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.
Reddit is so censored it’s pointless. Almost all the comments seem like they’re written by bots or gov guys with square haircuts who think this is what “those nerds” talk like
Bots are the ones running the show here too though.
Is this about hexbear and lemmygrad? These accusations have never made sense to me. They have been here long before it became popular and they had the same opinions back then. It makes no sense and is a waste of resources to have bunch of bots posting stuff when there is no one to read those posts.
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.
They keep a/b testing and rolling out worse and worse mobile websites. They’ve gone and done it again. For any regular mobile website user that wasn’t affected by the 3rd party app issue, or for anyone who switched from a 3rd party app to the website because it wasn’t as bad as the 1st party app, well… Now it is. Now it’s possibly worse.
So, we might hope for a prolonged period of organic growth now. Especially if Lemmy doesn’t get flooded with meta discussions again.
I’m glad to see this. I was mostly a lurker at the old place for over 10 years.
Creating posts and commenting at times was difficult and often they were deleted due to some rule or issue. The worst was when users would message to let me know the post had been deleted and they knew due to some other form of the site they were using.
In all my years of managing Forums before this period it wasn’t that hard to create new topics and participate so I gave up.
I started lurking here at Lemmy then starting seeing this theme about user engagement going down and not enough content. When I would end up back at the old place after a Google search on something I could see the volume number differences between lemmy and there so I decided to try posting again.
So far it’s been a lot easier especially in sh1tposting. I did run into a couple of hiccups but overall it’s been a lot easier.
I’ll enjoy it while it lasts as over time with more users things will change, at least for now the posts are not drowning in comments by the thousands yet. I can keep up with that. It kind of reminds me of my old forum days in the early 2000s.
Had to use the reddit app the other day… That people can stand to be on there still is beyond me. I like it here on the fediverse and im not going back
I’ve noticed that there seems to be a lot of activity, enough to replace Reddit, on the most popular communities and instances. Even my more niche communities such as !fantasyfootball has had more activity lately. Although the niche ones have a way to go to be replacements for their counterparts on Reddit
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.
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