Fediverse

If we look at how things went for Mastodon during the various twitter exodus waves, it's a very similar pattern - huge increase followed by tail off, then another wave of increase followed by another tail off etc. I suspect the same thing will happen with Lemmy/Reddit. We all know reddit are going to continue to do stupid things prior to their IPO so it's likely there'll be more waves of influx followed by tail offs.

This is actually good as it's organic growth/loss. I can't think of an example where a big push by a company to get more users has resulted in a 'better' community, just a larger one. Organic growth/loss is much more likely to result in a better community as oppose to just a 'popular' one. Or, to put it another way, lets aim for quality not quantity.

Now that my instance has defeded from Hexbear I don't see much outright tankie stuff anymore and on the very rare occasions I do come across it, I just block the user. That said, I have noticed a growing trend of people calling anything slightly to the political left of Joe Biden either socialist, communist or tankie as though those terms were interchangeable, which they're not. Either way, if it bothers you, either ignore it, block the user, block the community or move your account to an instance that is defeded from the instances you are upset by.

Let's also not forget Lemmy is not mature software and has only become as heavily used as it is now about 3 months ago. There's a lot of features missing, particularly for admin and mod users, so we can either be patient and do what we can right now, fork Lemmy, create unofficial patches or not use it.

I do feel like we've become so used to highly polished, corporate solutions that do everything that we've lost our ability to be patient. For me, its vastly preferable to be somewhere where I'm not tracked, fingerprinted, advertised to and have my data sold but at the same time put up with a few idiosyncrasy's of the software than the alternative.

How can we make it more popular?

Defederating tankies, nazis, fascists, bigots and other awful elements; forcing moderators and administrators to do their job when bad behaviours occur, and respectfully disagree with other people instead of calling them names or mocking them.

It's time for Lemmy devs to really think about the pain points and how to address them.

It's clear that federation isn't working as intended. Because of that, moderation is too difficult. Defederation has been a major drama for Lemmy, which is only being made more likely given these complaints have not been addressed.

Then there's the curse of choice that makes gaining non-tech users a lost cause. It is leading to extreme fragmentation which makes people drift back to their busier platforms.

These issues need to be addressed or Lemmy will be MySpaced within a year.

I haven't found the depth of experience and quality depth in most of Lemmy, yet. Lemmy.world is an exception.* It takes time.

Isn't this ok? I'm not saying it's better... just OK?

I don't know if this is just me but why is there always a race to be the "most popular/larger platform"?

Isn't this kind of race to be the most popular the reason why a lot of platforms/companies/jobs/games/etc are suffering today? Growth for the sake of growth and forcing something to be more popular just because it needs to be more popular is just kind of sad.

It's not like "corporate fediverse/lemmy" needs more users... At least this is my opinion.

There's still a lot of low hanging development fruit. All that downtime the bigger instances have are largely the result of poorly optimized database interactions (with the exception of the DDoSing) and that works out to higher costs overall. It should not cost instance admins nearly as much as it does to host a sum total of 50k users. Not to mention, moderation tools are still basically nonexistent. There is progress on tweaking the algorithm to not completely bury anything but the largest communities, so that will probably significantly improve folks feeds.

Also there's no point recruiting from Reddit anymore. I think we are better off establishing a wholly new slow growth phase pulling primarily from Mastodon. The userbase is huge by our standards and already understands federation. Not to mention Mastodon users tend to be far more active posters than Reddit users.

All the people saying there is no content, should also create the content they wish to see. It's the only way to grow, even if we're talking to ourselves for a bit.

Imo. Lemmy is doing great. I feel like this was expected after such a huge expansion. Never could expect everyone to stay. I stood up my own instance in early June and it's technically still up but I'll probably be bringing it down soon as I feel comfortable here on startrek.website and support the cause.

Yep growth doesn't come all at once it goes up and it goes down, just like stocks. Social media platforms experience increases in users but also decreases in users. Though looking at the graph it just seems that people are less engaged, rather than leaving, the sharp dip is an engagement, not such a sharp dip in overall user count though.

Its because of the diffusion of content and users. Its been pointed out elsewhere that the current structure of lemmy thins out both content and engagement.

Its a harder to grow social network and it suffers from some design issues.

It's fine, it doesn't need to be popular

I'm on today but was unable to get on many times. It says to change instances, but with no clue how to easily do that. I could not figure it out - so I just left it do its downtime thing until I could return.

Also, a lot of the posts are weird. Political. I don't want to see that stuff and have blocked what I can but I'm still seeing the stuff!

When I go to specific forum topics I do want to read, there just aren't many posts.

When I end up on the front page, some days it's the same stuff I read hours before.

Some things need to change to make it more attractive to hang out here. Even us nerdy types are finding other places.

Not complaints. Just my observations that perhaps someone can look at as a point to make some changes

This is to be expected. The question now is where will it stabilize amd will it start growing again after?

Lurkers are not counted I think. I prefer browsing. Let me comment so I can be "active."

I love Lemmy but I find the extreme pro-FOSS bias and hatred of everything else to be pretty abrasive and not conducive to useful or interesting discussion. And that's coming from someone who both loves to use and contribute to FOSS. But my preferred desktop OS isn't Linux which apparently according to the Lemmy hivemind is a big no-no.

I think more Lemmy users need to learn that the upvote and downvote buttons aren't meant to be used to indicate agreement and disagreement respectively, it's to indicate if a comment is valuable contribution to the discussion regardless of whether or not you agree.

In a post discussing Chrome, a few comments about alternative browsers make sense. But if there are 100s and 100s of comments all just saying some variation of "switch to Firefox otherwise you suck" and those are the only ones that are upvoted, then the whole comment section becomes pointless.

SELL!!

There were no fucking apps available.
Apps are now available but reddit wave is over.

So go back to reddit and tell people apps are here finally.

Two instances I signed up to went down. My accounts are down 50%!

Blame lurkers posting nothing but upvoting.

There’s hundreds of posts on “all” every day without a single comment

Doesn't help when you have a moderator for a community as big as KDE that tells users looking for help to learn to code. Looking at you, @Bro666@lemmy.kde.social. Suppose to be a support community, and if anyone reports an issue or concern, he calls them rude and dismisses them with a repost of his article to go code it yourself. That's helpful to no one. If I were new to Lemmy and KDE, that would have made me leave both. Toxic mods are a problem.

In that time we've had new people come and experience a lack of apps, many that we do have today were still in the works a month or two ago. We've had performance issues, shitty Active sorting that still shows week old posts no matter how many times you refresh, we've had instances simply disappearing over night, we've had ddos attacks, we've had horrible content spam like CSAM and issues with extremism.

All of that with the cherry on top that signing up for Lemmy, understanding how it works and using it day to day is not as easy as a place like reddit. Who knows what the future holds for Lemmy.

more plateauing than losing I think

Somewhat expected, probably will be multiple waves of people joining with small declines in the months immediately after. Some of those less engaged individuals will come back too, and some of each wave will stay. I stayed from this last wave of reddit users. I've been using three lemmy accounts and my Mastodon since the incident. I intend to keep doing it, it's been a lot fun.

Why on Earth would we want to make it more popular?

I want more people to leave. Things have noticeably gotten better over the last few weeks, but there's still a ways to go.

The people who are leaving are presumably mostly people who are frustrated by the relative complexity of decentralized forums and people who can't find enough "content" to scroll through here, and good riddance to the lot of them.

We had this question before, so let's get right back at it!

There was a rather controversial happening at Reddit a few months ago, which caused a lot (in Lemmy terms) of users to check out Lemmy.

Some of those users left rather soon, and some more keep dropping off regularly, as they can't seem to adapt to Lemmy, or rather live without one or another feature or content from Reddit.

Now to your question, what can we do better?

Advertisement is of course one, but a large part of the users who left Lemmy we're likely because of Lemmies unfinished state, so maturing Lemmy should be a top priority. "But properly maturing a social site requires an already existing user base" - and that's exactly what we have right now, even if it's dwindling.

Other solutions might also spring from creating the better user experience, such as features to moderate properly, both on a moderator and user basis, and of course to provide sufficient high-quality content.

We can of course try and forcefully promote Lemmy while promising rich lands and green fields, but I think that this is not the optimum path for Lemmy at this time, as we just might acquire the same bad reputation that vegetarians or Linux or a lot of other good initiatives suffered from.