I love Lemmy but I find the extreme pro-FOSS bias and hatred of everything else to be pretty abrasive and not conducive to useful or interesting discussion. And that’s coming from someone who both loves to use and contribute to FOSS. But my preferred desktop OS isn’t Linux which apparently according to the Lemmy hivemind is a big no-no.
I think more Lemmy users need to learn that the upvote and downvote buttons aren’t meant to be used to indicate agreement and disagreement respectively, it’s to indicate if a comment is valuable contribution to the discussion regardless of whether or not you agree.
In a post discussing Chrome, a few comments about alternative browsers make sense. But if there are 100s and 100s of comments all just saying some variation of “switch to Firefox otherwise you suck” and those are the only ones that are upvoted, then the whole comment section becomes pointless.
I think more Lemmy users need to learn that the upvote and downvote buttons aren’t meant to be used to indicate agreement and disagreement respectively, it’s to indicate if a comment is valuable contribution to the discussion regardless of whether or not you agree.
Not saying I disagree in any way, but this will never ever happen. Its the same idea on reddit and its basically been a lost fight, its the “I like/dont like this comment” button 99% of the time, and I just dont see widespread adoption of the “quality of content” idea ever taking hold on a site that is open to the gen public.
The same kind of applies to your 3rd point… Why people feel the need to add a 4,600 “I like firefox” to a thread about Chrome I will never know, but they do and always will.
I love Lemmy but I find the extreme pro-FOSS bias and hatred of everything else to be pretty abrasive and not conducive to useful or interesting discussion. And that’s coming from someone who both loves to use and contribute to FOSS. But my preferred desktop OS isn’t Linux which apparently according to the Lemmy hivemind is a big no-no.
I guess that will come over time once Lemmy’s feature stabilize and it will attract more people.
When I first joined, I hopped around instances and tried out a bunch. But eventually I settled on this one and I haven’t logged in to any other account in a while. I probably count as like 5 inactive users. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a lot of that.
Posts are going up pretty steady, that matters more.
I count for at least 10. Lol. I’ve made a bunch of alts, between trying to find an instance I vibe with, and then finding more instances I vibe enough with to use when there’s downtime. Lol
As many others have said, it’s only natural for the trends to plateau. After a sudden surge of users, due to the Reddit controversy, some of the less “devoted” (can’t think of the best word) are bound to leave in search of a more user-friendly experience or a community with more active users. I too, also wish that some of the more niche communities had more active users, however I also understand that these things take time and A LOT more users. For that reason and for the sake of a freer internet, I reckon I’m in for the long haul. I’m also trying to contribute as much as I can with the limited time I have. I think people need to understand that because we aren’t the product/customer anymore, we need to help to contribute content and help the build new communities.
I think it still has potential but it needs more time to grow
There were lots of interesting online communities with great information and conversations before Reddit but they mostly died out as people moved on to other platforms. It’s a tale as old as time.
Lemmy’s just a platform and communities take a while to grow and there’s no guarantee they even will
I wouldnt quite go that far, but reddit has the numbers and thus they have the content. There are sometimes post that I will see for 4-5 days in a row on my “home page”, whereas on reddit its not out of the question to back 6-8 hours later and have a totally new string of content. Certainly every day there is a full, new page of links on almost any well populated sub.
Kind of hard to stick around when that is the case
But we do need to learn from our mistakes. Mastodon for example now adapted search, because they hope it will be a useful feature that was missing - what if they hadnt learned from their communities feedback? In the worst case, another fediverse service takes over. There is also competition there and corporate owned social media e.g. bluesky also already knocks on the door.
No surprise. After a surge of reactionary, or curiosity, based signups, some will inevitably loose interest. In particular, the ‘bottom 10%’ of users, who weren’t/wouldn’t contribute anything of substance anyway, or possibly were annoyed by some feature or another that was different than Reddit. I similarly don’t care that more people haven’t moved from Reddit to Lemmy, as the majority who haven’t would likely make the place worse. When everyone can interact with something with even the most meager barriers to entry removed, the quality always declines.
someone who has a mind so open it falls out they think whatever the media tells them that you must be afraid of those who stand up for what their country is and to not fall victim to what the corporation thinks is appropriate to sell most things
To be expected. After any exodus and reaches a peak and dies down some. The real question will be long time retention and addition if new users over the course of a couple years, not months.
That’s a difficult question, for starters people around here tend to misinterpret what you’re saying accidentally or willfully, far more than my experience with reddit previously. Idk if it’s because the place just filled with the worst of reddit or the dumbest of reddit, but it seems like reading comprehension is at an all time low.
Second, there needs to be clear divides between communities and their uses. When c/memes and c/linuxmemes have the same content, it’s going to give new users the impression that this place is for a very specific kind of person and then they’ll quit altogether.
for starters people around here tend to misinterpret what you’re saying accidentally or willfully, far more than my experience with reddit previously.
Honestly, this is what has driven me away. No matter how innocuous something I say is, there are a bunch of “well, askshewly” asshats to argue an irrelevant part of your statement, or start the “whataboutism” shit. It’s exhausting, and frankly, takes all the fun out of it.
That and the bots reposting reddit shit. I may as well go back to reddit. Plus Narwhal is still working…
I feel like my comments here have received more thoughtful responses than Reddit. I’m guessing it’s pretty community dependent and I’ve just lucked out so far.
Agreed. The userbase is a bit too homogeneous. Also if you say something remotely positive or try to bring some nuance to topics that have a strong circle jerk value on Lemmy you’ll get downvoted into oblivion.
Exactly, you have an issue with their specific solution or just don’t agree with how extreme they are on a topic You’re just assumed to be an “enlightened centrist” and everyone will pile on no matter what.
Even if you reclarify to give an understanding of what you meant they’ll either claim you’re trying to lie or just ignore what you’re saying because they’d prefer to argue with their strawman.
On the first point, I can’t speak to the overall volume, but I can definitely say that people willfully misinterpreting me was a pretty common occurrence over on Reddit and definitely pushed me to comment less over time, just for the sake of my mental health. I don’t think I’ve been on Lemmy long enough to make a meaningful comparison though.
To add to your second point, Lemmy definitely feels very stale very quickly. Reddit, for all its faults, has a much larger user base with thousands of active communities. On Lemmy, even browsing the everything feed, I only see maybe a couple dozen new and interesting posts a day, and it only takes about 10 minutes of scrolling before I’m looking at stuff from days or weeks ago. Most communities I’ve tried to explore have one, maybe two posters. Subbing to a community often feels like subbing to one person and hoping it becomes a real community in the future.
I dunno if any of that will push me back to Reddit. If Lemmy doesn’t really fit me… I’ll probably just give up this last little bit of social media and just browse Imgur for memes when I want.
Tildes has a decent community that I’ve seen. It’s not fediverse but oh well, it seems more like a forum than content aggregation but that’s fine with me.
I’ll probably stay on lemmy but it really doesn’t have the user base for anything but a meme community IMO. Everything else is just Linux and Firefox arguments spilling over into everything else.
Try to sort the servers by Total users, Lemmy.world is on top, but the next 7 try to look at the row of numbers, you will see servers with many “total users” have almost zero activity posts and comments, compared to the number of claimed Total users.
I’m guessing those users are all fake. Why people generate fake users IDK, but there is clearly attempts to sabotage the Lemmy network.
Trying to penetrate the noise, and figure out more real numbers, I’m sure Lemmy remains quite healthy and is growing in real numbers, if you filter servers that are actively and properly maintained.
May the next iteration of the internet include more people journeying to smaller communities that fit them, and less scooping everyone up and exposing them to as much outrage as possible to addict them.
this implies that servers should focus, like on news, tech, extreme sports, or whatever. rather than trying to be the hub for all topics the way reddit and others are?
What I’m envisioning is smaller communities that aren’t open to everyone like school / family / friends based communities.
After making the above comment I started reading about self hosting a lemmy instance with the idea that I might run one for my relatives and I to share photos, plan vacations, help w homework etc
Do you need the persistence? threading? federation? Or would spinning up an instance of Zulip ( zulip.com ) with only your family as provisioned accounts on it work better?
Private slack channels work, but the reduced access to archives now makes that less useful. Spinning up a Zulip instance for family and then using that is quite tempting.
For most non-tech type people, the active asynchronous chat is an easier thing to work with than threaded discussions. And sharing images tends to be something more ephemeral / point in time. You could have a thread in zulip for “Smith Family vacation photos - summer 2023” and then follow that… but the "do you really want to be digging through those a year or two later? They’re still there, but how do you want them?
The other part is the… reduced moderation. Having worked with Stack Overflow Teams, the college intern thinking it’s funny to down vote everyone’s posts… well, that’s not funny. Cousin Charlie doing the same on a family Lemmy can create much more drama than you’d want to administer… and Aunt Jane thinks that it’s just boys being boys and doesn’t see anything wrong with it. Family drama is the worst drama.
This is why the least feature rich system that you need would work best. It’s just chat. No votes, no reporting and minimal administration and moderation because you really don’t want to deal with that.
really good points. Thanks for the thoughtful response. I find the forum format the most comfy, but I’m the techy one so I think you’re right that others would probably prefer chats
Another thought is the two parts of locking it down.
How much local configuration would it take to make it so that Lemmy doesn’t show any posts to someone not logged in (since you know that if its on the web even under a really funky hard to type name… someone will find it)? Do you want your vacation planning available to everyone (“I won’t be home from September 15th through the 23rd, so Cousin Dave is going to stop by each day to walk the dog…”)
The other part is specifically against fediverse (which would be the reason for Lemmy rather than some other system) for such a private community. It again gets hard to lock down… not so much a “what gets out” but also a “what gets in”. … oh, Aunt Jane and Uncle John have subscribed to swingers that’s hosted on a nswf instance and that’s not about playground equipment. Meanwhile Aunt Dorthy wants you to do something to prevent Cousin Charlie from seeing all that “stuff” in /all before Carlie accidentally calls him Uncle Long John at a family gathering. … and now you’re going through pics and finding pictures of your aunt and uncle that you really didn’t want to see (and you’re going to be going vegan before you want to think about that turkey baster next Thanksgiving).
And while these are solvable problems… it’s a question of do you want to solve them?
Simpler solutions will work better that you expand into other things as the need arises.
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