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.
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.
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
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…
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
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.
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?
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