Let’s look at some numbers and do some napkin math:
Currently, the top post of Lemmy can usually get a little more than 2K upvotes, which puts Lemmy at about late 2010 to early 2011 reddit level of activity, which is right before reddit hits its explosive growth phase in 2012 with SOPA, Kony, and the Obama AMA. While active user count has been going down, the amount of post and comments have both been steadily going up.
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity. (unless you count 9gag or the_donald for some reason.)
That is a very astute observation, and I would not worry about the temporary decline for this very reason.
Also, looking at your username… ”can somebody please find Margot Robbie so that I can make sense of all this”
That’s esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
It’s very simple, most of the posts here are circle jerks (Linux, FOSS, boy howdy aren’t we better than Reddit, communism) or rage bait.
I only come here when I’m having a good day and I want to reel myself in a bit
Edit: see below to see how far Lemmy users will go to circle jerk how much better they are than Reddit
Yeah the “All” in particular is pretty bad for the average person. They’re not going to enjoy a Star Trek meme, followed by a Arch meme, a Self-hosted post, a grad-student Science meme, followed by a privacy post.
I’m also convinced Lemmy’s “hot” algorithm is broken; I can easily find posts with ONE UPVOTE on the all feed. Hot is supposed to be a balance between acceleration and total vote count, but it seems like it just only acceleration. Go look at the front page of reddit. The difference is night and day.
We need a normie.world that has an “all” feed that doesn’t contain 70% niche communities. We have c/humor, c/news, etc but they’re completely diluted by overpowered niche posts.
I have a potentially contentious opinion. Normies are what ruined Reddit and the crowd attracted by normie communities are why Reddit is even more toxic than it used to be.
We don’t need to attract normies, we just need to attract more people like us.
I don’t hate normies by any means, but I don’t want to hang out with them all day either.
Yeah I completely disagree. Imagine if a city/local gov wanted to use Lemmy in order to be self hosted (similar to EU govs switching to Mastodon) but the public just wonders why their local gov put their stuff on a weird circle jerk website that’s flooded with niche memes. “Why didn’t they use the normal thing (i.e. reddit)?”
We should be welcoming enough that, when someone wants to make a new subreddit, they make Lemmy community instead. And I don’t think thats the case right now.
“Memes that people don’t get are unwelcoming.”
If a person sees something they’ve never seen before, and turns around and flees, that’s a problem with them being sheltered and pathetic, not a problem with the new thing they haven’t encountered before.
It’s not fleeing as much as it is being so bored that that they never really find the motivation to come back.
That’s not lemmy, that’s all social media (albite divisive topics are a bit different among different communities).
This is a hot take, but I think humanity is slowly turning it’s back on social media because of it’s toxic nature. You can only open a browser and get your nuts kicked so many times before you finally decide you don’t like getting your nuts kicked.
Honestly a lot of it is probably people getting comfortable lurking again, Lemmy only counts post and comments as active users
It’s funny how despite social media becoming very normal, the old phenomenon of most content getting generated by a small portion of power users persists.
Tervell and Dirt_Owl.
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Me no lurk. Me comment.
Commenting so I‘m active :)
I’m doing my part!
So glad I decided to stop lurking and actually start participating right as the whole fediverse dies out, it’s not just lemmy.
I find it more comfortable to contribute to Lemmy than to other sites. There seems to be actual discussion and opportunities to learn, which can be much harder to come across on the other platforms.
That I agree with. I don’t post often but when I do it’s always very positive and makes me want to post more . Compared to Reddit where it would have alot more negative comments or would just get removed by the mods for some stupid reason. Did you know you can no longer post on r/buildapc about asking for suggestions on building PC’s ? What’s even the point anymore?
And fewer comments that are clearly a chat bot.
Don’t worry! They’ve just become less obvious.
When you come across a ‘user’ that almost exclusively defends one controversial politician/company/government and all of their comments seem to follow a script. Also the account is either brand new or 5 years old but only started posting recently.
I exclusively surf “top 6 hours” and I’ve actually noticed an uptick in niche community content, lately. Different kind of growth, maybe a sort of settling into itself, finally.
If everyone is browsing by top-6-hour I think we need to rethink the sorting of things.
Oh yeah, the sort here kind of sucks. Also just using the site, you lose your place/sort if you click into a link or the comments. Like, if I’m on page 2 of Top 6 Hours, click a link, and then click back into the scroll… pretty sure I just see the first page of Active again until I either refresh or change pages.
That could definitely be improved as well.
I don’t think Voyager has this problem. Highly, highly recommend, both on desktop and mobile. The UI is slick enough that it’s kept me here. All I do is laugh at shit memes but it’s perfect
I sort by New. Bring it all on.
Lemmy is cool and all but the amount of communist obsession here is a bit much.
It was founded by a Communist, and decentralization appeals to leftists. The non-Communist lemmy is Reddit, basically, or making your own instance or finding an anti-Communist instance.
This is why Lemmy will never be anything more than tiny a niche platform. It’s a place for the far left by the far left. There’s nothing here in place for anybody else. I don’t just mean politics wise, I mean everything. There’s nothing for fandoms, shows, movies, sports, or anything really. You have to be privacy/tech nerd or some left wing extremist to really enjoy this place more than Reddit. Since the portion of the population that this platform is trying to appeal to is extremely small, this platform will always be small. There’s little to not attempts by the devs or the community to make this place appeal to everybody else.
What, exactly, could be done to make it appeal to non-leftists, structurally? Addition of advertisers? Lol.
There are few things the developers could do. For example, they could make the platform easier to use. Many people don’t even reach this place because they’re not that tech savvy or simple don’t care enough to figure it out. It’s much easier for them to just create an account and get started on Reddit or elsewhere. This leaves extremists with nowhere else to go and tech bros… which are the two groups that dominate this place. The process of getting on board and finding instances/communities needs to be easier. There needs to be something like centralized site/app that is easily accessible and shows all the different instances and communities in one place.
It’s not that complicated, go to an instance and sign up.
What actually dominates Lemmy are groups of people that value bottom-up organizational structures, decentralization, FOSS, and other general structural decisions made with creating Lemmy. This leaves people that like these principles, and actually care enough to move to an instance despite mass adoption of a more top-down, Capitalist site like Reddit.
Decentralization isn’t left wing or right wing, that’s just a moronic analysis. Decentralization has a wide appeal but unless it gets simplified and standardized it will never become adopted by the mainstream. Places like Lemmy which are littered with gatekeepers like you doom this place to forever being a niche. If this place ever hopes of rivaling reddit, it needs to appeal to more than political extremists and tech nerds
Decentralization is far more left than it is right, hence why Lemmy has a ton of leftists. It wasn’t just chance.
All the people constantly complaining about “tankies” and “commies”: You are the problem. Normal people are repulsed by that shit. The only reason you don’t see more pushback against it is because nobody wants to get inundated with pedo-nazis trying to draw them into a debate where they’re either forced to side with literal nazis or the worst strawmen of socialism that they can think up, where if they back down or stand up for their values at any point, they get targeted for harassment. I deal with that shit regularly because I’m built for it. Most people aren’t.
Not to draw either of us into this but you are specifically one of the users that makes me not want to hang out on lemmy.
As someone who posts a ton, I’ve noticed that a lot of people seem to check the top posts once a day or so. Posts can be slow to get engagement and traction, but the ones that become super active still seem to hit similar peaks as before (1-2k upvotes, hundreds of comments).
But yeah, people aren’t as actively engaged and commenting on everything all day like they used to on reddit. The framework is here, and I think if there were another big exodus, Lemmy is set up to be a great landing point.
But on the other hand reddits comments were frequently shallow and full of annoying jokes. I love reading Lemmy!
Lemmy is neither popular nor heavily advertised, so people join at a slow rate
On the other hand, the amount political discussions, Hexbear, and lack of content result in disinterested people leaving Lemmy and joining Reddit
So the user count is decreasing because Reddit refugees are leaving faster than new people are joining
Memes are at least 50% shilling for communism.
If that’s not your jam go to your ad filled corpo hellscape and talk to bots 🤷♂️
Lemmy is whatever we make it, except for the communism posts that love communism until they realize workers need representation. I half believe those are Chinese bots or high school kids who are stupid enough to believe the Chinese bots.
Got new for you champ China doesn’t gaf about communism… and they sure as fuck don’t care enough to deploy bots on lemmy… The fediverse maybe…
Right. Magically, everyone on the Internet has become infatuated with communism out of thin air over the last few years. Must just be my paranoia to surggest influence from a hostile government.
How do you account for the vast amount of anti-CPC Communists, Socialists, and Anarchists, if this “influence from a hostile government” is so effective? Might it be simpler to see that Capitalism’s increasing failure has driven more people in developed countries towards radicalization, especially as generations are further removed from the Red Scare?
How can we grow lemmy? I would honestly interact here a lot more if we had an active ML community like reddit or twitter.
But since it is a small community, maybe we can do interactive things more often?
lemmy still isnt nearly as good as reddit was by a long shot. niche communities suck, porn sucks, c/all content isnt bad but if you scroll once youll just repeat everything on refresh.
but god damn the reddit app is terrible now and the content sucks there now too it literally feels like its trying to be a tik tok clone.
Quit porn
I’m one of the people who has stopped coming here. I’ll keep visiting occasionally but the lack of content and pro-east/anti-west rhetoric is just as irritating as the maga/conspiracy crowds on reddit.
Do you visit here/Reddit for some news alongside other stuff, or more other stuff than news?
If the latter, you can somewhat avoid the rhetoric back & forth by blocking out a lot of the news communities, but then you do run into the general content problem more (especially if you’re also blocking memes).
I’ve been looking for more specific subjects now but generally I just browse active/top/hot all. Reddit is getting really bad…
Yeah… I’ve also never watched star trek, or used Linux, or had Firefox and browsing is all that.
You should have seen Lemmy before June 2023. All posts were from the same five people. For now the community seems to be alive and healthy.
