One issue with Reddit was the extreme even obsesive moderation level. It was totally frustrating to post stuff in some subs, lot of new people just avoid it even experienced users like me.
On the other hand… there’s a lot of Lemmy threads with flame wars that should really be pruned from the post by mods. The flame wars bring a lot of negativity and noise that takes away from the actual discussion
I respectfully disagree - it’s very easy to contract comment threads you have no interest in (at least on my client if I long-press a comment, it hides the comment and all responses), but I sometimes enjoy reading through an actual discussion two or three people have in a comment chain. They may be few and far between, but that’s the nature of an open forum.
I got a bunch of posts removed there too, but tbh I kinda get it. 99% have the same repetitive showerthoughts and the whole sub was by design, super low effort, meaning the garbage : quality content ratio was like 500:1 so they had to rely on brutish rules
I prefer quality over quantity, but more quality is always welcome. I’m not going back to reddit. The reddit alien is about to become the Borg of the shareholders.
I used to look to Reddit when big news broke because it was always on the front page within minutes. This past year there have been a few times that big news stories weren’t even on the top few pages. I gave Lemmy a try, and it feels just like reddit from 2013. I love it. I’m home.
I never experienced reddit 2013 but reddit’s front page is gone. They’ve swapped out r/all for r/popular on new reddit, videos and screenshots are everywhere instead of links and they’ve even renamed themselves to “the heart of the internet”
I still go to Reddit for American politics, my cities sub, and /r/nfl.
But I haven’t made a single comment and treat it more as a news aggregator than a proper community. And even that is happening less and less as I get more comfortable with the pacing of the community here.
On Reddit you can make a clever comment at the right time and get thousands of upvotes and sidebar conversations. It’s great for a shot of that sweet, sweet dopamine.
On Lemmy, I rarely get more than 5-10 upvotes, but the conversations are meaningful and nuanced.
People are realizing that Lemmy is not a 1:1 drop-in replacement and are adjusting their expectations and behavior accordingly. Hopefully we’ll hit a critical mass soon.
It’s active users, not total users. I’m not sure on the exact metric, but users need to post, comment, vote or whatever to be counted for this statistic.
I don’t think I understand your point about them impersonating users? It seems to me like an account gets created for everyone using the portal. It then provides you a password and you can start using that account. I tried it just now and it seems like your account gets flagged as bot on creation automatically. So most people posting from that domain, might just not have unchecked that “I’m a bot”-tick and are actual former Reddit users.
Creating an account doesn’t make a user active though, but for the question if a bot posting stuff counts as an active user or not, I honestly can’t say.
Afaik the bot auto-creation is disabled now, but it used to mirror some Reddit subreddits by automatically creating bot accounts for every Reddit user posting in them, and using that to post the same content in a Lemmy community. That’s how the instance got over a million users, pretty much all of them are bots that do whatever the Reddit user with the same name is doing in one of the mirrored subreddits.
What you are describing is another part of the plan: Allowing the original Reddit users to take over their mirror accounts on Lemmy. Apparently it just creates accounts for them if no bot exists yet.
I think the number of servers is a interesting metric to look on, it correlates with users who are tech savy and are early adopters, before the exodus the number of servers was growing consistently , despite the number of users mostly staying the same, That was IMO an indication of the relative quality of lemmy at the time and indeed it seemed to got the most benefits from the exodus out of all the reddit alternatives.
compare that with peertube which shows consistent growth in the number of servers (see this month, and long term), I think what makes them better then lemmy currently is that they currently seem better at prioritizing feature development by using a dedicated site.
Also the total donations have declined in the last month (from €3962 to €3,771 today), So i think we should try to not get overconfident and work to secure the future of lemmy or some other open source reddit alternative.
Before the Reddit exodus, I don’t remember many active servers besides Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad (there was Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ca but they both had like 3 posts a week). Hexbear wasn’t federated, and servers were mostly being desperately spun up in anticipation for a flood of users who would crash the network.
The donations being down is bad though. I would love for at least Lemmy.ml to sticky a post asking for funding; one has to look no further than Thunderbird to see how well that works.
Before the Reddit exodus, I don’t remember many active servers besides Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad (there was Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ca but they both had like 3 posts a week). Hexbear wasn’t federated, and servers were mostly being desperately spun up in anticipation for a flood of users who would crash the network.
There were about 80 before the exodus (may 2023), compared to to 40 (may 2022) and 15 (may 2021), about double the servers every year which is good considering this is “word to mouth” growth, even older data shows a clear growth trend, my guess is that i and others didn’t really see them because they are some dude community, even today i think i will have a problem listing more then 5-10 lemmy servers.
unfortunately other data is not encouraging , the number of servers is both down since the exodus and in the recent month.
this is normal. we’ll go through a lot of similar waves. people start servers, realize they’re a lot of work, and then abandon them. servers that foster a healthy community will survive. hexbear’s worst cycle involved losing the entire administrative team just weeks after a large percentage of the website left. don’t sweat the growing pains - work together to learn, grow, and change.
I started using Lemmy since September 2022 I think, but I rarely open it, two weeks ago I was permabanned on reddit for report abuse, then semi-unbanned, so I deleted my account, and now I’m starting to use Lemmy actively, there are a lot more servers and users now and I found a new nice server.
I’m wondering if it’ll be similar to people switching from (convenient & centralized) Compuserve and AOL to (difficult but p2p) email and web. That took years.
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