It was better before people absolutely fucking insisted on scraping reddit posts to bring over here. Post after post after post of regurgitated bot posts, without a single comment, no engagement at all. Fun!
Have you checked if the source sites of the articles being shared have RSS feeds? That would be a more optimal way to aggregate articles from a few sites than communities, depending on what you’re after.
Although, amusingly enough, you could also follow the RSS feeds of the news communities instead of doing that, but then there wouldn’t have been much of a point to making an account. 😅
But but but… I want the little offshoot niche community to grow! I also want content to get seen by more than 5 people.
In reality there just isn’t the user mass to make small/niche communities viable right now, so you see more general communities filling the void.
An easy example is 3D printing. There are two 3D printing communities in the lemmyverse. There’s also a ‘fix my print’ community that’s a ghost town and a few printer specific communities that are also ghost towns. Posts in these more specialized communities tend to get a consistent level of votes, but very few comments.
I’ve intentionally been trying to seed more content, but it’s hard without literally posting the same thing in two spots.
It really doesn’t bother me tbh. The fediverse isn’t for everyone and I’d rather people just use whatever platform they prefer than endlessly complaining on Lemmy when it’s clearly simply not for them. And that’s okay, use whatever platform suits you.
The whole “populist” mindset of modern social media is trash anyway. I miss the age of forums and boards instead of monolithic megacorp run social media
There’s nothing that brings out hostility on the internet quite as effectively as suggesting men may have flaws. It’s surprising how many men can’t handle it - which, one might argue, is a flaw. I’m going to hide now.
Yeah I lurk most of the time and comment on neutral topics sometimes, but generally the content isn’t too engaging.
It’s either memes, Linux (or memes about Linux), or this or that type of politics. Lots of bot-generated content, too many American-based sports teams; lots of repeating topic content (e.g. shitload of musk, trump/biden/whatever), lots of community and/or news duplicates. I won’t be lying I’ve seen like 5 reposts of some amd threadripper news in my active feed within 10 pages.
Sometimes I know that engaging into a small comment will yield zero replies, and other times I feel like the response will most likely be frustrating. What I valued about reddit is diverse topic discussions, interesting questions and fun reads. But people seem to have more fun bypassing my anti-politics filters in-between porn. I honestly think we need to revive many communities related to questions, interesting topics, and overall “lets-have-a-chat-on-something” (preferably not related to what I mentioned above, or at least that touches a broader audience).
Do I contribute a lot? Am I the one to tell people what to do? I don’t think so, but when I have a will to create some content, that will is usually cut off by zero-to-none expected engagement from other people. People wanna do what they wanna do, I guess. I don’t blame em.
I won’t be lying I’ve seen like 5 reposts of some amd threadripper news in my active feed within 10 pages.
It’s true and one of the pitfalls of the de-centralized model. As a poster I try to crosspost the same link across servers to multiple communities big and small, as a way for people to “discover” niche communities.
I’m in full agreement on how there should be more laid back “chat about something” content. You might interested in having a look at beehaw.org (not federated with LW or SJW), that has !chat and that server might be more your speed, I personally like it a lot. Bee sure to read and follow the spirit of the server rules.
I honestly think we need to revive many communities related to questions, interesting topics, and overall “lets-have-a-chat-on-something” (preferably not related to what I mentioned above, or at least that touches a broader audience).
Have you subbed to the various AskLemmy/Ask[instance]/NoStupidQuestions/Out of the Loop communities across here?
To my own amusement, I found sh.itjust.works has several question communities that I tossed some posts to here & there.
Also although I haven’t sorted out what I might want to post in them, there’s these chat communities for other discussing other topics besides those you highlight getting plenty enough discussion:
My god, the amount of Trump shit I see on here is insane. I despise the cunt, but god damn do I really need to scroll past like 15 posts a day about the shit stain? Even on Reddit they didn’t suck his cheeto dick so much
I’m here because reddit is fuck and my favorite reddit app converted to Lemmy, and I’m certain that was a bigger reason for lemmy’s popularity growth than instances ever was
No it got popular because Reddit pissed a lot of people off temporarily. The only thing segregated instances does is confuse and upset the average person. Hell I host like 10 different alternative open source front ends for various websites and I fucking hate Lemmy instances. It makes Discovery new content unbelievably tedious.
What if I just want to browse communities? I can only do that on a per instant spaces, I have to go to that instance go to its communities tabs to browse and then if I find something I want I have to take its address and then go back to my own instance so I can subscribe to it with my account. That pisses me off and makes me not want to bother with it let alone the average user.
The sad state of reality is that centralized systems will always eventually get turned into corporate greed money machines but decentralized instances are by their very nature just shit and hard to work with and no one wants to put up with them.
Agreed, it was a steep learning curve just to even figure out how to use it. The concept of Lemmy is amazing but like you said, finding content is very unintuitive.
I think if there was some kind of database or reference for instances and the communities they have, it would be way easier to find what you’re into. Somebody way smarter than me should look into that ;)
If it wasn’t for instances, lemmy would just be lemmy.ml, filled with tankies, and unable to handle more than 10K people. You would never have joined.
The reddit exodus only caused people to leave reddit, not join lemmy. There have been dozens of reddit alternatives over the years and many of them were around at the time of the reddit exodus. Why do you think they all failed?
That sentence makes no sense. That’s like saying “this ‘website’-shit isn’t helping the internet grow tbh.”
Instances are Lemmy. They’re all seperate platforms that just so happen to share stuff and use mostly the same code. It’s just people hosting their own social media sites.
The main reason lemmy isn’t growing is because of the userbase. Alot of the things I say are opinions. But this is just a fact the userbase is incredibly toxic. Especially folk from lemmygrad and prehaps lemmyml lemmyworld instances as well. A good marjority of 4channers are less toxic than a good chunk of lemmy users I would say
In the early days of Reddit it’s motto was fake it until you make it. It was a ghost town so they set up an army of bots to generate content and fake activity. Not much has changed tbh.
Yeah Reddit just sucks now. I don’t care much about karma, but it can be discouraging to type out a long answer to help someone and just get a downvote with no comment or anything. Over and over again.
The influx of people who don’t know how the site is supposed to work, on top of the usual toxicity, has just ruined it for me.
This is normal. Most “alt” services, rely on outrage and shit to grow user base. Reddit will do something stupid and we’ll get a huge influx again, some people will stay, others will leave.
Ha, I like the meme. Maybe replace the N word with “commie” or an Anime tankie chick. I’m with that last Redditor that stuck around, I’m liking this place. Certainly not the same as Reddit, but it’s got it’s own charm to it that a lot of others have already commented about
Infinite growth is not a good thing, numbers rise and fall just let it do it’s own thing. That being said, maybe if the Lemmy instances would stop defederating like children snatching toys from one another at a daycare it would get more engagement.
Read the comments thread of ANY of the “we defederated from” posts and it’s always the same “They were annoying tankies” shit. It isn’t a matter of abusive users, they have tools for that. They just want to allow fash shit to fester unopposed by the people capable of disarming it.
Just look at any instance that has hexbear and lemmygrad blocked. Their culture is already starting to decay into becoming reddit nazi bars.
Do we have stats so we can compare dates of drops in active users against defederation events? Every time a major instance defederates I resist the strong urge to abandon the defediverse.
Feels Very circle jerky here. Its low effort commentaries on political issues mostly and extraordinarily little growth of niche interest subs. The lack of content here helps curb my doom scrolling, so that and a real hate for reddit leadership and the pathetic Simps that think writing “fuck Spez” while still contributing content to his network for free is a form of effective protest, are all that keeps me here though.
This is my take on Lemmy as well. I was impacted by the removal of third party apps because I used Reddit as a mobile quick reader between activities where the bite-sized format of title -> elaboration -> brief discussion was great, but maybe a little too much. On Lemmy I don’t feel the need to keep reading. This also means I wasn’t invested enough in Reddit, so when they made clear their disdain for the users, I simply left. Nothing there is important enough to keep going.
Lemmy is definitely lower quality though. All is primarily single topic outrage and there is a significant amount of extreme rhetoric that makes me feel like I’ll be put on a list for reading, which would have been removed on Reddit for lack of civility or worse. The niche things don’t exist and, even if I wasn’t a bite-sized mobile user and had the time or thoughts to form a community, these Reddit clones are always most active at political… discussion users can’t express elsewhere and that tends to kill the niche hobbyists who don’t want to look at or be surrounded by that type of passion. So it’s difficult to curate a personal feed of anything but that.
Lemmy still works for my use case and it’s about the next best thing to Reddit. I do think the “circlejerk” feeling is contributing to the decline though, and wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up like Voat.
Wait… Are you guys not doing the Highlander thing? Because I’ve been cutting the heads off of other Lemmy users to absorb their power, but if there can actually be more than one true Lemmy user then wow… That is some egg on my face, but anyway the monthly users should start increasing again once I stop!
Sincerely, the 900 or so Lemmy users I for lack of a better word now “represent”.
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