I joined during the first Reddit exodus, and it seemed like for ages the amount of Lemmy content was generally increasing (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but overall increasing). Now it seems that when I sort by New, I get through everything since my last visit much more quickly than I used to. Is that my imagination, or is the activity declining?
I honestly think that the whole internet is in decline.
I was just thinking everything seems to either be in decline, stagnation, or regression.
Maybe the whole age verification thing is keeping people offline.
Missing the Internet of my youth makes me feel older than almost anything else.
Fewer things are sadder than the reality of the Internet compared to what we envisioned early on.
It’s perhaps the greatest tragedy of my lifetime, I’m truly not exaggerating. We went from the free sharing of the majority of human knowledge to forcing people to sell their souls for YouTube money.
I feel the same way. I was a CS major in the early 80s. I watched the internet become something amazing, and then I watched it rot. Heartbreaking.
we are, right now, part of the un-rotting
I’m not in a country with the age verification thing, but has it been turned on for Lemmy servers?
I don’t know, but I was thinking it might be causing people to be less online generally, even if Lemmy itself isn’t a problem. I wonder what the Lemmy NSFW people are doing.
I don’t know of any servers that have started to verify ages, but some have started to geoblock countries whose laws require it.
When I run out of stuff to see on Lemmy, I touch grass. Simple as.
I feel way more in control of my online experience when endless scrolling isn’t possible.
This is why I haven’t touched grass in a while. I see so much content on here than when I first started
Seems the same
I’m doing my part! Just joined a couple days ago. Thought I could stick with Reddit but it got too far to the right for me. They crossed a line I can’t ignore, but I like the format, so I’m here. I knew Reddit was going to be winding down soon so I didn’t put as much effort in. I’d like to start a couple communities here, whereas I wouldn’t have tried over there. I just hope the toxic people who run the communities there don’t see what I’m doing and try to invade. I mean we could use the numbers but not the toxicity — though I feel that that comes with any influx of new users.
Well, welcome aboard! It’s pretty good here. Fewer bots, fewer trolls, more civil conversation. I hope it works for you.
Thank you! I’m mostly treating it like “Reddit but for left leaning people” and enjoying learning the differences.
Yeah, it is that. I’m way left leaning, but I actually wish Lemmy was more of a cross section. I’m not sorry to see the total assholes on the far right not here (or not very vocal), but I don’t prefer an echo chamber.
I’m actually coming back to Lemmy. I left reddit, but then went back to it with limited participation. And now it’s truly a cesspool. Lemmy may not be a perfect replacement, but it feels better. I should have never left.
Sorry to hear your experience was so bad, but welcome back.
The situation with bots and trolls on Reddit is horrific. Do you remember that time a few years back when Russia disconnected their whole country from the Internet? That day there was a dramatic decrease in assholes and trolls. Like, night and day, it was unmistakeable and widely commented on.
So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.
So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.
At the very least, I suspect Lemmy, as a federated network, has more power to filter them. We saw years ago what happened when the Wolfballs bigots tried to join, they were eventually isolated by most other instances who continued to run without them. So as long as we can retain a situation where the largest instances actually take a solid stance against assholes and trolls and bigots, then it becomes much easier to make them all optional, shunned to register on the more liberalist permissive instances.
Good point. Also worth noting that, since Lemmy isn’t owned by a company trying to make a profit, there’s no incentive to put up with outrageous jerks who drive up engagement.
I’m definitely bored of it.
Why?
Barely any content, endless reposts, and the same content as found on other popular forums
I think Lemmy needs a better way to federate communities, so if you sub to say a “Star Trek” community on 3 instances, you don’t get the same post 3 times, but instead it’s somehow linked and content federates; this would be at the community and not instance level, so there’s more community self-governance, and communities can migrate instances without so much intervention from instance admins. I think that will really help growth and decentralization.
What about that issue do you think is causing less activity? Just people not wanting to engage as much because of the redundancy?
Yea, if people get too annoyed seeing the same story in 4 communities, I think eventually they consolidate down to one, and the fracturing reduces engagement across ALL the communities; a couple become ghost towns, etc. It’s a different sense of engagement to see 4 threads with 2-4 comments instead of seeing 1 with 20.
I’m trying to relate that to the experience back on Reddit, where the same thing happened. Didn’t seem to hinder growth. But often people would abandon the smaller versions of the communities for the larger ones.
I don’t think it is, maybe we are due for another growth spurt but from here on out I genuinely think a critical mass has been achieved where it will simply make more and more sense for people to come here.
I do think we face a real inertia right now where the general public has become convinced corporate social media sucks because people suck not because corporations suck and we need to refute that misconception if we want the fediverse to have a vibrant future.
It is really frustating how evidently unhappy most users of corporate social media are about their social media use, yet they show no signs of stopping and when you start to provide an alternate vision of social media they immediately shortcircuit to “social media is bad, I don’t want more”.
I do think if we don’t start pushing back with an affirmative positive vision of why social media can be good we may see a period of depressed growth but I don’t see that happening yet personally.
I’ve definately noticed it too. I’ve tried to look for stats, and most seem to indicate that there is plenty of activity, but I dont really see it. At this point, I can scroll through the day’s all feed in like 20 minutes, nonetheless my subscribed feed. I kind-of wonder if theres one or two instances with a lot of bot activity effectively inflating the numbers.
Edit: Is there a way to see monthly posts by instance, or compare percentage of posts? That would be an easy way to prove or disprove my bots theory.
Edit 2: fediverse.observer shows monthly (Or rather, total by month) local posts by instance but not federated, and their overall stats are warped by a few bot instances that you can’t filter out. That said, for local posts on a few of the big instances, the rate seems stable. That said, smaller instances are shutting down so I don’t know if that has an impact on the overall posting rate.
That was what got me making this post.
I’m relatively new here, the only negative thing I notice is mods/creators reposting the same stuff every ~6-24 hours to make it ‘seem’ like there is more activity, which I think backfires more than not.
Are you sure you arent seeing posts of the same community being hosted from other instances? Ive been here a while and havent seen any reposting within the same community of the same instance. (Or atleast not repetitively.)
Very possible, I have not dug in on this, just a vibe.
Oh, I haven’t noticed that.
I think these things oscillates a lot.
The stats say the userbase is increasing, but it also feels like there’s been a lot less content being posted recently.
Perhaps the closure of Lemm.ee took away some of the quantity and variety of posts and communities?
I don’t know how to check for the whole lemmy but seems it’s growing a bit but the MAU dropped a bit probably because of august: https://fedidb.com/servers/lemmy.world
But the fediverse in general doesn’t grow too much except when a scandal happens.
That link is just hanging for me.
Watch out, the statistics might not say what you think they do.
“Total users” is a meaningless metric. All it showes is how many users aren’t using lemmy anymore.
“Monthly active users” is the only meaningful metric, and it’s fluctuating and currently going down.
“Activity growth” doesn’t actually show the number of new activities per month, but the total count of activities. So with constant activity you’d expect linear “activity growth” and with growing activity you’d see the line curling upward. It is currently mostly linear but slightly declining.
So these statistics show a slow decline, not an increase.
But in a way you can be happy that it doesn’t grow a lot. With the base architecture of ActivityPub (every instance contains a copy of everything, all content needs to be propagated to all instances, all content needs to be duplicate-moderated by all instances’ admins) it is absolutely not designed to handle large amount of users.
If only a tenth of a percent of Reddit users were to switch over to Lemmy, everything would grind to a halt and most instances would have to close down because running them would become to expensive for a non-profit project.
Yeah one has to be careful with statistics and I couldn’t find the whole Lemmy in one place so it’s also not representative of the whole Lemmy.
I thought ActivityPub did scale well and was ATProto (Bluesky) which had a lot more issues. I mean I can comment on Peertube using my Mastodon account meaning the whole Fediverse is properly connected and we are 1M MAU so I would say it already scaled good.
Here’s all of fediverse: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=1000
Also remember, though it says ‘daily’ in the title, that only refers to that the stats are grouped by day. They are still total numbers (e.g. total number of posts that are available on that day, not number of new posts created that day).
Lemmy has the big issue that each instance needs to cache the whole content of each community any user of that instance ever subscribed to. Since Reddit-style platforms only make sense if there are huge communities that means that the biggest communities have most of the traffic while being subscribed to by most instances. That means that most instances have copies of most content.
Same goes with moderation. Since every instance holds a copy of the content, each instance’s operator is liable for illegal content stored on their server, and most instance operators also want their moderation guidelines enforced across the whole instance, even for content coming from other instances, so each instance needs to moderate all content. Content moderation on one instance is not propagated to other instances (unless the moderation happens on the host instance of the community), so you end up with moderators of dozens of instances each having to individually e.g. delete the same post.
This is already such a strain that e.g. Lemmy.ee got shut down because it was just so much work and money doing all of that, and that’s with a miniscule amount of ~40k monthly active users across all of Lemmy. Compare that to the 1.2 billion monthly active users on Reddit. If we only got a tenth of a percent of all Reddit users over to Lemmy, the whole system would come crashing down.
Aah I didn’t knew this issue from Lemmy, really interesting. Creating a decentralized platform raises many new challenges that are hard to solve!
Now I get why piefed approaches moderation in a different manner and tries to be more resource friendly.
Thanks for the info! Really interesting stuff :)
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