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
I won't lie. I mostly don't engage with content I see here. I didn't do that when I was on Reddit either and mostly for the same reason: I don't really have much to say and, even when I do have an opinion, I don't usually want to engage in what's often a protracted debate about something that will probably just end up being frustrating.
That's not to say I haven't had positive experiences on the Fediverse - I've had more here than anywhere else - I'm just not particularly motivated most of the time.
I do most of my discourse on Beehaw which is protected in many ways. When I used reddit I would often have a comment typed out ready to post and think better of it since I knew it would only drive dismissive and antagonistic responses of the stupidest kind. It may be because of the protections or it may be because of the smaller community but I find a lot less posturing and a lot more actual conversation since I’ve been using this platform. This is what keeps me here rather than reddit. It might be worth engaging in conversations you wouldn’t have on reddit when you’re interested.
I agree… Beehaw is such a wonderful and special place on the internet. I have an account there but I try to keep it separate from my main Lemmy.ca one so that I better hold myself accountable to the server rules, in order to foster nicer discourse.
Well, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts.
There are a number of thread topics on Lemmy that seem to keep going the same direction (Google, Musk, Gaza, Trump, Windows, etc.), and as you say, it can be frustrating and exhausting…
At the same tine on Lemmy, I had found articles that were worthwhile reading, updates to FOSS that I would have otherwise missed, no shortage of silly memes, and a handful of new perspectives that were positively thought provoking. Those let me look past most of the negative things and stuff that is pervasive on all kinds of forums, Reddit and social media on the whole.
I’ll happily participate with light-hearted content but otherwise I mostly feel like you when it comes to any polarising topics like politics, etc. I wish there were more content about my areas of expertise so I could participate in that but alas there’s mostly developer stuff only. Maybe I’m also not doing my best curating my feed since I tend to mostly browse all.
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.
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.
It doesn’t help that every feds response to literally any perceived slight is OH MY GOD DEFEDERATE NOW. Kinda defeats the purpose and advantage of the fediverse.
Hexbear still going strong though. We’ll be here after every else continues to splinter and defed from each other I’ll bet
Lmao Hexbear defederated from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.blahaj.zone, in both cases with extensive theatrics and drama for essentially no concrete reason. Y’all literally defederated a server that is run by a trans woman as a safe space for gender diverse people because you claimed it was transphobic 😂
Yeah, you’re really going strong over there, no splintering whatsoever.
We literally defederated from a server that our trans community fairly unanimously said was harming them yes. Are you saying that we should have ignored our entire trans community?
Shit just works kept actually threatening our community so I appreciate our mods defederating from them too. Not sure what you think a “good” reason is if you apparently think “threatening actual material harm on a community” is a bad one.
All of this is clearly laid out in the posts about the defeds, which you could go read for more information. You won’t. But you could educate yourself instead of spouting complete nonsense
I have read them, and there is no evidence. You clearly don’t need evidence over there, anything a hexbear account says is the absolute truth, and anything from another server is absolute fascism. You guys don’t concern yourself with the details or nuances in life.
Let’s have a look at the defederation announcement about sh.itjust.works. Keep in mind this was less than 48 hours after you voluntarily voted to federate with us, expecting to abuse and overwhelm our userbase like you had already done to many smaller servers. Unfortunately, you didn’t realize that we were larger than you and thus less susceptible to being drowned out by the brigading, which led to a quick tactical retreat by your fearless leaders.
Firstly, opening up by calling us sh.itsfulla.chuds and sh.itholefor.nazis. Very mature and rational behavior from an admin 👏
Multiple instances of ableist and homophobic slurs directed at our users
I personally witnessed a hexbear user throwing a shit fit about people using the word “crazy”. Apparently that’s an ableist slur. Woopdee-doo
overwhelming litigiousness against even the most innocuous comments by our users, and just a general ethos of reactionary behavior. We’re done and out.
Lmao, I guess my point is self evident here. A lot of big words that convey absolutely no information about what specifically was objectionable about the behavior of sh.itjust.works users. I’d love if you could explain to me how “overwhelming litigiousness” and “a general ethos of reactionary behavior” are grounds for defederation 😂
I have also read the things that hexbear users have said about everybody else, and quite frankly they are the most nakedly racist and xenophobic comments on the entirety of Lemmy. Imagine having the gall to use the most hateful and dehumanizing language towards white people as a matter of principle, and then turn around and get all butthurt at a “racist” meme of Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh. Try to rationalize that one for me, because I can’t seem to figure it out
Or ya’ll could try not to be unbearable assholes constantly. Or not, because others can just defederate, which is actually a nice advantage of the fediverse.
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.
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
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
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.
Hi, they aren’t. I browse by Hot on All or Local specifically to discover niche and active communities. The memes I see on Lemmy are actually higher quality compared to Reddit, mostly due to the older user base here. Bonus points that we don’t have extremely toxic communities like dankmemes yet. So overall, that’s much much better for me. Even if the content was dog water, I’d still be happy about the absence of toxicity and everyone enjoying a semi-lame repetitive joke.
For me personally, I have less connection to specific subs than back in the reddit days, given its federated nature and all that. I enjoy scrolling through the homepage, but don’t really have that specific moment of ‘I thought of something nice! That would fit nicely into this one, specific subreddit!’
Which, don’t get me wrong, can be a good thing in the long run. But it takes a bit of getting used to.
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.
yeah, idk, we’ve built up an actual community here over the last few years and all these redditors have come over, made reddit 2 but worse on their instances, got bored and then left
We also experienced an initial explosion followed by a major drop and then steady growth. It’s healthy growth because it shows we’re keeping genuine daily users to compete with natural user churn.
Outdoor cats are destructive to the ecosystem, keeping a pet is the exploitation of an animal and is therefore not vegan, and forcing a vegan diet on an obligate carnivore is , depending on how you do it, either pointless or animal abuse.
While I provide no further argument or justification for these points, understand that I am unchallengably correct as I am the one true Marxist.
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.
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.
Are you using any app, or just through a browser? On a mobile browser, I find the back button to take me to the previous page of posts (so if I clicked into a comment thread on page 3, hitting the back button takes me to page 2). It’s definitely odd.
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
Bro, I noticed the same, it has been a long time since I played around with the sort types, I basically settled with Active and hid all seen stuff, now I feel I get different content with other kinds of sorts.
I subscribed to the communities I care the most about and sort by subscribed and new. That said, across 20 communities it’s probably something like 10-15 new posts per day so after I get through those and interact it’s off to all.
But I do try to engage in the communities I want to see grow.
Isn’t Lemmy suposed to be FOSS? I thought that was the main reason why people left Reddit for Lemmy was that and API changes. Wouldn´t other FOSS be of interestt too? Just a thought.
Reddit’s great strength was that it was big enough that niche communities could attract enough users to have interesting conversations and a steady flow of content, and if you are a Reddit refugee looking for those sorts of communities you aren’t likely to find them on Lemmy. I’ve more or less made my peace with that, but if you’re not the kind to stand on principle, a falling user count is bad news for the hope that the Fediverse might snowball into the sort of place that can support discussions about your passions and hobbies even if they’re not the sort of thing that is popular with a specific set of tech-savvy anti-capitalist leftwing activists (and I say this with love as a fellow tech-savvy leftie… but y’all got one-track minds and it shows in what communities live and die around here).
Yeah even a pretty unpopular car brand (Infiniti) has a pretty active sub due to the install base. I think I’m the only person here who has posted about it at all on lemmy.
Hey don’t forget about the other half of the posts, which are in a language you don’t understand. Seriously, my block list is long because language settings here mean nothing, and while I’m sure that’s quality content, uh, I can’t understand it.
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.
I have a potentially contentious opinion. Normies are what ruined Reddit and the crowd attracted by normie communities are why Reddit is even more toxic than it used to be.
We don’t need to attract normies, we just need to attract more people like us.
I don’t hate normies by any means, but I don’t want to hang out with them all day either.
Then go use Reddit if you want all the normies around. There’s a site that already exists that meets your desires. I still use it for niche content, but there has been an undeniable increase in toxicity on Reddit as the user count has increased.
Your grandstanding is cringe. This is a forum, not a political movement. If you want normie content then go back to Reddit. When I want normie content I’ll use TikTok.
Nope, I just don’t want the place overrun by people who are mostly just around to flame and insult.
Pick up moderating a few large subreddits and you’ll see what I mean. Even on a small sub like /r/Infiniti, I’ve seen a massive increase in people just being pricks, especially after a cross post. Smaller user base makes it less likely.
Like I said in another post, I don’t like using the word normie because it’s not actually descriptive of the behavior I’m talking about, but it’s the word the thread is using.
Yeah I completely disagree. Imagine if a city/local gov wanted to use Lemmy in order to be self hosted (similar to EU govs switching to Mastodon) but the public just wonders why their local gov put their stuff on a weird circle jerk website that’s flooded with niche memes. “Why didn’t they use the normal thing (i.e. reddit)?”
We should be welcoming enough that, when someone wants to make a new subreddit, they make Lemmy community instead. And I don’t think thats the case right now.
If a person sees something they’ve never seen before, and turns around and flees, that’s a problem with them being sheltered and pathetic, not a problem with the new thing they haven’t encountered before.
Under a centralized system, bans are terrible. But federation is awesome because it’s perfectly okay for an instance to be ban-happy. Just join another instance. (I’m on lemm.ee because I want to see everything)
Not only is it fine, but I think we actually need a variety of instances; no-bans, some-bans, lots-of-bans, and excessive-bans. People should have the choice.
Gotta appeal to advertisers that want the normie eye balls.
I hate using the word normie, because these people truthfully haven’t done anything wrong. It’s the advertisers that follow them around like vampires that are the issue.
It’s called reddit and that’s why I left. Fuck the normies. They’ll import fascism.
That sounds unnecessarily combative so let me expand my argument.
There’s a book called The Authoritarians by a man called Bob Altermyer. Altermyer is now retired but he was a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. During his career he did a lot of research into authoritarians, both followers and leaders. In the book he describes for laypeople the experiments and the findings. If you want to do a deep dive into his statistical analysis you can because the whole thing is fully referenced but for people who just want an easy to read description that is also easy to understand then this is the book for you.
After reading the book redditors behaviour became a lot more easy to understand. I was less upset by what was going on but I stopped engaging because I now understood that reddit wasn’t a site for me anymore. It was a site for people that enjoyed being normal and doing normal things. And that’s ok, why shouldn’t they be catered for?
I use reddit and lemmy exclusively on desktop or laptop. So when the app business came up I didn’t regard it as my fight, however I thought that if I expected people to stand up for my interests if they are challenged I should show a bit of solidarity with them. So I didn’t visit reddit at all for the days it was blacked out. I didn’t like how spez reacted. I saw that people were crossing to the fediverse and I took a look for myself. I liked it. I posted. I wasn’t attacked for having a non-normie viewpoint. I liked that a lot.
The thing about normies is they don’t read scientific studies for fun, they don’t like long winded explanations about why the world is the way it is. They think they can see something in the street and extrapolate an entire social policy from it and there are chancers that will tell them, ‘You know what? You’re right. We don’t need experts telling you that you’re wrong, what do they know?’
So your Jordan Petersons and your Nigel Farages and Alex whatever his nameis, these people and reddit’s normie audience are made for each other. I’ll even go as far as to say this extends to the people that think the Democrats or the Labour Party are going to fix their problems, Team Liberal aren’t doing themselves any favours but my point is that if your goal is a massive website that caters to the largest part of the reddit audience you’re going to end up swimming in cryptofascist and sometimes outright fascist content. Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt.
Interesting, I think I’ll take a look. You sorta skipper over what ‘normie’ or reddit behaviour was mentioned in his book specifically. Was it the lack of reading scientific articles you mentioned in another paragraph, that alone can’t be it right?
Listen, just go and read the thing; it will be time better spent than listening to me precis it from memory. but if you do read it a feel like it hasn’t given you an insight into what drives a whole host of behaviour that one sees on social media or that I’ve misunderstood the book then do come back to me and I will refresh my memory of the book to have that discussion with you.
While I don’t entirely disagree, I’m a little confused by your description of the front page of lemm.ee, which we’re both on. My front page when viewing All here is mostly memes/shitposts/news/technology when set to Active sort, is yours not?
I’ve admittedly blocked a fair amount and have show NSFW/bot posts disabled, but the communities you mention aren’t affected by that.
Yeah I could’ve been more clear. I mean the All feed not Local. I went and updated my comment. And to be fully clear, I’ve got no complaints about lemm.ee. It’s exactly what I want, e.g. show me everything and I’ll decide what to block. That said, I know I’m not the norm.
Saying you blocked a fair amount is exactly what I’m talking about, so have I. A little bit of effort can really make the feed more palletable. We need to have a place where that is done by default. Maybe even an open source AI or even just an algorithm that tailors it to the user. I’m already glad Lemmy.world is much more moderate than lemm.ee, and we just need a place that goes all the way; NSFW blocked by default, several communities blocked-by-default (not defederated), and somehow prevents All from being flooded by niche memes. I love Linux and the memes (even if they get a bit repetitive) but we shouldn’t have 3 of the top 10 posts be linux memes.
I tried to get my lab mate, a PhD in computer science and Linux Mint user, to get a Lemmy. He took one look at the all page, laughed, pointed out the circle jerk stuff and asked how some junk posts even made it to the all page and then said “yeah, no thanks” and has never touched Lemmy since. He was already 4 times more likely than the average person, but even he was instantly turned off.
I gotcha. Fwiw I kind of agree, even beyond Lemmy I’ve been a little surprised some of these sites/instances haven’t done more to tailor themselves to accommodate more folks or focus on specific demographics.
That’s supposed to be one of the big perks of the federation approach, being able to create more distinct communities, but outside of a few, they largely seem to run the software as-is, maybe with some backend adjustments to help reduce the costs of operation or the like.
Yeah, and maybe that means I should try making such an instance. I don’t have the funds for something like lemmy.world, but I’ve got the technical background. So maybe that’ll turn into my winter break project
Lol, yesterday it felt like there was at least half a dozen posts about Firefox, mostly claiming that YouTube was slowing them down. Which seemed really bad at first, till I dug into it and saw it was probably an unintended bug with ad handling.
And why were there so many posts? Who wants to see the same post more than once?
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.
Hmm, yeah I definitely see how I am biased there. I’ve been on social media since its inception, so my opinion is likely influenced mostly by people who have experienced social media for ~2 decades and are sick of it now.
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