Total monthly posts exploded after Spez enshitified Reddit, and is still growing steadily month over month.
That suggests that the current decline in monthly active users is primarily because lurkers who only came to lemmy after initially hearing about it on Reddit, went back to lurking Reddit.
The number of users that are contributors is still growing, and that’s what’s important.
I’m still seeing so much growth in new content and communities, idk if the raw number of users is the metric we even should care about. Is it the best measure of quality?
I also think a big part of it is how active users are counted. Saw in a different thread that it only counts accounts who have commented or posted in the last month. Well… I browse and vote on probably an average of 30-50 posts and many of their comments every single day, but the last comment I left was over a month ago.
I also wonder if the active user count is counting people who made multiple accounts across different instances and was therefore always massively overinflated to begin with. I have 5 lemmy accounts - one on lemmy.world when I first joined, one on lemmynsfw for happy fun times, and 3 more trying to find a different instance with the de federation policy and hoster that I wanted after lemmy.world was going through their ddos downtime issue.
I’m yet to encounter the majority of issues I hear Lemmings griping about. Everyone has been pretty civil toward me. Every time my inbox blows up I feel dread, only to open it and find zero confrontation or vitriol. I’m not running into any racists, sexists, bigots, etc., and I certainly haven’t noticed a decline in content (I browse Top ~6 Hours).
I realize my personal experience doesn’t equate to these problems not existing, but I do get the strong impression that people are exaggerating greatly.
If you share a thought on a Biden/Trump thread, an Israel/Palestine thread, or another topic that attracts strong views, and your opinion is different than the hive, expect some vitriol and confrontation.
I’ve run into it while seriously looking for debate or productive conversation.
The same thing happens on Reddit, though. I think that’s kind of just the internet from now on. /r/worldnews is literally just a pro-Israel, anti-Palestine echo chamber so it’s nice to see another perspective on here. (I only browse Reddit at work not logged in for the record.) Over here, the hive mind on that seems to change thread to thread.
You mean pro Palestine? You literally can’t say “hey Hamas should be considered at fault too for using hospitals in the first place” without someone telling you that it’s 11101010% Israel’s fault for ever defending themselves when any civilian could get hurt.
It’s funny when the US does war in the middle east when a republican is president the media doesn’t even cover it. At least not to the extent we do today. That’s because Republicans are callous and could not give an ounce of fuck. The fact that people want to hold Biden to account should tell you everything you need to know about the two parties. Yes Biden sucks dick. Yes genocide is unacceptable no matter the people doing genocide. Only I’m voting along side the constituents that actually give a fuck.
And that is certainly not the GOP. They only care that it makes Biden look bad.
Sure? I don’t care about US presidents. I’m talking about how personal responsibility doesn’t exist for Hamas.
Israel is apparently completely at fault for having to attack hospitals because that’s where Hamas is choosing to fight from specifically to increase civilian death, but it’s not Hamas’ fault as well for choosing to put their own civilians in harms way for their political goals?
Fuck the both of them, the middle east is a cesspit of ancient draconian morals and ideas, and they’re constantly dragging first world nations into their ancient goat herder religion bullshit.
Sick of seeing the world on the brink of collapse and the conservative nutjobs always claiming it’s the end times and using it to justify their oppression of minority groups in other countries. Structured nations borderline fall apart every few years because a few million extremists half a globe away have had a blood feud for thousands of years.
Hamas had human shields. What is there to argue about? Should we take innocent lives to punish the guilty? Doesn’t sound like justice to me.
The world is a shit place. People are really flirting with the idea of fascism in America. Its insane but they are doing it. Americans are lucky now to have relatively peaceful lives despite corporations wanting to oppress them. Why we involved ourselves with the middle east is toothpaste we can’t get back in the tube. At what point as Americans are we allowed to bow out of the discussion? To me, it’s when we cast our ballot and its for the side that is the lesser evil. As individuals we are purposefully cut off from the reigns of power and until the people seize them again we have no choice but to keep making the humbling choice.
I’ve been active for a month and in my opinion too many users have radicalised and extremist mindsets, but other than that it’s alright.
Going back to reddit would mean to install that unbearable app they have and having to deal with incompetent admins, so I will stay here for some time.
I can see why it’s off-putting for a lot of people though.
many users have radicalised and extremist mindsets,
I think thats the whole internet nowdays, unless you decide to exclusivelly consume cat content (and even then theres gonna be a way to jam in extremist political views by some nutter somehow).
Although i have to admit that the ones here are of a diferent breed than most, mainly tankies and people on that side of the compass (and yes they are very annoying about it).
One upside to lemmy is that ,at least up untill now, the mods and admins are very neutral and i rarelly see deleted comments (or maybe they are hidden… i dunno) and that theres genuine free speech in here, i mean if you whant you can look at my comment history, i get downvoted to oblivion most of the time but my comments are still up and not censored.
Although there is this weird thing on other instances (im in sh.itjust.works and they dont do this i know i tryied it) that delete words on peoples comments and posts, mainly slurs and politically incorrect words. Really, i seen that some months before, dont know if it still like that now with the world users, but if you type something like fa***t in .world you will get “deleted” in that word specifically irc
I don’t know how to feel about it, gives me some “spez editing the database to change comments” vibes.
I guess I would feel better to just get notified that my comment got removed.
Or is it just a displaying option based on the instance you logged in with and it gets filtered on the display side and a different instance user would still see the original?
Indeed it does, thats why i shit so much on political extremeism, it inevitably ends in censorship.
My advice would be that if it makes you feel uncomfortable (and you still whant to use lemmy), change instances, like i said, shit.just.works doesnt do that, dont know which other instances do and doesnt. I think lemmy.ml absolutelly does.
My only issue is the lack of small communities that get posts frequently, and yeah, duh, I should contribute, but theres only so much I can say about my transness.
One thing I miss about reddit is just being able to endlessly read about peoples experiences and stupid shitty trans memes, thats just missing here right now
Exactly this. My small Reddit communities had a few posts per day. The equivalent on Lemmy have a few per year. Still, I don’t miss them enough to go back.
Exactly my experience as well. Sure, I don’t have infinite scroll, but I also don’t feel like an algorithm is trying to make me angry. When I get responses, they’re typically thoughtful or on topic.
I feel I have better engagement here. It is still missing some more niche communities that Reddit had, and I’m trying to be active to grow them, but it has been slow.
lurkers are also not counted in this statistics. ifaik only active users who are posting or commenting are counted. so there might be more users out there who are active and just lurking and they are not counted.
Yeah, it’s plain to see that engagement is steadily climbing. The top posts keep getting higher and higher numbers and new, interesting communities keep popping up.
Long time lurker here, 99% of the time I go to post a comment I delete it before posting like ah fuck it. I’m trying to engage a bit more now there are more users.
I mostly lurk, too, but enjoy being around my fellow Lemmings.
The only decline I have seen as someone who mostly lurks is in conservatives who thought this was the next Voat. After the surge I saw an uptick in all kinds of people, and a lot of them I don’t mind seeing leave.
You don’t need this lil slice of the internet to be the “next big thing”, you just need a place to go to see the stuff you like.
Ya ever since everyone defederated from exploding heads there’s definitely less of them. Maybe one day they’ll create another instance. I hope they do, maybe a less transphobic conservative instance, just for the variety of people.
So, following the 90/9/1 rule, 90% lurk, 9% comment, 1% create content, we are primarily losing from the 90%? That seems to be a good thing for the long-term. As long as we aren’t losing from the 1% I’d say we’re good
I’m close to that too, but I think mine was 13 years. The weird thing that I’ve noticed is that most of the time I was on Reddit, almost no one I talked to in real life used Reddit. I struggled for years to try to get people to check the site out. Now that I left, I swear I hear someone I know mention Reddit exponentially more often. The average person doesn’t give a damn about how shitty the platform has become, because they weren’t around to see what it used to be. The average person WANTS to see ads interspersed with their cookie cutter content with stupid ass features like chat and followers. Good riddance.
I’m a counter example. I contributed on Reddit, moderated my own subreddit with a couple of thousand viewers; couple of tens of contributors
I haven’t been back to that sub, haven’t appointed any other mods. If automod can’t handle shit, shit isn’t being handled
I have been back to other subs. There are small inoffensive places on Reddit that simply haven’t moved
I still visit those subs, still write on them, just not nearly as often
Edit to add: checking today, those subs are becoming less good. With no good app, so many of the prolific commenters don’t comment much now. I also had a reply to a 2015 comment I made. I thought stuff was auto-archived much quicker than that
Agreed. First they killed RedditGifts, then AMAs, then the up vote/down vote debacle, and when they took away my ability to use Relay is when I left. Screw them.
Yep, arrived during the initial digg exodus, had tens of thousands of posts at Reddit, modded two subreddits. Closed my account the day during the protests and haven’t been back.
I’m not as active here, mostly due to a busier life but found a new home anyway.
Exactly, lemmy needs to grow but if it just continues to grow and grow eventually it will just turn into what reddit is now. I’m happy to have something small to be a part of for now… i don’t think you needed me to tell you this but they say commenting is good for lemmy, so here i am
This is exactly right, I even find myself wanting to check my GME DRS subs but knowing I shouldn’t and feeling bad about it and blocking it for myself until the next week when I unblock and check my subs again in shame. But I’ll never return for real because I know she’s bad for me, wait we’re still talking about Reddit right?
Nah, fuck spez forever. That sentiment should never die. I hope a decade after reddit goes bankrupt, he can’t leave his home without getting the phrase screamed at him
We can decide to never go back to our ex and also warn others if it comes up, while still moving on with our lives. However, if we’re just bringing it up out of nowhere, we’re still hung up on them.
I mean, would you call this post ‘content’? It’s just low-effort, non-discussion-provoking, nothingness about a platform that nobody around here cares about anymore (except you apparently?)
You literally repost AI generated images, you dont even possess the originality to come up with your own prompt Lmao and you’ve never even made a post with over 1k upvotes. Git gud
But hey, apparently that’s enough, I haven’t been bored on Lemmy yet. And as the enshittification of Reddit continues there might well be some other exodus.
Every time I go to check out reddit, I am shocked by how many right-wing psychos there are. I don’t bother commenting anymore because there’s so much vitriol there.
honestly it’s replaced reddit for me in a good way, because it has just enough new content that I can check it before bed every day and scroll for a bit, but not enough to where I spend entire lunch breaks on it. sometimes I go days without even checking it. if anything it’s made my relationship with my browser / phone healthier than reddit.
100%, all I really want is something I can look at and perhaps sensibly chuckle at when I have a few minutes… Not a pasasitic brain worm that really wants me to pay attention to it.
a lot of servers are really weird about porn, ngl. its not that they just don’t allow it on their server (which, cool, thats fine), its that they go out of their way to block it. its a new wave of puritanism and i don’t really like it. although porn isn’t that hard to find if you are on a good server.
Do you know of a good server for that? Because I tried to sign up with Lemmy n sfw they never activated my account, and it was like a month ago.
And yeah, I’m not sure why the sex positivity movement seems to have completely reversed itself. There is this idea that the idea of sexuality of any kind is somehow inherently wrong. Which is stupid. I need all the fetishes
Give yourself some grace, yes corporate social media is addictive and yes it is easy to get lost mindlessly scrolling but the important question to ask is why is your brain so exhausted and stressed that mindlessly scrolling is the only thing you really have the mental energy to do so much of the time?
Western society repeatedly slams through the narrative that social media addiction is the reason people are miserable and it is all a pathetic attempt to distract us from the fact that our lives suck because of actual horrible things like not being able to afford rent, being in endless debt, not being able to afford healthcare and any number of other awful stresses.
If you need to blob out and scroll after getting out of your shitty job that pays shit where you are treated like shit and sitting in shitty traffic on the way home for who knows how long that’s on society for only providing predatory options that abuse you.
For a lot of people the only thing they actually have the energy to do after work every night is mindlessly scroll, it is a grace that people at least have that to turn to even if it is predatory. It is a symptom not the core issue.
Also true. And there are plenty of worthwhile/educational things to be found on the apps that can help a bit more than they harm. But yeah, it being a symptom is spot on.
I just discovered Lemmy, and I’m so happy about it. Instagram replaced Reddit for me these last five months, and I can really feel how detrimental it is for me. It’s like an ADHD-machine. No community, no discussion, just this as quick and loud phase as possible vibe. You look through one recipe video and you get recipes for several days. People dancing and dancing with huge smiles and these creepy eyes. Honestly it’s all so dystopian.
So keeping on with Instagram is not an option, going back to reddit is not an option - and I was really considering becoming like this person who is never in his phone, really mentally healthy, but wildly uninformed about the world and the general discussion 😅
The feel of this place with the Sync app is just so * chefs kiss *. Feels like what reddit was.
I saw a discussion the other day that may have been part of it. They were pointing out that many users when first joining lemmy created accounts on multiple instances. Whether they needed to find a community they preferred or do to ddos attacks and other issues causing outages a lot of those accounts have likely become inactive more as time went by. So the numbers may not be decreasing so much as been inflated by individuals coming up as multiple active users early on. I haven’t looked into how they are verifying what users are active though, so it could be wrong. If someone knows more please respond.
As far as I have heard, “activeness” is measured by whether a user posted a comment/post the past month, so lurkers/voters are not being counted. This does likely skew the numbers quite a bit.
Yeah, my first account on Lemmy was actually on Beehive, but I was confused by their sign up process (there wasn’t a page update telling me I had to verify my email, it just happened in the background and didn’t appear to do anything when I clicked sign up). I sorted it out when I checked my email an hour later, but that killed the vibe for me. So then I made this account, but jerboa didn’t support Aussie zone at the time so I made a shitjustworks account and used that for a while until I started becoming more active in the Aussie zone communities and tried to jump ship just for the ease
But yeah, I saw quite a few people who were very confused about the whole instances thing and a few others that have jumped ship a few times because of it. And as I mainly browse local top day, then all top day once that runs out of content, and my instance federates with all the instances I want to interact with, I don’t see a reason to use either of those other accounts I created
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Lemmy much more than I did Reddit. I find it’s overall less toxic and I’m therefore engaging more instead of just lurking.
One criticism, though: I really do not like the communities that use bots to copy over posts and comments from Reddit. I see no value in commenting or engaging on those posts as the original poster is not present for discussion. It’s also kind of weird that the original posters are most likely not aware their post and its comments have been copied elsewhere and may be having further engagement.
On Reddit it got so bad I stopped responding to replies entirely. I’m still not very regular about that, but whenever I check now, I’m shocked to find I’m not just getting blindly downvoted for potentially contraversial statements. It feels like a really good sign to me - progress in an era of downward spirals as low effort people all over the world spew their nonsense on everything.
I treat Reddit like I treat twitter. When something happens, I look at it to get a read on the situation, or what people are saying or whatever. But I otherwise totally ignore it now.
A year ago, I couldn’t go an hour without looking at Reddit.
Honestly, good. The Internet was better when people were spread out across many small message board and chat rooms. The golden age of the Internet was when you’d do a search for something and 500 different forms and little websites would pop up.
Now’s it’s all reddit, “X,” and shitty corporate owned nonsense. We turned 2020 Internet into 90’s cable TV.
Gonna add a comment to my upvote: I agree with this so fucking much. I look back at the joyous days when I had… fuck if I know how many websites, each dedicated to its own thing, most with its own userbase, so unique and so defined. The only good thing about Reddit for me was gaming communities that, unfortunately, replaced actual forums that once allowed me to engage with passionate people and look for relevant info, even if it’s been years since its creation.
It’s probably just me being unaware, but gaming communities these days feel dead outside their respective subreddits and some Discord servers - and the latter is an even worse experience because the form factor of an endless IRC-clone that actually seems to save chat history is pretty fucking dumb more than it is convenient. If anyone has any suggestions there, shoot.
I’ve been here for like 6 months now, maybe more. Posts SEEM to be getting more engagement than when I started. It definitely doesn’t seem like there are fewer users.
The vibrancy of communities is what matters, not total numbers. I have definitely noticed a solidification of new communities into places that feel longterm sustainable.
I mean also people are really tired and beat up, in the US most people are worse off than they were before the pandemic (not good). I don’t blame people for not having the mental bandwidth to join a new social network.
My mental health is so much better than when i scrolled reddit. Everyone here is so nice and doesn’t talk like 14 year olds with an ego. Also theres front page furry porn
I also find the limited number of posts and comments keep me at a healthy level of browsing. On Reddit I could get sucked down the rabbit hole of even one post, reading comments and replying to stuff for hours. There’s really very little of value that can ever be accomplished at that depth.
I agree with this, and on top of that the lack of infinite scroll is a feature to me because it requires me to deliberately consider each post before the next page rather than just spamming downward looking for that next dopamine hit.
which is the reason why some people don’t move to it.
If the first, there are other bad/tracking/adware things that people use and the people that try to help have a helpful tone. But for windows, people that ‘try to help’ always talk in a blaming tone and act like “I’m superior than you bc i use linux”
Or if the second
Bc you need some help to figure out Linux but if the community that is supposed to help act like that would people move?
I think you can find some jerks in any community, it’s people. But I doubt that GNU/Linux enthusiasts hate people for using Windows in general. I personally a GNU/Linux user and I never hate people for using Windows.
It’s just like Reddit - they have more content, but we prefer Lemmy because of freedom. And we hate Reddit (and spez), not it’s users.
Not really if you get into political talk, you will be shit talked into oblivion, and in the subject of pornography, i find the one here on lemmynsfw bland af, its mostly tje same chicks posting over and over again. But other than that I have seen before complaints from people on the lemmy.nsfw community that they are surprisingly puritan with the nsfw content allowed, and if you look for that type of content you will realize that its true, like i can think of various extreme fetishes that are banned that i rather not type here in public, but some that are more perplexing are like csncs, which its just a type of roleplay between 2 consenting adults and thats banned for some reason, and rape hentai, while i understeand while that would be controversial, its still a fetish sone people would have and its in draw form so no harm done to anyone, also some other gross stuff that nobody likes like scat or guro (drawn ofc)
Which like i said nobody whants to watch those last 2 except for the people that do and there even are comunities of those in reddit, so its very weird that there arent any equivalents here.
(Btw when i say banned i mean that they dont allow comunities that post that type of content.)
(And before you ask no im not into any of that type of the aformentioned shit)
Now you could say “well change instances”, but i heard bad things from the other ones here that do allow some of that stuff, specially the hentai focused ones, which i heard are mainly legally dubius shit and a little dangerous to go there so i rather look for porn/hentai somewhere els
Agreed, I went on reddit recently and realized how much anxiety it used to cause me. Fuck that place. There is definitely something to their algorithm meant to make you feel that way.
That’s what this is all about, people are putting their trust in systems that aren’t trustworthy, who will sell you to the highest bidder. Or any bidder frankly.
I love how so many of us former reddit lurkers found a home on Lemmy/the fediverse. I have absolutely loved being a part of the greater community here, I don’t know how else to describe it but it feels like my Internet home. I love all you fellow nerds. Obligatory fuck spez.
It feels like mostly internet veterans and people that care to explain themselves to me. Less recent users that don’t know technology or are newer to social media that isn’t “mainstream”.
Absolutely, this is really well said. I think because of the barrier to entry on this platform we are all a little more invested and I am here for it. I’ve hated what social media has become (Myspace was peak imo) and I’m so delighted the fediverse exists.
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