I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
I've been here a few years now and I can say Lemmy's got issues. You can't come on here and have a good time anymore when all it's about is trump trump trump and Linux Linux Linux it gets old. I wanna escape from reality a bit sometimes and there's few areas to subscribe to that gives any joy anymore.
Yeah part of the issue here is that there are so few users that the more niche topics just don't get a lot of traction.
For example, I help mod the Washington Capitals hockey team community, but mostly it's just two of us talking. We recently decided to stop posting game day threads for every game, because there'd be one comment in them (usually me), if we were lucky - and we were the last NHL team community to end the game day threads; most stopped long ago. The overhead just wasn't worth the reward. We decided we'd focus more on the general Hockey community, hoping to build that out a bit.
(We didn't give up entirely - we posted a sticky thread that is for all games, and we'll make a top level comment for each game in there, asking people to respond to that comment for that game. If they don't, not a major issue. This way we still have the forum for the game discussions without having to worry about posting it every time.)
THIS is the way. Build up general communities first, then the niche ones will come later. Kudos! :-)
On a long enough timeline, every Lemmy thread eventually becomes one of the following:
ACAB
Trump bad
FOSS good
Reddit bad
Socialism (generally, via vanguard party) good
Tankies (i.e. #5) bad
Not that I disagree with most of the above, but we need some normies in here to balance things out, so invite them and don't demonize them. That's made trickier by Reddit banning people for talking about the Fediverse/Lemmy, so you have to be clever about it.
amen. i want to nerd out and make jokes and listen to people's stories and gain insightful from other people.
but now i have weirdos going into my history from such threads and telling me that if i think there is any subtlely to social or personal or moral issues, than I'm evil incarnate.
I think part (though not all) of the issue is discoverability. There's other communities where this isn't as prevalent, but a) they're not always easy to find, and b) for this as well as other reasons, they might not be super active (if people don't know it exists, who's posting?)
I get around the first bit by trawling All New once and a while. One feature I will say I liked on reddit was the random community function. But while I like that it's a smaller userbase here for some reasons, it does mean less diversity of interests.
I made one of those communities:
https://lemmy.world/c/IndepthIndie
PieFed offers a number of options to aid in discoverability - like Topics, Feeds (user-customizable and shareable), and combining together all replies from all cross-posts (at which point you can be like "oh hey, I didn't know that community also existed?! Subscribed!!").
Sorry for being salty, but I've given up on Lemmy ever catching up to have even remotely close to as many features as PieFed.
Anyway you are definitely correct, community discovery has huge flaws when using Lemmy (and it's about to get worse, where lemmy.ml gets veto power in showing communities to newly-created instances - it is easy enough to get around that by simply adding them manually, but that will increase the authoritarian control factor even more than it is now, further strengthening the ties between the Lemmy sourcecode and the Lemmy.ml instance, where already maintenance of the latter siphons off a great deal of funding away from efforts to develop the codebase further).
Same federation, same posts, same users. Different software doesn't mean anything else changes.
There are an absolute shit-ton of features that PieFed has that Lemmy lacks. To give just one example, PieFed offers "polls", which do not show up on Lemmy since the latter lacks the ability to properly receive them.
Even for the posts that do federate, many features cannot federate in Lemmy, since the latter lacks the entire concept of them - e.g. hashtags, user & post flairs, user labels, limitation of community voting to only subscribers, etc. To give an example there, if a Lemmy community wanted to see fewer posts about USA politics, a moderator only has one option: make a rule and ban users who try it. In contrast a PieFed community could make a community flair and have a much gentler rule that any post about USA politics must use that flair, so that users who did not want to see such could filter them out. PieFed also combines communities into cross-community topic areas, and combines all comments across all cross-posts (identical posts sent to different communities), with the ruleset of the one currently clicked on displayed at the bottom below a post, including the description and the entire set of rules that the mods are asking the members to follow (displayed on each and every single post). Therefore even the identical communities look different when on PieFed, with many enhanced features (caveat: 3rd party apps have not yet adapted to take advantage of most of these features).
https://join-lemmy.org/instances will send you to places like hexbear.net and lemmy.ml, whereas https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser literally never will.
Even federation works differently, allowing a hierarchy of level of "trustedness" beyond simply yes federate fully vs. no defederate entirely. Also PieFed instances more efficiently send out 25x less data per post, and new instances are significantly easier to install and maintain (see e.g. irl stories of https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed and https://slrpnk.net/post/29381524, and don't miss how in both stories there are long-standing issues/bugs that somehow never seem to get fixed...). Feel free to like or dislike whatever you choose but...
Different federation, different posts, slightly different users. Different software means everything is now up to be changed, especially as the software is written in a language that encourages more contributors, and the devs are also much more responsive to feedback.
- source: Nutomic, one of the primary Lemmy devs
Even the very model of interaction on PieFed profoundly differs from Lemmy: e.g. if I wanted to block political posts then I could unsubscribe from all (or most) of them, so that they do not pollute my Subscribed feed on the main page, yet they would all still then be just a click away in the News & Politics Topic Feed, meaning that I can literally both have my cake (no politics) and eat it too (have politics whenever I want). Everything is different here. Check it out if you do not believe me - e.g. your very own instance has a PieFed version.
Honestly I think this is a problem. I don't think the instance picker should be so opinionated that it blocks (legal) instances. I want extremist to be directed away from the normie and moderate instances. I prefer to clearly characterize instances and let people pick their own, while also providing opinion for people who don't care or lack understanding.
Although this is clearly a point of preference, and I can see why some people would prefer the opposite to possibly prevent the radicalization of a moderate.
My group is not political =3
Or about Linux
https://lemmy.world/c/IndepthIndie
I just got on to lemmy and im already over all the political news in here.
Do you subscribe to other communities?
I do. But every other comment is about how the thing this community is about sucks.
Lemmy really has a problem with "fun". Everything is bad and you need to be told about it.
What communities, out of interest? Piefed has a wider range of options for following comms.
c/nintendo@lemmy.world is quite notorious for this
Im new here and the part you talk about feels the same as reddit at least here I feel like im not supporting that clusterfuck by being an advertisement target.
Yeah even reddit is fucked these days.
By the way note there is not always an easy way to find communities naturally so I would recommend thinking of some key words and searching for communities with them to fill in some niches
And you can say "block anything related to that," but I don't want to stop hearing about it entirely. Just not the only topics.
And even on the few active subs that aren't Trump or Linux, there's a lot of commenters that can't shut up about Trump or Linux, particularly ones that think you're a bad person if you ever stop talking about Trump.