this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Fediverse

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It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.

Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren't attracted enough to become regular visitors.

Curious to see at which number we'll stabilize.

Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)

Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

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[–] WoodenBleachers@lemmy.world 167 points 1 year ago (15 children)

Maybe it’s because the content here just isn’t as vast. I’m nkt going back to reddit for awhile, but there’s so little to see on lemmy to me. Despite numerous subscriptions, I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same. Sometimes this place feels like a hive-mind. Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale

[–] dingus@lemmy.ml 125 points 1 year ago (15 children)

I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same.

That's funny because the meme subs still far outpace posting from politics subs for me, and I mostly see memes.

In fact, a few weeks ago, there were lots of complaints in meme comments of how the only thing they saw on the site was memes.

[–] TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Memes may be thriving but niche interest communities can't even get off the ground.

[–] dingus@lemmy.ml 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

So just like reddit 14 years ago when I first left Digg for greener pastures. When I joined, it was years before my local city subreddit sprang to life, and for years, it had around 1000 active accounts and only now has over 10k accounts.

Man, if the people on reddit back in the day had sat around complaining about lack of content like this, the site would have died. Instead they started making fucking content.

It takes time for communities to grow, and it feels like a lot of the folks who left reddit only ever knew reddit as a ready-made-community filled with thousands of people already. As in, they were latecomers and missed all the slow growth.

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[–] Kichae@kbin.social 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see very few memes and far too much political content

Where are you even looking? My timeline is flooded with memes all the damn time. They're practically drowning out any posts of value at this point.

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[–] magic_lobster_party@kbin.social 128 points 1 year ago (8 children)

The cope is strong. Let’s not pretend fewer active users is a good thing. It just means people are unhappy and are leaving.

[–] devious@lemmy.world 46 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If the stats are accurate then this is not necessarily due to people being unhappy and leaving as both comments and posts are still stable - indicating that the lower active count are lurkers, duplicates or otherwise non engaging accounts.

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

That said, you can come up with statistics to prove anything! Forfty percent of all people know that.

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[–] Rhabuko@feddit.de 38 points 1 year ago

Yup if I hadn't blocked several communities from appearing constantly in my feed, I would leave too.

[–] Nutterthebutter@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago

Right. Everything negative about Lemmy is being turned into a positive for some reason. Truth is this is still a difficult concept for a lot of people to get on board with and the overall reliability of instances leaves much to be desired. All we need to do is continue to contribute and see what takes off.

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

But just remember: Some of those people that are not staying are the types of people you wouldn't want to interact with anyway. If the roughly 10k people who quit were Nazis (for example), it's a good thing.

[–] arefx@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

But they obviously aren't all Nazis

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[–] Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 89 points 1 year ago (9 children)

lemmy.world being down half the time probably made a lot of people think that this platform is trash and left.

[–] TheMadnessKing@lemdro.id 24 points 1 year ago

The number of times Lemmy.world was down made it unusable for me to use. Switched to Lemdro.id and it's so much better now.

[–] Rambi@lemm.ee 18 points 1 year ago

I am on Lemm.ee and haven't had a single issue

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[–] squidzorz@lemmy.world 87 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)

I'm getting pretty tired of the obvious "Big tech company bad, Twitter dead, Linux good" bias that Lemmy seems to have. It's definitely decreased my usage over the last week or two. I guess it kind of comes with the territory given Lemmy is a more complicated platform that will naturally attract more tech-oriented users, but it's still getting super old seeing the same flavor posts every single day.

[–] sheogorath@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The biggest issue for me is the stale posts keep showing on my feed. Either the posts are too old, or it's too new with low engagement. I think the sweet spot for me is when a post is in its 1/3 of its lifecycle. Already got a discussion going but not too far that I can't engage meaningfully.

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[–] provomeister@lemmy.ca 84 points 1 year ago

Switching between "Active" and "Top [1h/6h/12h]" at different times of the day has provided me with enough content & interactions to make Lemmy my new home. I always was a lurker on the old site, no comment nor post, not even an account. Now, I'm slowly trying to break from this habit. Being on Lemmy feels like I'm not shouting in the void; when a platform gets too big, you get lost in the crowd. It's always nice to see recurring usernames on different communities.

[–] Oppawaifu@lemmy.sdf.org 82 points 1 year ago (12 children)

There is no infinite doomscroll on Lemmy and that's what I used to do on Reddit. Now, I just read the top headlines and touch grass :)

[–] lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee 30 points 1 year ago (10 children)

The reason I'm still here instead of there is that I absolutely can't use their official app. I just can't. It's so awful. Lemmy isn't perfect but at least it isn't that. So I do spend less time doom scrolling and that's probably good for me.

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[–] MargotRobbie@lemm.ee 76 points 1 year ago (9 children)

And at the beginning everyone was worried about "Eternal September". It's only been two months.

People will come in waves, instances and communities will grow and die, just like how it was on reddit, we'll probably start seeing meme/politics free or even more specialized instances soon. But all of this is going to take time.

The turning point will be when companies/websites start spinning up their own Lemmy instances as their official one to replace their forums, which I think will happen.

So, being on Lemmy is a long term investment for me.

[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same for me, good to still see you around

[–] MargotRobbie@lemm.ee 20 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Hopefully this works out, gotta get that first mover advantage in, then Lemmy's only real celebrity will be recognized as the marketing genius that she is. :)

I like Lemmy better when it's when it's nicer and quieter a month ago honestly.

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[–] regalia@literature.cafe 70 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It always dies down after the initial hype. It seems pretty stable now. Compare it to pre-exodus and it is still like hundreds of times more popular then before.

[–] isthingoneventhis@lemmy.world 32 points 1 year ago (16 children)

It honestly feels nice because the activity feels human and not just spammy low-effort comments 0:

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[–] Polar@lemmy.ca 57 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I dropped off because I am unbelievably sick of seeing the same thing posted across 20 different communities. No matter which sort I am using, my front page is CLUTTERED with the same crap.

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[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 48 points 1 year ago (23 children)

There are many fatal problems on Lemmy, worst of all is you can't click this link /c/books and see every /c/book on every Lemmy instance of the fediverse. This is out of convenience to moderators and it is killing Lemmy. One people figure out communities only exist on a single instance, the promise of federation is broken and they fuck off.

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[–] imgonnatrythis@lemm.ee 47 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Pretty sure it's going to just be like 12 of us. If the third party app thing on reddit didn't drive users here, unfortunately I don't think anything else will. At this point if you are already content with the reddit app it's going to be a hard sell to say, yeah come check out Lemmy, it's like reddit but if you have a question about your sick betta fish instead of getting a helpful answer in a few minutes, you need to first create a betta fish community, then go back on reddit and recruit users to your Lemmy community. Post content on it daily to maintain interest, and then, if you are really lucky, ask your question and wait a few months and maybe if your fish is still alive (doubtful), you might get a response, but it will probably be just be an anticapitalist shit-post. I'm sorry to say it is this way, but this be the way that it is.

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[–] itadakimasu@lemmy.world 46 points 1 year ago (17 children)

JFC there's only 60k of us? And that's a good thing? 😳

[–] Tudou@feddit.uk 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It does explain why all the niche communities I visit have gone from quiet to abandoned.

[–] spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That and the sorting at this time really doesn't allow for niche communities to grow.

[–] cybermass@lemmy.ca 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is one of the biggest issues with Lemmy right now.

I'm gonna keep holding out cause I hope that Lemmy will have improvements like sorting algorithms and mod tools and such, users have stabilized.

If the users keep going down I might have to go back to Reddit, a man can only laugh at the same Linux meme so many times.

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[–] Kushan@lemmy.world 40 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Yeah, it's not a good thing and I'm getting sick of people on here trying to gaslight themselves into thinking it is. The same people saying that this is good are also mocking X and threads for losing users. Nobody's claiming that's good for those platforms.

We want growth, more users and more instances is better for Lemmy overall.i don't buy this arguments of "people are just not using their alts", I mean fuck off, that statement was pulled from OP's arse with nothing to back it up.

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[–] NuPNuA@lemm.ee 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Some subs on Reddit were practically unusable due to the amount of users and the noise they created. Especially if you weren't in an American timezone so missed the early chatter before everyone piled on. I've come to appreciate less users being here.

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[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 42 points 1 year ago (3 children)

These numbers are not descriptive. Check out the daily stats.

  • Active users per day has already stabilised.
  • Active users half year is still climbing so we have people coming in.
  • Shitposts per day are growing exponentially.
  • People are still leaving from the Reddit influx. Lemmy just wasn't for them.

Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120 Daily stats lemmy

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[–] spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

Regardless of where the loss in users is coming from the major takeaway here is that we are firmly in a reinvestment phase. This will likely last until Reddit does something stupid related to the IPO but in the absence of that we will probably not see a significant uptick in growth again without major improvements to the threadiverse as a whole. That means that those of us who are personally invested in the growth of the threadiverse should be taking this time to develop the tools and features necessary to weather the next wave more gracefully than the last.

One of the biggest issue I see here is still community growth. Growing certain communities is significantly harder than others and if you don't have a lot of crossposting potential it can be damn near impossible. As it stands, I do not see a way to fix this situation without a hot and active ranking system that takes into account the number of users active in the particular community. As part of a change like this I think we would be best served by consolidating a significant portion of the small dead communities. I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics. As it stands only a handful of them have enough broader threadiverse activity to be truly useful.

Another thing I would like to suggest is a change in recruitment strategy. At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.

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[–] 5redie8@sh.itjust.works 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Bizarrely it feels way more active, the people leaving were never going to contribute anyway and that's fine. It seems to be stabilizing at a good amount of content per day.

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[–] flathead@quex.cc 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 19 points 1 year ago

Well, in that case the bar is on the ground

[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a personal opinion, but I would also be happy to see some groups spread on different communities to decide together on one community and make it grow together.

Browsing /all and seeing still another book or gaming community first post always makes me question if that post would not be better used in an established community.

And I know this will happen naturally overtime, I guess sometimes I would just like things to happen a bit faster and on a organized way.

[–] dingus@lemmy.ml 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I personally don't mind having multiple communities on different servers because some of these servers go down... a lot.

Makes sense to have "backups" sort of littered throughout the Fediverse, imho. I like seeing what different groups have to say about the subjects, too. Like, a thread will be wildly different on lemmy.world and beehaw.org, because I'm fairly sure beehaw is still defederated with lemmy.world, meaning I'll see very different groups of people on each instance's community.

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[–] Poggervania@kbin.social 20 points 1 year ago

It’s probably more likely that we’re losing more of the “Fediverse is just Reddit 2.0” kind of people - which is great because that’s 10k or w/e less Redditors that’ll go back on the platform they actually want to use.

Fediverse doesn’t have an ocean of communities and content (yet), but that’s fine with me since I’m more active here and trying to offer more insightful comments outside of the Reddit staple “this” kind of comments.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"This is good for Bitcoin" vibes there.

[–] 14specks@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Key difference is that Bitcoin people want/need their numbers to go up,up,up as a measure of success.

Here, we are hoping to cultivate a healthy community (at either/both the instance and fediverse level). From my experience on various subreddits, focusing on growth is not a good way to do this.

Communities are defined more by who is not allowed in than by who is in the community. Lemmy phase 2 kicked off back in June, and it still needs some time to find its footing at a sustainable rate of growth.

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