Fediverse

…I am drifting away from Lemmy myself.

Political communities are echo chambers like Reddit, in a different color. Discussing tech or helping others is better, but still feels like talking in circles.

Wholesome subs like /c/SuperBowl are sublime, but I mostly lurk there.

Information hygiene is awful. Big subs upvote tabloids and Tweets to the sky, as long as they align with their beliefs. I just saw a discussion on a not-obviously AI generated photo with the community sentiment of “misinformation? Who cares. It’s a pro-lefty meme, so spread it.”

Anyway, all this scrolling and impulse commenting eats time. I get the same feeling of shouting into a black hole that I get on corporate social media.

Much of this is my fault, though.

I have several niches I intend to make original posts for, but never do.

It’s somewhere in the giant pile of my IRL executive dysfunction :’(

From my own experience with Lemmy, I can absolutely see why it's declining.

Lemmy is packed full of miserable people constantly calling for violence. 90% of the feed is packed full of US politics, it doesn't matter how many filters I use I still see that greasy orange cunt's face every time I open Lemmy.

The amount of hostility towards outsiders just getting into Lemmy is astounding, and I've absolutely seen the whole "quality over quantity" crap that only drives people away from the platform. The IT tech snobbery is also incredibly offputting to people who aren't tech enthusiests.

In short, Lemmy has a toxic shithead problem that a platform this small can't afford if it wants to survive long term.

I’m feeling very burnt out. Lemmy is kinda an endless stream of political doom and gloom. For context, I’m in the US and already stressed out by our political situation. But I don’t come here to see more doom and gloom. It’s getting to the point where I think I need to get off for my mental health.

Then there are all the people who if you don’t agree exactly with their opinion they downvote you to hell. You have left leaning politics but not my flavor of left? Downvote! You hate enshitification and big tech privacy practices, but you use a single piece of software that isn’t FOSS? Downvote!

It’s so exhausting. I absolutely hate Reddit but I miss going on there and just laughing at how someone’s TV is too high. I miss laughing at how some restaurant serves food of shovels instead of plates.

And that’s not even getting into the lack of content. That part I understand requires users like myself to be as active as possible. But it’s hard being active when I feel so burnt out from the other stuff here.

Tbh, idk if these issues are specific to Lemmy or just the internet as a whole. I can only speak to the slice of the internet I find myself in. But I just wanna see people that are excited about things: photography, 3d printing, weird keyboards, etc. And that exists here, but it’s drowned out by all the doom and gloom.

The culture wars have reached the fediverse, and it's making me less happy to be here. I don't want to hang out in places where people use slurs and insults, even if they're not aimed at me. I'm seeing more casual misogyny/misandry, more casual use of the r**** slur, more perfectionist gatekeeping, more assumptions, and just less good-faith comments in general.

I'd advertise, but I'm starting to look for an alternative to lemmy.

Hot take: the biggest issue is actually ever entering a community and seeing zero comments. Most reddit addiction stems from wanting to read comments, so I think people should add a comment to something if they're upvoting and they see that the thread has zero comments.

Nothing eliminates enthusiasm like seeing 0 comments on every post in a community, especially if that community is driven by bots.

While (I think) I totally understand what you are saying here...

... Yeah I'm honestly fine with lemmy just being more or less a tiny cluster of neo forums.

I like the cozy.

At the same time... from I guess a less selfish perspective... yeah, this is the exact time an alternative to Reddit and other corpo social media needs to be popularized.

But, somewhat alleviating myself from that... I don't really know anybody that I could 'word of mouth' spread lemmy to, that I haven't already.

And I'm too crippled to put stickers on really anything outside my own apartment, lol.

Reddit refugee here. I've been banned three times in 2 weeks for erroneous applications of nebula's policies. They appear to be going through a self-destructive phase. All you need to be is a viable alternative to a dumpster fire and deliver a clear valuable alternative.

It seems strange that these two curves so closely match eachother in shape.

When 6month active users drop that means 6 months ago a user stopped using the platform.
When monthly active users drop that means a month ago a user stopped using the platform.
So this would suggest that there is a correlation between user attrition 6 months ago and last month.

Web banners are the way to go

Every person that keeps saying it's good that there is no one here sounds like scrooge in my head going,
"Good, all to decrease the surplus population"

I agree! There is not enough people here

Goes to 'All --> New,' here we go again...

Come on everyone, let's do our part. The only way to get less doom and gloom on the main page is to engage with the stuff you want early. Like it was mentioned by others, that primarily means comments not just upvotes

I think part of the issue is new users not understanding or feeling comfortable with the fediverse (myself included a while ago). Even after searching for a bit and looking it up I can barely get how it works, but there's really no guide with the common terms anywhere, how to get started, the difference between platforms and what they have in common etc. The benefits are the first thing you hear about, but they seem more like jargon terms than actually anything functional.

Reddit has better accessibility and user retainment, alongside with a library of old posts that are good for searching some niche stuff up.

For example, if I were to get a friend into lemmy, I'm not really sure how I can explain it to them, or where to start other than the copy paste "decentralized" "federated" stuff. It doesn't really answer stuff like who moderates it, develops it, owns it, or what's the difference between lemmy, piefed mbin, how do they interact with each other.
I believe that an introductory "oficial" post on the front of each platform in layman's terms would be great to get new users to stay.

Everyone I try to explain it to thinks it's reddit but worse. I'm still going to keep trying. The other thing is seeding content and not making reposts. I'm not the most creative person, but I still try to make content for this platform because I love what it stands for.

My two cents is that more users oughta establish new communities when they find the absence of one. Even if they don't have the time to devote for moderating it, as people join the responsibilities can be allocated among the early adopters. Especially those with strong political and moral backgrounds (to mitigate abuses of power like those infamously cultivated over at Reddit).

I've always been more of a lurker/commenter than a poster, but posters are what Lemmy needs if we want more users to come. People need to want to come to Lemmy for content.

In my experience, the best poster on the platform is the person making the comics on /c/unix_surrealism, in that sometimes I find myself wanting to check the comm to see if there is anything new.

And this will be disagreed with heavily, but the second best posters are the memers at Hexbear. I just think they make the funniest leftist memes (so political content, sorry people who are tired of politics), and they're the only instance that actually has a site culture, with their own in-jokes and history/lore.

When Reddit was young, that was a big part of it: Posts that went viral among the community and became in-jokes/lore. Comment chains (as much as I grew to hate them). And original ideas for content (AMA, TIL, AITA, etc.). There was a kind of culture to the site (that's mostly been diluted now).

That said. I like Lemmy perfectly fine at the size it is, even if it doesn't fully replace Reddit. Though it's concerning to see it declining.

I came here looking for something different than Reddit but I’m actually pretty done. I try to post, start threads and conversations but the ones that don’t get deleted because of some vague rule get questioned to hell as to why it exists that it makes me wish I hadn’t posted at all.

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.

Alright, I'll make more content. Give me a month or two. I'm slow at drawing.

Then start breeding yall

For me I deleted my account a month ago after 2 years of lemmy. I forgot about this account and jerboa install, the only community sub is this one haha.

I figure I'll just say why I left, this place became a depressing shit hole.

The communities aren't niche enough because it's not big enough, so it's just a shit experience. I'm just going to look to old school forums again. Phpbb you must still be out there..

I figure I'll still keep this account in case I need to use it for something useful. One never knows when they'll get lost on the seas and need some directions.

Just wait for Reddit to finally ban porn and we’ll have more users than we know what to do with

Tell your musician friends to find me here:

https://lemmy.world/c/IndepthIndie

Actually, you know what? I'll give a free guitar lesson to the first 10 people to make a post in that group.

To the user mines!

I actually don't mind a smaller community of more intelligent people. Too much riff raff and the quality degrades.

This is quite concerning indeed.

We should start by being better at retaining what we already have.

Every person is valuable now.

I'm a very new user who wanted to give this a chance, here are the friction points from my point of view:

1. The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn't help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.
2. Content discovery sucks ass. My feed stayed mostly the same since I started using Lemmy. I'm presented the same shit over and over again. I'm not sure if it's something that I do wrong, if there is just no content or if that's a side effect of 'no tracking at all' but either way the experience is just bad
3. Someone in here already said it, but 'Lemmy' is a horrendous name. That alone was the reason why I didn't bother to try it at all for a long time. Only recent events pushed me towards it but tbh I'm not sure I'll stay.

In short the user experience is abysmal.

After trying to convert a friend who heavily uses reddit, multiple times, I recommended him again the other day to leave the hellsite (reddit).

I didn't recommend Lemmy but have a while back.

He himself specifically brought up that he 'didn't vibe with Lemmy as much as reddit' and that he believes he would 'miss stories he would otherwise have liked to see' by switching to Lemmy.

Reddit has kept him more up to date than not over the past year - he believes had he not been using reddit he wouldn't have found out about [specific events in iran] as early as he did.

The other main pain point I've encountered is the small and niche community problem, which I'm sure we are all aware of - certain information feels like it can only be found on such small subreddits.

Therefore I have two suggestions:

• create a Lemmy instance that mirrors reddit, rather than have bots post reddit posts onto main Lemmy instances, create an instance that mirrors specific subreddits on request, including the comments of their posts, and allows Lemmy users to comment and reply back, where those comments are also propagated to reddit so that replies and discussion are mirrored also.

This would struggle due to reddit API and compute power requirements but the subreddits on request and a specific instance for these posts would eliminate the bot spam problem from earlier attempts at the same thing.

• potentially allow the user to associate their reddit account with the instance so comments etc can proliferate without bot recognition.

The other suggestion would be:

• set up trackers for major (and newly popular) subreddits, tag posts by priority, and use this set of posts to determine what content and types of content are missing, but don't just automatically post everything as the spam problem gets out of hand.

Finally, my biggest gripe with my Lemmy use is the constant instance wars.

I have had my comments removed for being rightfully critical of Israel by lemmy.world mods. They appear intent on recreating the problems of reddit here.