It’s about creating and keeping things moving rather than just consuming. I wouldn’t expect lemmy to move as fast as reddit because the focus isn’t in having an algorithm or creating a selection of communities to prop up the front page. It depends a lot more on the user’s curiosity to find an interesting space to comment or share links or media. Removing the commercial aspect of it, removes a big drive for engagement by design.
Lemmy being free of modern engagement tools will always make it a slower, less interesting site than reddit or any other social website. It could have a similar fate to older web forums if we expect it to perform just like commercial social networks, we should be conscious of that and refrain from proprietary networks and visit lemmy or other fediverse alternatives when it’s interesting to us.
The reality of most of this websites is that they aren’t really necessary in our lives, the reason they’re kept alive is because they’re designed to make us keep an eye on them and fill us with not actually necessary content. We aren’t users, we are used by corporations so they can put an ad in between, or to gather information about us, so that their customers (those who pay for ad space) can pay for their service making the best targeted ad campaigns possible.
I’m not sure if you are really active on lemmy’s ML communities, but there’s plenty in lemmy.ml. I don’t participate in them, but I do try to keep posting in the instance I like, you’re welcome to post and comment wherever you like. :)
I honestly do want it to become bigger. We need to share and produce more and constantly, otherwise it will wither. I’m interested in your opinion though, if you’re willing to share your discrepancies, I’ll read it.
Also, yeah. Since lemmy.ml and the main developers are marxists, ML can be understood as marxist-leninist. Big lefty influence on many instances. Honest question though: Have you tried posting ML links or opening discussion threads on it?
It was always bound to happen after a massive user gain. Frankly, we should be quite happy we can get over 400 comments in a thread. That’s not insubstantial for a very niche platform.
tbh its true: apart from my french instance where i like to hang out, most of Lemmy is just memes, Linux related posts, or self hosting posts. No meaningful content for ur average person really. In fact i scroll throu ‘All’ in new and reach yesterday’s posts in just few minutes, given the amount of ‘not so meaningful content’ i am filtering …
Exactly. also inputs from experts who chime in on the subject are really useful, like a semiconductor engineer suddenly replying in a comment section. There’s not much of it here thou. Yea there is sorta this lag time between Reddit and Lemmy in whichever get wind of the news first, i even, used to be a reddit reposter just to somewhat help seed this place
I moved to Lemmy over from reddit not because of content or better UI but because people behind reddit seems like jerks to me and i came to realization I’d rather use open source.
What i lack here is information e.g. programming communities in Lemmy are, well, dead. If left on Lemmy things that are “recommended” to me it’s sensational “news” that are aimed to spark woke vs others battle in discussion.
So what to make better ?
to build what reddit has, I’d call it a content library and i don’t care if it’s done by bots or humans. For me the facts + discussion to ask question is super important.
if searching for a topic outside of Lemmy> Lemmy doesn’t show up in search engine but reddit does. Some optimization needs to be done to get better score at search engines.
let users to block instances and thus make de-federation to user’s decision.
i think there needs to some kind of cross instance community, i don’t think having same kind of community in multiple instances with different content is good solution.
Some optimization needs to be done to get better score at search engines.
i don’t think having same kind of community in multiple instances with different content is good solution.
On the first point: If we have more people, we will have more content and more visits, and search engines will rank us higher. Hard problem to solve. A bit chicken and egg. Glad you raise it.
On the second point: This really frustrated me. I had issues knowing which manga community to join. In addition, multiple instances means multiple communities and means more fragmentation. If we could bring us all together…
I dunno. I blame lack of engagement. We have to post content. Engage. I see tons of posts upvoted but a huge lack of OC. If we don’t use the platform, it dies.
Yeah, remember the reaction when that one post got popular about lemmy being boring for anyone that wasn’t a SWE/Linux user?
People got so pissed off, one of the top posts on lemmy that day was something to the affect of “fuck you, we’re not obligated to post things you like”. Which, yeah, you’re not - but you also can’t blame people for losing interest in your platform when you only have active discussion on one or two relatively niche topics.
The fact is that Lemmy is garbage for discussing hobbys or interests outside of a few niche areas. On reddit my feed was filled with woodworking, 3d printing, Astronomy, and other topics that get very little traffic on lemmy.
My lemmy feed is mostly politics, then SWE stuff, then memes
That’s fair, but I think this will rather be fixed algorithmically. More users here (generally) means less users on big tech platforms, which I always appreciate :) Also I think gatekeeping ends up hurting a platform. Even “generic” people can have or develop special interests haha.
If you mean to choose a Yet Another Small Community of Users, there’s never been a shortage of those, and there’s barely a need for the federated space for that.
If you don’t want to see how abusing power to remove and drive users away from communities removes and drives users away from communities, I don’t know what to tell you, but I think people are coming to the federated space seeking alternatives to reddit and twitter, not just small communities, so unless something is done about the federated architecture, what happens to access to the biggest communities will always matter in regards to population numbers.
If a user gets their account banned and purged for barely any reason but extreme escalation, I think that will always be a concern - you have no assurance that users will simply create another account and remain. If there’s going to be abuse by the leadership in the alternative, why would anyone who comments on RedditMigration simply remain in the fediverse and not go back to Reddit? If you are going to get falsely accused accused and banned for shit reasons, even to the point of an admin of the most popular instance fabricating accusations that you are an alt of a CSAM account, why would most people remain?
Nothing is stopping the user from accessing lemmy.world communities from the alternative instance they chose (unless it has defederated). It’s just that in this case lemmy.world did not want to be responsible for the user’s content.
Abusing admins is nothing new and with reddit you have absolutely 0 recourse besides making a new account at the mercy of the very same admins. On Lemmy at least you can select another instance and still access the same content.
My point is, if you are going to be dealing with it anyway, why would you participate in the social network that is order of magnitudes smaller? You can access content on reddit without an account, the problem is participating alongside the community.
For all intents and purposes, since you are still locked out on lemmy from doing because of its server-centric communities regardless of which instance you choose, it boils down to the same outcome for the same desired goal - creating an alt - except with an order of magnitudes smaller reward - far less population and engagement than on reddit.
So rather than sticking to lemmy, it seems natural that people go back to their old but bigger platforms.
Federated is great for maintaining persistence of your account beyond the whims of fickle admins, but that’s a tertiary problem. No one is that exited about keeping their user history, they are excited about participating with everyone else about the topic that is being discussed.
It’s not worthless, but I can understand it explaining some of the decreasing population numbers if they encounter it even just once after months of participating on the platform because of how disruptive it is. No one is normally going to stick around a community when only the fraction of the local users in your own lemmy instance can view it.
It’s because when you go to /c/books , the default view is not every /c/books on every server. But one /c/books on one server. Therefore Lemmy is doomed and the dev refuse by principle to fix it.
Ideally, the user should search for “books” communities and the top result should be the largest/most active community. If they don’t like that community, they can try the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th result to see if they are better. Unfortunately, the Lemmy sort algorithm needs a lot of work.
For the communities I have searched for, both “Hot” and “Active” sort are bad (the main community about a topic is barely top 5, no other relevant results at the top of the list). When I switch to Top Year, I start to get good results.
You end up with one community with 8000 user , second community 17.
Unless there a major fuckup, only the biggest community is viable and gets seen by anyone. It sucks the air out for everything else. Because nobody is going to manually subscribe to 50 microscopic /c/books communities on as many servers.
That recreates Reddit mod power problem and it will kill Lemmy in the same way.
Maybe Lemmy simply already isn’t viable, just a Reddit clone with meaningless federation feature that only decentralize unimportant stuff but not the strangleho lady that moderators have on communities.
The second community will never be viable because even if the first community messed up as bad as Reddit, we know less than 5% would even change their habits.
Lemmy is not spez proof, it empowers the spez as much as Reddit.
Except even on Reddit we saw large communities split due to some issue (for example r/questionablecontent and r/QContent, one has 13k and the other has 5.3k subs).
Yes, many communities have these kinds of fuck ups. In the best case scenarios you have a new community half the size and with its attention split. The newcomers still get split between the schism after it happened. The result is multiple weaker communities.
And it take a really monumental fuck up to even get this low level of user action.
Look at reddit, the admins fucked over absolutely everyone and they’ve made it clear they’re only starting. Look how hard it is to get people to come over.
While on the other hand, if most users go to /c/books and by default they see every /c/books on every federated server, then the problem is sidestepped entirely.
No single mod team can get a stranglehold on a community.
Each user gets to choose, by applying or subscribing to a blacklist/while of users or servers. Or they can raw dog it with the click of a button.
But if most users who go to /c/books end up on the “one big /c/books instance” then every other /c/books community except the biggest one, will be a desert that is not worth your time to post to.
Assuming you merge instances, how would moderation work, especially if mods cannot agree on rules or interpretations? What about instance specific rules? Would a post be moderated by whatever instance the OP posted from?
If the mods have to agree on rules, you have the same exact asshole mod problem but now with extra name squatting.
A system like that can’t have a second books community, let alone a second or third. The current books community has 133 user. They’re not going to have 13 communities split between them.
Instead they all have to accept, whoever is the biggest, (realistically, whoever is first) community, gets to shape the books discussion on lemmy forever. That’s just how first mover advantage, compounding advantage works in this obviously broken system.
This will certainly spell the end of Lemmy. You think defederation is a problem, You’ve seen nothing yet.
what do you mean refuse by principle to fix it? the solution that comes to mind is for a whitelist that is implemented either in federation broadly or lemmy specifically for certain categories (think TLDs) which are agreed to have a certain focus, like on literature or video games or music, where the instances themselves can join or link to.
kinda bypass a community being held hostage (or kept isolated) by an instance, the whitelists can be determined through a simple majority (first past the post) or any other method by members of communities rather than instance moderators/admins.
i get that many folks don’t like hexbear and i have nothing against them, i certainly don’t want to force them to see content they don’t want; giving granular control over specific content (not just a blacklist like per-user instance blocking) seems ideal.
When you go to “/c/books” on any server, the default should be an agglomeration of all /c/books on all federated servers (notwithstanding the already ongoing defederation wars)
The -USER- then decides if they want to filter by whitelist or blacklist, the user decide what server or community@server goes on the list. Realistically, users will just follow other user’s lists, which should be sharable easily. You might even subscribe to someone else’s blacklist/whitelist and get updated automatically.
But none of that is possible if the baseline view is not the ability to “see all /c/book on the entire fediverse in its raw unedited form”. You can filter out data you can’t access.
Whitelists, of course, are poison were just just deem everything to be garbage except “the chosen ones”, usually handed down from above by your betters.
A public blacklist model would be much better. You could then build your own blacklist by scanning all user profile for what is on their blacklist and use that as a basis for building your own blacklist, this is mostly how spam filters work. Because in the world of email, if you say “everyone I don’t already know is garbage” well, then you might as well just abandon email entirely.
The difference is that Lemmy is an answer to Reddit, not Discord. If a Reddit user wants to see if there’s a community for woodworking, he can search for “woodworking” and find it.
If a Lemmy user searches “woodworking” and the biggest woodworking community isn’t on your instance, you have to leave Lemmy and use an external service to search more instances and even then you might not find what you’re looking for.
I don’t use that spyware but it’s probably the same as every tech bro Reddit like.
Everyone flocks to the one big “books” community and that sucks the air out for any alternative.
Lemmy’s one thing going for it was that it’s was supposed to be decentralized and prevent concentration of power.
But you end up with one big community, and a unaccountable minority owns that community and does what every they want with it. Just like Reddit, they can sell your grandmother, we know users don’t care enough to do anything about it and they’ll just stay. The 2nd biggest will never matter.
This means there isn’t a lemmiverse books community, there is one big books community, on one person’s server, moderated by one guy and his disciples and that’s it forever as far as Lemmy is concerned, the same end as Reddit.
Why does this matter? Do we need to appease the shareholders or something? Do we need endless month over month growth, lest the world completely stops turning?
It just signals that this platform is flawed to the point where it’s bleeding to death. Keep in mind, a bigger userbase = more active community = better platform.
If there are no users, there will be no new contents added.
If there are a lot of users (many more than there are now), there will be enough people around to support all sorts of niche communities, like Reddit had.
Active user count is probably the single most important metric to whether a platform is successful and stays alive. Even above quality of content, as proven by many other social media platforms that thrive despite being flooded with trash content.
As a Lemmy shareholder, I’m outraged. If Lemmy doesn’t get more users soon, I am going to stop the thrusters that keep the world turning. You have been warned.
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