active users are declining
I’ve BEEN saying this for a while now. How Lemmy users need to welcome new people with interests that are different than their own. People from different generations than their own.
I’ve given ideas how to make starting an account easier. The concept of picking a home instance for someone who’s never heard terms like “instance”, “federated” or “decentralized” can be quite intimidating to start. And if you fuck up, and randomly choose the wrong instance? You have to start over. All your comment history gets left behind.
So people are going to choose the most active instance, trusting the idea that OTHER people know what they’re doing.
I gave the idea that Lemmy needs to adopt standards across all instances so you can push a button and move your account. All your data would come with you.
Instead I was given a list of technical reasons why it would never work. The basis of these reasons came down to “it won’t work because it would be a lot of work”.
I hear a lot of people on here complain about corporate greed, and enshitification, but you gotta admit that they do get shit done.
In 2010 Steve Jobs was reviewing the new iphone prototype. Jobs said he wanted it slimmer, and wanted it airtight. The developers said it was pretty airtight, and there was no more room inside to make it slimmer.
Essentially telling Jobs that his demands were not going to be met because it would be a lot of work. So Jobs stood up, grabbed the prototype, walked to a fish tank, and dropped it in. It sank, and bubbles came out. Thus destroying it.
He said “See that? Bubbles. There’s air inside, which means there’s room inside. It also not airtight. Make it smaller, and make it airtight.” Then he left the room. When it released to the public, the final design was smaller, and airtight.
Not saying it WON’T be hard work to make true account migration a reality, but it IS possible. The developers just figuratively need their prototype dunked in a metaphorical fish tank.
Because until this process is easier, and users are greeted with a friendlier userbase, people are just going to sign up, realize they fucked up, realize the experience isn’t great, and leave. If they have access to reddit, they will leave.
It seems everytime I search for a topic all the results are from a year ago. Which suggests to me that reddit fucked up, users exploded here, gave it a chance, disliked it, and left.
Meanwhile, I point out just SOME of the glaring problems. But instead of embracing the problem and starting a think tank on how to fix it, my posts are instead turned into an echo chamber of how wrong I am. How the ideas will never work, and the problems presented persist to this day.
All because I’m thinking from the perspective of the normie 95%, and not the linux minded 5%. Which really places an artificial self installed glass ceiling on top of you.
but you gotta admit that they do get shit done.
I opened Reddit again today to have a look at my local city sub, where I’m an (inactive) mod, the interface to moderate now offers a terrible experience. Bloated, clunky, slow. So I’m not so sure they get things done.
All your comment history gets left behind.
What’s the big deal with you leaving an old account behind? Lemmy has no karma, if you keep the same username (and even more with the same picture), people are going to recognize you, you can even add links to both accounts in the bio to make sure. I’m on probably my 10th alt, people still recognize me from time to time, whatever the account.
Instead I was given a list of technical reasons why it would never work. The basis of these reasons came down to “it won’t work because it would be a lot of work”.
As @[email protected] pointed out, the 2 main developers have limited time and resources. What is the community supposed to do, threaten them to leave will the vast majority finds account migration a non-critical feature?
The concept of picking a home instance for someone who’s never heard terms like “instance”, “federated” or “decentralized” can be quite intimidating to start.
Here’s the post I made a few days ago on /r/RedditAlternatives: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/
Federation is confusing, people want a single website they can go to
Go to https://lemm.ee/
Have a look around, see if the content and the formatting is appealing to you, register an account if you want to be able to curate your feed further
Go to https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.
Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your “instance”, use “lemm.ee”
If you want more choices for apps, have a look at https://www.lemmyapps.com/
Email has been working on a federation model for decades. People have to remember if they use Gmail or Outlook, but that’s it. It’s similar here.
There is a whole community here who has no idea what an instance or federation is, but they still use this community, and post 100 comments every 3 days. The platform is similar enough to Reddit for them to use. And I can tell you very confidently none of them (between 100 and 150 monthly active users) use Linux.
It seems everytime I search for a topic all the results are from a year ago.
Of course if you ask questions on a very niche topic on a dead community nobody will answer. That’s what [email protected] threads are for, to make active communities emerge.
There is even https://quiblr.com/ if people want more tailored suggestions
The statement about comment history is inconsiderate. People absolutely care about their content. I don’t have to know nor care for their reasons why but it is important to users.
I’m gonna say it, Blockchain might actually have a usecase for Lemmy accounts.
I’m unclear what that means.
You could decentralize user accounts so that they aren’t attached to any instance, or at least the account owner can move their account from one instance to another.
This would be way easier to implement without blockchain. Data portability doesn’t require any of the consensus mechanisms or distributed computation, even if they would result in user data being portable.
If your instance disappears, then how can you make sure that you could use your same username on an instance that is created after that one disappears?
The same plot with a more reasonable y-axis:
Active users (monthly is what you should be looking at) is very slowly declining, however we are still above the level that we were before the most recent influx.
I’m probably missing something, but what are the two bumps in December and Feb from?
December changed the way active users were counting, adding the votes on top of posts and comments
February was LW applying that update
Oh so they are not new users coming in? Well that paints a pretty different picture then
Insane to start the plot at 45k. The rate of decline is rather minimal
In the last 3 months it went down by about 10,000 users. Comparing with the rate of increase in total Lemmy users, active user rate should have at least been stable. I guess we will have to wait for reddit to fuck up again for another influx. And Lemmy is only getting better with time so probably on every influx more users are going to stay.
I try to get people from niche subs I follow to move to Lemmy but every time I do I get downvoted. Could be automated by reddit idk
People generally don’t like being proselytized.
I don’t care about “number go up”.
Lemmy now has enough users to provide plenty of content, and really interesting new communities I’ve never seen on that other website are starting to pop up.
It also has its own memes and culture already.You don’t have 1000 comments under every meme post, but the comments that are there are usually worth reading.
It’s not a reddit replacement - it’s much better.There is still not enough people for niche topics.
It is the eternal struggle as more users come niche communities will improve or even exist, but general communities will get worse.
Maybe not every niche needs a dedicated community.
They kinda do though. I can’t post about my gaming niche in a gaming community because it’s barely tangential, and still haven’t found 99% of the communities I had on Reddit.
Lemmy is good for /all, and that’s about it tbh
Which kind of gaming niche is it ? Are the subreddit mods open to creating a post presenting Lemmy as an alternative?
Simracing. We don’t relate to typical gaming at all. It’s all high end hardware, all very specialized and typically doesn’t interest normal gamers.
Subreddit mods are very against Lemmy or anything that moves them off the platform. The absolute butthurt rage for weeks after the protests proved that one right.
Mostly I just don’t see this platform as an alternative for medium sized communities. It works for large ones where there’s enough people that after a move if 25% transfer then you still have a lively community. Or for small communities where you can get 70%+ to move. But those mid size, 100k users on average communities trying to get them to move just ends up with a ghost town here.
Have you tried [email protected] ? @[email protected] posted there 2 times in the last 2 days
I’m actually a mod over there, but as a general consumer of content, there’s not enough to make it a viable community. It’s seen a little more activity recently, but is overall a fairly small and dead community.
“More!!” -Kylo Ren
“MORE!”
believe it or not also Kylo Ren
Lemmy at first was Abit barren but I’m super happy with it now. Let’s hope we don’t see reddit collapse and the masses turn their attention here like the digg event
I hope Lemmy doesn’t become overrun with reddit’s far-right psychos after reddit collapses.
I imagine that many will flock to right-wing friendly instances that end up widely defederated. Most of them though will go back to 4chan and other similar sites.
Exploding Heads is a Nazi instance that many people don’t even know about because of how defederated it is.
Was, it’s no longer in existence currently. Many of them moved to Nostr, though some of their members came back to Lemmy and set up the hilariouschaos Lemmy instance.
So long as the Israeli bot networks stay off of here. I don’t like how China is discussed here but it’s a function of the type of people this place attracts, i.e not fans of authority.
I really hate graphs that start at 99% and top off at 100%
The gain is really next to nothing in the 2 months shown in this graph. It goes from ~1,456,000 to 1,468,000… which is a 00.8% increase, less than 1%.
Yep we’re gaining 1’000 new accounts every couple days, maybe every week. Which is pretty cool given we have an average of 40’000 active users. But nothing compared to the total of 1.5 million accounts. The vast vast vast majority of which are dead. Made one year ago to check out lemmy and never came back.
There’s also lots of people who made an account in multiple instances before realizing that you don’t have to do that
People make throwaways all the time for services like this. I expect lemmy to be no different.
Monthly active users would be a better statistic to track imo. That gives you a real idea as to how big the community is.
Anecdotally, content wise does seem better than a few months ago. Unfortunately lots of it seems to be highly polarizing and hateful stuff when you look at all communities. Othering seems to be as strong as ever, if not stronger. Probably because hate groups can just setup their own instances or take over parts of existing ones without much blowback like they would get on other sites.
Yeah I don’t feel like it feels much larger. But at the same time my blocklist has added 30+ accounts in the last couple of months.
It’s amazing to me just how hassle-free it is to use Lemmy as opposed to reddit.
Rddit just feels like it’s actively trying to get you to leave it.
Bad moderation is still an issue here. Like allowing people posting pictures of text or low effort meme content on comms that aren’t for memes
Feel free to create Meta posts about that.
And if you reasonable meta posts gets removed, post on [email protected]
I use the report button
Sounds good, but from what you are saying, they are ignoring your reports
I guess we need more people to report it? I don’t know what their admin UI looks like, but I imagine posts with more reports sort to the top?
What might happen is that mods ignore you because they don’t care, and admins don’t want to interfere with community level moderation
Reddit is like the late Roman Empire. It looks fine on the outside, but it’s corrupt all the way down, powered by unpaid labor, and the lead pipes are slowly killing everyone.
No, no, the pipes are fine (mostly). They have calcium buildup that prevents lead leeching.
The REAL major source of lead poisoning in the Empire is much stupider - knowingly making wine syrup in lead pots because the lead makes it taste sweeter. Despite knowing that lead is toxic af.
There’s probably an apt comparison in that to Reddit as well.
Lemmy is one of the most harmful platforms I’ve ever been on.
Not even on Reddit have I spent so much time on here. Quality content and engaging conversations taking so much of my time and doomscrolling. I love you guys, keep it up.
