I feel like that is more or less to be expected. A ton of people found Lemmy during the reddit protests. Now that the protests are gone and Lemmy has had its growing pains some users are leaving, going back to reddit or other places. If we keep using it and making content users will grow organically.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
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I wish there was a way to migrate all my subscriptions, cause then I would probably change instances to ease the burden on my current instance.
There are ways! Have a look at these:
I haven’t tried it out but have been watching it. Looks like a great tool!
It’s worked excellently. Very easy to use.
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
There are a few others, mostly command line scripts.
LASIM can copy your current subs to another instance, as others have said. I wish there was a way to migrate posts/comments over. I guess you could just link to your old account in your bio though.
I found this
I appreciate World’s transparency but it’s been a lot nicer on lemm.ee for me. Not having a way to kill time when I need to isn’t the end of the world but definitely annoying.
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I have also recently moved and it makes me wonder, will users moving to other instances affect the graph?
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I don’t think it’s about a craving for centralisation but for newcomers and people still learning the core ideas about decentralisation it’s about a promise of more active engagement and more varied content.
And FOMO. New users gravitate towards the large instances because they think they will miss content, not knowing they can easily access said content on any instance as long as it hasn’t defederated from them.
I’m barely seeing any content at all, I often see a post click on the community and it shows either 2 other posts and nothing else or nothing at all. It constantly seems like the majority of posts just disappear into the void.
It is much much more of a pain to access content on small instances where it hasn’t synced yet. It means visiting those larger instances anyway to check if it’s worth subscribing to communities. And then trying to actually subscribe is a lesson in patience while it gives you no search results and errors out if you try to visit an unsynced community directly.
Of course it’s not about centralisation per se, but the problems that a centralised platform does not have to deal with.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
Because decentralization, at least as it is now, runs counter to what people are looking for in a social media platform; mainly discoverability.
Does it though? My instance has very little locally, but if I browse ‘All’ it really isn’t any different than being on any other instance, even a big one.
You are only shown what your server has stored. Your server only stores what people of your instance have subscribed to. If you visit bogger instances, they all have different Hot feeds, because each server pulls different content. There is no one way to see what is going on in all of the fediverse. You are only ever shown a part.
Sure but above a certain user count, your instance will usually have at least one subscriber to just about every active community. (I may have used a bot to help this process…)
Subscribe to what you want to see?
It’s not that users want to centralize everything. It’s Lemmy’s design that promotes it, because despite federation, there are still advantages to choosing big instances and communities.
- Joining the largest instance makes searching, joining, or opening communities much more seamless.This can be addressed by:
- Improving the search so that it can find communities, or even content, that no one on the instance has subscribed yet.
- Making it easier to open a community in your home instance.
- In addition to Sub/Local/All feed, you can have a “moderated” feed (with communities selected by admins). The “local” feed is most useful for instances on a specific topic. But for very small instances, it’ll be too empty at least at first. So a moderated feed can create an on-topic feed that’s more lively.
- For most topics, only the largest communities are large enough to have good content, so everyone wants to join them. To address this, you need some easy mechanism to subscribe to all communities on a topic. For example, we can let communities follow other communities. Then people can create topical meta-communities that aggregate content without centralizing it.
This is the big one to me. It’s much more difficult to search for specific content if it’s isolated amongst communities on different servers, all trying to fill the same niche and splitting the potential userbase for said niche up between them.
If there was like a tag system in place that communities could use to tag themselves as being for a specific thing, like cooking, for example, and then you could aggregate/search posts from all communities under the cooking tag across all servers federated with yours, it would greatly simplify finding content for less tech literate users while also increasing the resilience of the entire network by allowing more communities for a specific niche to exist, which would prevent content loss if one server goes down without discoverability being an issue.
You also don’t have the content of Reddit. It doesn’t take too long to scroll through all top six hours and get to the single digits of upvotes.
Kinda cozy though, if you pay attention you kinda see who’s active.
Like you, only user on my instance who has more comments than me.
How do you think I got so much karma on Reddit?
If Lemmy gets significantly larger we gotta figure out how to make our own CC
Right now private communities aren’t really possible.
There are a lot of parts of Lemmy that are rough around the edges or aren’t there at all. Hopefully it improves over time, especially as new front end apps can free developers to focus on the back end, but we’ll see.
It’s hard to find instances that offer what world offers, so I get it.
OTOH, I ended up moving or handing over most of my communities that I had created on world because this instance is TOO popular and bogged down all the time. Plus, they make arbitrary and drastic decisions without discussion on matters like defederation and often banning. It’s smart to go to a smaller instance but it’s also risky because any instance could go down at any moment. That’s why many of my communities are duplicated (across world and infosec) because it would be devastating to lose all of those quality links and engagement.
It’s that everyone wants to create the same community on different instances.
I think more people need to make communities they are interested in that might already exist on beehaw/lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/etc but on other instances. We really need to not keep everything on a few instances… I agree it contradicts itself. I tried by creating fallout but hard to get activity. Even its main community is quiet so that makes sense. I might try something a bit less niche.
I think there is a gap in understanding how Lemmy works and how it differs from reddit, in particular with the less technical crowd. We definitely don’t want people sharing giant instances, but that matches more with the sign up for reddit, use reddit logic many people are used to.
I think it’s also why we have seen such drama over Sync for Lemmy and its ads and pricing. To the techy crowd that was the majority of Lemmy users, that all seems antithetical to what Lemmy is and how it works. To the people who came to Lemmy from reddit, and especially those who may have tried out Lemmy because of Sync, the criticism sounds maddening because that’s the way it always worked on reddit.
So in some sense all of this is expected. Lemmy will lose some users, but maybe it will find an equilibrium. The key focus these days imho should be outreach about smaller instances, and outreach about donating to your instance (if you can) to keep it running.
I like the idea of federated social media platforms conceptually, but ai absolutely want to make my home on the largest instances. That’s just an artifact of how I use social media, though, I always gravitate towards the busiest platforms because interacting with so many people is the real joy of it.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
Is that any different on Mastodon and other Fediverse projects?
Same shit happened with the ‘temporary’ mass migration to Signal.
That doesn’t seem weird to me. Honestly it seems weird that it’s that active. I would’ve expected a sharper, quicker decline. Retaining active users is hard.
Exactly. Users who are involved in extremely niche communities will probably not find a place on Lemmy/Kbin yet. In 2008, reddit was the same. The politics subreddit only had 50,000 subscribers.
It’s all about momentum. The more users we have, the more engagement in niche communities, the more it’ll attract and retain users.
And loads of people hear the buzz, try it out and leave when they grow bored. I think the reason for the downward spike not being worse is that the threshold to take part in Lemmy communities is higher than many social media sites, and invested time registering makes people more likely to stay.
Lemmy is a much closer analog to Reddit than Mastodon is for Twitter. While Mastodon has similar basic functionality to Twitter, it lacks a lot of the features that make it easy to find new content and new people to follow.
Pair that with some very polished third-party mobile reddit apps with large, loyal followings transitioning to Lemmy and it became way easier to abandon reddit for Lemmy than it was to leave Twitter for Mastodon. I’m a huge open source supporter, but the average user doesn’t care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.
Am I being retained?!??
until personal interest groups are populated people will not use this site. its basically 1 big meme sub right now with some tech and politics sprinkled on top.
Some dropoff after initial hype is normal. Now we just continue as usual until reddit pisses people off again.
I’m to tired to make quality posts. Props to the people that can do that every day. Best I got is a few mildly opinionated comments.
I’m actively lurking, I just have nothing of value to share 🌝
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It’s a FOMO, bigger is better, kind of thing. I think some people came here looking for a replacement, which can’t happen, instead of looking for a community, which can.
It’s funny that you say that. Although it’s not I guess replacing Reddit in terms of scale, the browsing experience on Lemmy and that community feeling is actually an improvement for me.
So, I guess for me Lemmy is a more than adequate replacement. I don’t want all of Reddit here though, I think that would cause a whole lot more problems than it would solve.
Bigger is better, that’s why I got a big truck on big wheels and only eat corndogs whole while enjoying it a little too much.
It’s okay for it to die down a bit after a massive influx like we saw from Reddit.
In the long run though, if it isn’t growing it’s dying. Lemmy is still small. If it succeeds at what it’s trying to do, it should definitely grow.
It’s a little worrying that we can’t grow faster than the novelty-die-off rate. But not cause for alarm as yet.
I’m okay with it being smaller. I don’t think I want this to be Reddit-sized. I would like more users for sure but not that many.
Well, to keep a user is way harder than to attract his attention.
I think that the key differences between this platform(s) and the more known alternatives are part of the problem - people are very dumb these days and lazy. Often the first reaction to something new and not working in the expected way is to skip it, or demand the solution, rather than look around, try different approach and such.
I feel like I’m witnessing Diaspora 2.0 effect…
Yes, most people give up as soon as something does not work first time.
Maybe there are enough of us to be enough abd to fix those annoying little things that make lemmy complicated to use.
A lot if issues got resolved, apps are here,it is getting better fast.
I doubt it - too many people with different preferences they aren’t willing to let go, I’m afraid.
If you’re asking me, it’s “good enough” the way it is. I’d gladly have some more content filters, but even without them I perceive it as a platform with enough potential to consider it good.
There’s a flaw in your logic around people’s preferences if Lemmy wants to keep growing - at the end of the day, Lemmy is a service, and people shouldn’t be expected to give up what they want from a service. They’ll just go somewhere else if they aren’t getting the services they want.
It’s like if a restaurant told you what they were going to serve you and you better eat it or go find somewhere else to eat. Nobody’s going to put up with that. They’ll go somewhere else to eat. Just because you think the food is good doesn’t make that a good service model.
Now, I’m not saying that Lemmy should copy Reddit, or Facebook, or whatever else because that would defeat the entire point of Lemmy. But, taking into consideration the friction points people have with using federated platforms and coming up with ways to reduce that friction will only end up helping everybody. For example, finding a way to make a native aggregator for similar communities across multiple instances would not only help with discoverability for smaller communities, but would increase engagement by simplifying the process of users being able to find content they’re looking for while also allowing for more instances of those communities to exist across more servers without splitting or isolating the userbase to those servers, which would increase the resilience of Lemmy’s communities to specific servers going down.
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I think those issues will be solved though. Apps will increasingly make onboarding simpler so Lemmy will be as simple to use as Reddit.
At that point really its just a case of waiting for Reddit to fuck itself, which it absolutely will do eventually via corporate greed, and there we go, all the Lemmy content anyone could ever need.
I don’t think Reddit will fall, sadly.
It harbors too many people, who go there for a specific content and don’t care about the internal dramas, or who leads the place and what he thinks about the userbase. In addition… Eh, it hosted Obama, Arnold, plenty of actors, celebrities.
My assumption is that it will simply evolve into something different, but no less popular.
After all, Facebook was caught redhanded on such abominable practices that it should be burnt to a crisp long time ago, and yet it’s still there, led by that automaton, what’shisname…
I mean Facebook is actually a perfect example though no? I don’t know anyone below 40 who uses it. Eventually people get fed up of these stupid websites and move elsewhere.
Reddit will be around just like Facebook sure, but somewhere else will pick up the slack.
In Facebooks case that was Instagram largely which you know, also they owned. In Reddits case it may be Lemmy it may be elsewhere, we will see.
But that’s the point I’m making here. Facebook didn’t fall and Reddit won’t either. It’s going to evolve, cater to different clientele, offer different content/experience. But it won’t fall.
I mean fair I guess we’re on the same page there then. But if it caters to a different clientele then the existing clientele will move elsewhere was really what I was getting at, and that may possibly be here.
Aye.
This is both a blessing and a curse. Already there are some… less welcome, Reddit behaviors visible here. I’d rather people leave their old baggage at the doorstep, heh. 😬
One thing that bugs me is people asking for/using tools that replicate the look and feel of Reddit instead of learning the ropes. I left Reddit, I don’t want another one. I get it, familiarity is comforting, but when the user base is a fraction of the other platform, no UI or app will ever give you the same experience. I say move on, get out of your comfort zone and participate.
Amen to that.
I don’t imagine staying on some site that resembles a drowning wreck, because “I got used to how things work here”.
I’m just here because I like the pretty 3rd party apps.
I think I am on shitjustworks… i don’t know how big my instance is I just chose it because it has a cool name.
It has gone down a few times and at first my reaction was to go to is it down dot com to see if the problem was with my app… but then I had the realization that ohhhh, it’s just my home server is down… I thought about making a separate account on another instance but instead just decided to do something else with those few minutes I would have spent here….
No big deal…. It’s happened a few times in the couple months I’ve been here, but it always works eventually… I really like this platform, and the philosophy behind it, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to understand all the inner workings and how the instances work together, but I don’t feel like I need to.
But I can see how people who understand it even less than I do might get frustrated and so that is going to be a limiting factor with new growth here I would assume…
FYI, Lemmy doesn’t count lurkers as active users. Here’s how Lemmy counts active users:
An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame. For site counts, only local users are counted. For community counts, federated users are included.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
I’m not too worried. Graphs dont only go up. :)
Graps are delicious and I love the wins they make.
:) I erased any evidence of any misspelling that may or may not have taken place here tonight.
Joined today. I’ll likely just lurk in the background…
Also, this graph does not take into account kbin which is essentially the same kind of software as lemmy but tracked seperately. Better data can be found here: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
Also, instance hopping and users registering on multiple instances before picking only one/being active on only once may be an explanation.
Also worth noting is Lemmy only counts posts/comments as “active users”. Lurkers who only read and up/downvote aren’t counted.
That’s interesting, I would expect people who vote to be accounted
Me as well. I only remember this because around July 1st there was a post about it, which lead to a wave of “doing my part by posting my daily comment to count as an active user”-comments.
That was probably my post :)
wow, I lurk so much more than I post stuff… one would think they would track this
I think this is the biggest factor. Most people only lurk. How many people signed up and only lurk?
At least 2.
So true. This is straight from Lemmy’s documentation:
An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame. For site counts, only local users are counted. For community counts, federated users are included.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
In this case, I have a theory. I remember a month ago people were posting a lot on Reddit and the !reddit@lemmy.ml community was extremely active. It was like group therapy for refugees. But now the new reality is setting in and people are actually having real and meaningful conversations, which means more lurkers.
So it doesn’t mean that active users are down per se, it’s just that it’s stabilised because people are mostly over Reddit.
Absolutely, and also keep in mind that many who were lurkers on Reddit and came over here maybe made one or two comments immediately saying something like “Happy to be on Lemmy!” and then went back to lurking here and haven’t commented since. They would have counted as monthly active users for July, but not August.
I wonder if lurkers were counted in reddits active user data
I’m generally a lurker so here. I posted.
As a lurker I mostly just vote. But gotta post every once in a while to add to active users stat!
I don’t know why, but it never occurred to me that you need to comment to be counted as “active”
Is this actually written somewhere?
I would have thought votes would count as a unique interaction to count towards being active
A stat for logged in users would be nice.
Yeah same, well here’s my active status for the month.
No worries, Lemmy is alive. Lemmy and Fediverse in general is better to grow organically.
