Honestly a lot of it is probably people getting comfortable lurking again, Lemmy only counts post and comments as active users
Me no lurk. Me comment.
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.
And fewer comments that are clearly a chat bot.
Don’t worry! They’ve just become less obvious.
Well count me in now
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.)
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.
That is a very important point that doesn’t get mentioned enough. Lemmy is the largest and most active reddit alternative around. All the other sites that tried to capitalize on the API disaster have laughable numbers of users and most posts rarely have more than 10 votes or interactions.
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.
Yep, I’m jaded in my expectations knowing what Lemmy was prior to the massive expansion through June and July…
It was still a fun place, but it was a couple dozen posts a day across all servers, by a handful of people from the bigger servers.
We still have a lot of fixes to make on Lemmy, especially on the moderation, management, and content filtering side of things (though apps have been thankfully filling the gaps on some of these issues). Niche communities still need more participation to get off the ground. I’ll see again where we are in a few months from now.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I sort by New. Bring it all on.
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
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.
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.
Yeah… I’ve also never watched star trek, or used Linux, or had Firefox and browsing is all that.
I’ve done all of those but none of them are interests of mine. I like the odd reference but linux is an OS… it doesn’t get more boring than that for me.
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…
as a realist, allowing porn would do wonders ngl
I joined a porn instance to fill the gap and trust me, you’re not missing out on anything
Less content, that is spread across multiple instances that can have duplicate communities.
You just can’t keep doomscrolling here, the “active” search repeats all the time and the “best of the day” is like two pages.
And then there’s specific communities that just… Stayed on Reddit.
It’s not just that. Most people here are into far left, anti-capitalist bs and people don’t care to deal with that
I like it here because of the far left anti-capitalist bs. The internet is full of edgy incel nazis and it’s pretty relieving to have some safe spaces 🤷♂️
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.
Fine by me. You’ll find a place willing to cater to your more reactionary tendencies, just good luck finding one that doesn’t also cater to nazis.
