Lemmy world was growing at a decent pace leading up to July 1st, then had a big influx following the API deadline. However the last week in particular has seen a decline.
Engagement still appears to be the same, although a little lower than the start of the month. A few of the other instances i have been checking follow a similar pattern.
Do you think we will continue growing at a steady pace, or do we need another big trigger to get users to migrate? For Mastodon, it seems there’s a big trigger every other week to drive users away from Twitter, but with Reddit, the revolt seems to have quietened down considerably.
It does feel a little dead here. Right now it’s mostly memes, meta discussions, or Reddit hate. And the crowd is a very specific type of hyper aware internet dweller (myself included).
Reddit isn’t worth using without third party apps, and it’s the only social media I used before Lemmy, so I’m spending a lot more time off my phone nowadays. I only check the daily top on Lemmy once a day instead of compulsively every time I touch my phone. Guess that’s a good thing.
I blocked the major meme subs (coms?) and my experience here has been much, much better. Free yourself of last year’s memes and explore all the interesting links getting posted
It would be nice if you could block a community directly from the front page without having to navigate to it first. Whole instances would also be useful.
I can do it on Connect - click the dots in the upper right and you can pick Block Community
I wish there was an Undo button, though. Right below Block Community is Block Instance and I’ve clicked that a few times by mistake
That’s a very good thing.
And to be honest, as selfish as this will sound, I wouldn’t want Lemmy to grow too much - unless the eternal september crowd can be contained.
I disagree. While I do like that the discussions and top level comments are not nearly as homogenized as Reddit eventually became, I’m really missing the niche communities. I wasn’t subscribed to any large subs on Reddit, so my feed was basically just a curated list of discussions for my hobbies. No memes, news, pop culture, internet drama, or politics. Right now, that’s just not possible on Lemmy due to the low population.
Understood. That’s why I said:
I think it is very much a client thing.
The one I use - memmy - frequently has issues with widgets that stop responding, and currently is glitching such that the upvote/downvote buttons are superimposed over the posts. Search results show all communities as having 3k subscribers even if there’s actually only single digits. If you highlight text to make a link, it overwrites the text with the empty link rather than making the text into a link. Mlem and Liftoff - the other two I checked - have their own issues.
I think we can also do a better job hiding the complexity of federations from novice users and cut down on the impact of bot-based crossposting by detecting that the lines articles are identical. I could see, for instance, discussions being merged on the client side.
I found reddit neither usable nor interesting before Alien Blue, and I suspect there are a number of potential users out there who would onboard or increase engagement here with a better UX.
Once 3rd party lemmy apps get up to snuff it’ll be easier to switch. The .ml loss probably hurt us and for now a lot of redditors would rather complain than leave.