I joined during the first Reddit exodus, and it seemed like for ages the amount of Lemmy content was generally increasing (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but overall increasing). Now it seems that when I sort by New, I get through everything since my last visit much more quickly than I used to. Is that my imagination, or is the activity declining?
I think I’ve just reduced social media participation in general.
I still browse a lot but with so much AI bollocks and rage bait and engagement farming and any other manner of “fake stuff pretending to be real stuff” going on it just doesn’t seem worth it to actually participate much.
Best case: I get some upvotes, and my comment is stolen for training an AI
Worst case: I get no upvotes, and my comment is stolen for training an AI
I’m actually coming back to Lemmy. I left reddit, but then went back to it with limited participation. And now it’s truly a cesspool. Lemmy may not be a perfect replacement, but it feels better. I should have never left.
There’s way less content here but the content that is here is way better, and the level of intelligence and civility on display is night and day vs Reddit.
Sorry to hear your experience was so bad, but welcome back.
The situation with bots and trolls on Reddit is horrific. Do you remember that time a few years back when Russia disconnected their whole country from the Internet? That day there was a dramatic decrease in assholes and trolls. Like, night and day, it was unmistakeable and widely commented on.
So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.
So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.
At the very least, I suspect Lemmy, as a federated network, has more power to filter them. We saw years ago what happened when the Wolfballs bigots tried to join, they were eventually isolated by most other instances who continued to run without them. So as long as we can retain a situation where the largest instances actually take a solid stance against assholes and trolls and bigots, then it becomes much easier to make them all optional, shunned to register on the more liberalist permissive instances.
Good point. Also worth noting that, since Lemmy isn’t owned by a company trying to make a profit, there’s no incentive to put up with outrageous jerks who drive up engagement.
Seems the same
I feel the same
Ah the twice yearly post asking if Lemmy is dying.
Ah the twice yearly post
I recently re-joined Lemmy, so I am not sure how it changed, but I am mostly a Mastodon user and I noticed that people were flooding it in large quantities when something stupid happened on Twitter (again), and then leaving it after a short while to go back to Twitter or quitting social media altogether. I would suspect that people either started going back to Reddit, or decided to get a mental health break from the internet as a whole (which wouldn’t surprise me, the internet is pretty depressing lately).
This fits my profile. I actively browsed and contributed to Lemmy for about 4 months following the US inauguration, but all the useful stuff I want is still on Reddit and Twitter. I still look at Lemmy around once per week, but honestly it seems like there’s a lot more political rage bait and not as much in the way of niche community content.
I can relate to that. Most of the info I usually need from Reddit is about gaming, and the majority of games I play aren’t even mentioned here. I also agree on the political ragebait part. I narrow my feed down to the communities I follow only, because the moment I use “All”, I get a lot of these.
Games genre communities (!jrpg@lemmy.zip ) are doing okay, game-specific communities are probably too niche for now yet.
yeah, talk about all jrpgs in that community until it’s busy enough to subdivide
The world is a pretty depressing place lately.
Also re:lemmy/piefed - there are quite a few people who are very loud and vocal about things, and a lot of the opinions here lean to the left a lot. Not that it is a bad thing, but some folk appear to have got fed up of this and as a result have migrated elsewhere. I like it here, but it can be far from helpful at times
I’m in the UK and I am seeing a decline across virtually everything tinternet related. Years of rising rpices, job security worries and just a shift in attitudes has made people far more wary and less time to post, interact etc. plus the modern fragmented web doesn’t help
I rarely post but comment a fair amount. To me, it’s only been recent, but I’ve noticed a decline, too.
I’ve definately noticed it too. I’ve tried to look for stats, and most seem to indicate that there is plenty of activity, but really see it. At this point, I can scroll through the day’s all feed in like 20 minutes, nonetheless my subscribed feed. I kind-of wonder if theres one or two instances with a lot of bot activity effectively inflating the numbers.
That was what got me making this post.
I said that in July instance admins said it’s often quieter over summer
I’d expect that, although I’ve noticed this trend continuing (and seemingly getting worse) for months now.
I don’t know how to check for the whole lemmy but seems it’s growing a bit but the MAU dropped a bit probably because of august: https://fedidb.com/servers/lemmy.world
But the fediverse in general doesn’t grow too much except when a scandal happens.
Watch out, the statistics might not say what you think they do.
“Total users” is a meaningless metric. All it showes is how many users aren’t using lemmy anymore.
“Monthly active users” is the only meaningful metric, and it’s fluctuating and currently going down.
“Activity growth” doesn’t actually show the number of new activities per month, but the total count of activities. So with constant activity you’d expect linear “activity growth” and with growing activity you’d see the line curling upward. It is currently mostly linear but slightly declining.
So these statistics show a slow decline, not an increase.
But in a way you can be happy that it doesn’t grow a lot. With the base architecture of ActivityPub (every instance contains a copy of everything, all content needs to be propagated to all instances, all content needs to be duplicate-moderated by all instances’ admins) it is absolutely not designed to handle large amount of users.
If only a tenth of a percent of Reddit users were to switch over to Lemmy, everything would grind to a halt and most instances would have to close down because running them would become to expensive for a non-profit project.
Yeah one has to be careful with statistics and I couldn’t find the whole Lemmy in one place so it’s also not representative of the whole Lemmy.
I thought ActivityPub did scale well and was ATProto (Bluesky) which had a lot more issues. I mean I can comment on Peertube using my Mastodon account meaning the whole Fediverse is properly connected and we are 1M MAU so I would say it already scaled good.
Here’s all of fediverse: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=1000
Also remember, though it says ‘daily’ in the title, that only refers to that the stats are grouped by day. They are still total numbers (e.g. total number of posts that are available on that day, not number of new posts created that day).
Lemmy has the big issue that each instance needs to cache the whole content of each community any user of that instance ever subscribed to. Since Reddit-style platforms only make sense if there are huge communities that means that the biggest communities have most of the traffic while being subscribed to by most instances. That means that most instances have copies of most content.
Same goes with moderation. Since every instance holds a copy of the content, each instance’s operator is liable for illegal content stored on their server, and most instance operators also want their moderation guidelines enforced across the whole instance, even for content coming from other instances, so each instance needs to moderate all content. Content moderation on one instance is not propagated to other instances (unless the moderation happens on the host instance of the community), so you end up with moderators of dozens of instances each having to individually e.g. delete the same post.
This is already such a strain that e.g. Lemmy.ee got shut down because it was just so much work and money doing all of that, and that’s with a miniscule amount of ~40k monthly active users across all of Lemmy. Compare that to the 1.2 billion monthly active users on Reddit. If we only got a tenth of a percent of all Reddit users over to Lemmy, the whole system would come crashing down.
The user you are replying to has specifically sourced lemmy.world data there, which is not going to give you an overall for the wider fediverse.
This here is a better source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=1000
That’s all of lemmy over the last 1000 days.
Most important takeaways:
- Active users tend to only grow during special events (usually “Reddit pulls some new shit”) and then declines slowly as people fade back out.
- When instances close, users tend to just disappear (as when Lemmy.ee closed down). The Lemmy.ee users seem to have just disappeared instead of migrated to another instance.
- Number of active servers is in a strict decline. Apart from the initial rush, smaller instances seem to go down and don’t get replaced. Most users seem to prefer to use big instances.
- Comments again shows the total number of comments available, not new comments coming in. As you can see, the angle of the curve gets slightly flatter over time, meaning that activity drops. It also shows well that when instances get closed down lots of content just disappears.
- Posts also shows a similar decline, though even stronger than comments.
When instances close, users tend to just disappear (as when Lemmy.ee closed down). The Lemmy.ee users seem to have just disappeared instead of migrated to another instance.
I suggest you look at the piefed activity indicator for more context here.
A big chunk of the lemm.ee base went here, and its gaining servers where Lemmy is losing them.
Yeah, that makes sense. Though still Lemmy.ee’s closure is a drop of ~4500 monthly active users while piefed only totals ~1700 monthly active users in total.
Oh yes, it has some impact - but the slow decline of Lemmy instance activity has to be contextualised with whats going on Piefed (and to a lesser extent: Mbin)
Kbin exists as well, unless something changed since the last time I looked.
But one thing is for certain: The whole field isn’t growing right now.
That link is just hanging for me.
The stats say the userbase is increasing, but it also feels like there’s been a lot less content being posted recently.
I honestly think that the whole internet is in decline.
I was just thinking everything seems to either be in decline, stagnation, or regression.
Maybe the whole age verification thing is keeping people offline.
Missing the Internet of my youth makes me feel older than almost anything else.
Fewer things are sadder than the reality of the Internet compared to what we envisioned early on.
It’s perhaps the greatest tragedy of my lifetime, I’m truly not exaggerating. We went from the free sharing of the majority of human knowledge to forcing people to sell their souls for YouTube money.
I feel the same way. I was a CS major in the early 80s. I watched the internet become something amazing, and then I watched it rot. Heartbreaking.
we are, right now, part of the un-rotting
That’s just UK currently
Right, but I’m assuming there’s a nontrivial number of UK users.
Well there’s an amount, but it wouldn’t have much impact on the Fediverse as there’s no age-ID here.
Therefore to comply, the server would relocate or go offline.
Lemmy.zip is the only notable instance to have done this. Mostly because the owner is based in the UK.
I’m not in a country with the age verification thing, but has it been turned on for Lemmy servers?
no
I don’t know, but I was thinking it might be causing people to be less online generally, even if Lemmy itself isn’t a problem. I wonder what the Lemmy NSFW people are doing.
I don’t know of any servers that have started to verify ages, but some have started to geoblock countries whose laws require it.
I think Lemmy needs a better way to federate communities, so if you sub to say a “Star Trek” community on 3 instances, you don’t get the same post 3 times, but instead it’s somehow linked and content federates; this would be at the community and not instance level, so there’s more community self-governance, and communities can migrate instances without so much intervention from instance admins. I think that will really help growth and decentralization.
Piefed has this with reposts
mbin also will group multiple posts with the same link or the same title together. Occasionally, this means a months old post with the same (simple) title will show up, but I’m okay with that.
Its so nice.
It does
The whole point of federation is a variety of moderation styles so it doesn’t really make sense to federate in comments from other communities because it would take away any identity that exists
What about that issue do you think is causing less activity? Just people not wanting to engage as much because of the redundancy?
Yea, if people get too annoyed seeing the same story in 4 communities, I think eventually they consolidate down to one, and the fracturing reduces engagement across ALL the communities; a couple become ghost towns, etc. It’s a different sense of engagement to see 4 threads with 2-4 comments instead of seeing 1 with 20.
I’m trying to relate that to the experience back on Reddit, where the same thing happened. Didn’t seem to hinder growth. But often people would abandon the smaller versions of the communities for the larger ones.
People always complain about this but Lemmy does actually combine crossposts in your feed. What frontend are you using? Or maybe it’s just bugged? If someone can figure out the bug and how to reproduce it, it needs to be submitted to GitHub.
Here’s a reference to the feature, a fixed bug, disabling the deduplication for a single community view https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2104#issuecomment-2316048658
I’m relatively new here, the only negative thing I notice is mods/creators reposting the same stuff every ~6-24 hours to make it ‘seem’ like there is more activity, which I think backfires more than not.
If you mean the “how is your day going so far” type of posts, I don’t think those are meant to be deceptive so much as to generate engagement by placing the post into people’s subscribed feeds.
But if you mean the same identical post, that’s not great - perhaps you want to unsubscribe from communities that do or even allow such practices.
I love the little personal threads. Im not sure if they exist on other platforms but its one of my favourite things about lemmy so far.
Yes I really like that too, it’s something that’s unusual on social media and is really nice. Gives a sense of community
Oh, I haven’t noticed that.
Are you sure you arent seeing posts of the same community being hosted from other instances? Ive been here a while and havent seen any reposting within the same community of the same instance. (Or atleast not repetitively.)
