far.
think the biggest instance, lemmy.world, not being operated by the Lemmy devs is also a good health indicator
Doubly so considering how the main devs manage their instance according to their highly controversial political views LMAO
I think the distribution is fine as long as we still have nodes with good capacity. Our real issue is everyone demanding to be on the same instance because they’re scared of Federation.
What I’d REALLY like to see is a Federated Resource Locator service, kinda like nameservice for a federated user.
[email protected] is 101254684, if I move to [email protected], I want all my followers to do that lookup and still be following me. It’s great to have my settings migrate with me, but it would be bangin’ to have other people linked to me to still follow me.
There are no followers on Lemmy
there are on mastodon
I hope they feel welcomed here to stick around. I’ve quit Reddirt in 2023 during the API exodus, came to Lemmy and never looked back.
Samesies. About the only thing I ever go back for is askhistorians
I think it’s OK here, but some communities here are a bit shit and very vocal
You know it’s bad for Reddit when people were even talking about going back to Digg
Digg still exists?
Yup
They just announced they were coming back the other day 😂
The growth in 2025 has been staggering, ngl. And this is the kind of thing which converts from a trickle to a tsunami very quickly. It never happens with one shock. But a consistent amount of enshittification shocks. Reddit’s desperate struggle for profitability practically ensures those will keep happening, so this is all inevitable at this point. The only thing that is uncertain is whether digg can recapture the fleeing masses who are not cognizant of the dangers of corporate vc-backed enshittification yet, like bluesky did to Twitter.
The user growth we’re seeomg could result in an overwhelming flood of users at anytime. Which is why people should consider supporting the lemmy devs and instance admins either financially or through contributions so that the lemmy software and infrastructure is ready to handle the growth.
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rant about eternal September, [email protected] and the young
There is beehaw.org a very peculiar instance, they defederated from lemmy.world to preserve their unique community vibe. Fediverse enables a more fine grained approach to handle those issues.
A lot of problems are still there but there are other projects that want to address them like piefed
lemmy already has a bunch of echo chambers, I think it’s inevitable from the design of a network like this where the user selects what content to view and be served
The difference is the way it is run. You got it. And if one day Midwest.social starts doing things you hate and treating it’s users like crap, then come on over to lemmy.world or lemmy.ca, or one if the other thousands instances.
People hosting the database are not the owners of the platform unlike Reddit. They get to tell us how we can use it just because they host the database.
I’ve already moved at least once and have been very happy it was as easy as it is.
I’ve never moved, but I assume you just create a new account and start over. Or is there more you can do?
it’s possible to migrate your subs on lemmy
it’s possible to both migrate your subs and make a redirect on mastodon for followers, but the redirect requires the old server to remain in service.
You bring up some good points and I do believe that the model that Lemmy use can insulate it from a lot of those issues.
People posting whatever they want wherever they want and having very little understanding of nuance in language I dont think this would be a huge problem, mods can remove unwanted content and instances can decide what type of users they want to accept. As for misusing downvotes I think that issue never has ever mattered and the difference between reddit and lemmy is we have a open source algorithm to decide how content is served. If anyone can think of a better way to server content they’re free to put that in.
moderators becoming more power hungry This is an issue on every platform but Lemmy is more insulated against it than reddit for two reasons. First is that we can have the same community name shared across servers. On reddit once someone gets the catchy community name they can camp it forever. On Lemmy you can just make the community somewhere else with the same name. Second, each instance can decide how it wants to moderate its communities on Lemmy ML they are OK with power hungry mods but on other instances its frowned upon. On reddit its ignored completely.
One thing that makes Lemmy better is that its made by the users for the users. We have the code, we have the protocol its built on. This means we can have Lemmy tailored to however we want. We are not at the whim of a massive company that only cares about profit. If I have an idea for a feature i can goto the github and suggest it, better yet if I could program it I could help build that feature. If I dont like a change that is made by the lemmy devs I can fork the project and remove the change and still interact with the rest of lemmy.
This seems unrealistic in my opinion. Normal people really don’t like to donate, unfortunately. I think that Lemmy needs to make it so anyone can easily self host an instance without too much fuss. Something like docker on an old laptop. I know they have docker containers for Lemmy already, but in my opinion, they aren’t simple enough to set up. And there should be an option to bundle it with a wireguard VPN tunnel, so that they really don’t need to fuff about with reverse proxy to browse on your phone. This way, the cost is distributed across all users. It should be that setting up a domain and port forwarding should be the largest hurdle.
I can tell you as a sample of one that everything you just said would scare me off
Its not unrealistic. I don’t think anyone expects 50% or 100% of users to donate. Also sites sustained off ads get less than a few cents per user. Donating literally anything puts you ahead of an ad supporting user. If Every lemmy user donated a dollar a year there would be 500k in rev to support the development. When the culture shifts from everything must be free to everyone giving a little to the services they use we can easily fund the costs of these platforms.
You can host an instance very easily on low spec hardware but its a lot harder than giving a small donation.
In the sims modding community people pay $5 for a dress and modders make over 100k a year. This is because sims players are happy to pay for things they find valuable.
But a consistent amount of enshittification shocks
I think the proper term is enshittification sharts
Lel
Yeah. Reddit is currently enshitifying in overdrive. They used to just do dumb features nobody wants, but now they are actively harming the base. The entire Luigi over-moderation this is just bad, and it feels like they want the formerly leftist site to go full maga now. and even if I do have to use it, the website often tends to not function properly these days, with the site constantly reloading, or voting functions to be broken. This is the year of lemmy.
I figured the planned paywalling of content was going to be the last straw for me, but then they gave me a fucking warning for upvoting. I made a Lemmy account the same day. Fuck them.
The paywall shit is still planned for this year afaik so be prepared to see more of Reddit heading this way.
Let’s go! I hope to see these numbers continue to go up as the days go on.
To anyone new wondering about phone apps for Lemmy, I use “Thunder” and it works great.
Also, feel free to say Luigi without getting banned.
Voyager also work good.
Just stay on the right side of pineapple on pizza.
/s
Insta-ban!
I love that neither of us made it a point of which side is right :P
I personally prefer Raccoon at the moment, but the gestures are starting to wear on me, so I might be switching back to Thunder. Honestly, can’t remember why I left it. I’m a persnickety bitch about apps sometimes lol
I switched to thunder from boost and it’s great.
I’m calling this one the exodus of st mangione
Luigi Migratione
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Have you considered reddit? I hear it’s a great platform for people without any sense of humour.
