Most recently lemmyloves.art. Exploding heads shut down. waveform.social was DDOS’ed and decided to shut down. And then there’s the vlemmy.net disappearance. I’m sure there are many others.
If the total user count is based off the users on the instances, instances shutting down would reduce the total number of users.
On fedidb.org/software/lemmy one of the charts is total instances. It recorded 1312 instances in July and 1249 in August.
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.
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
It’s a huge circlejerk here and there isn’t that much engagement in other smaller communities. And I highly doubt that it will change for the better since I already see that a lot of the remaining people love this little circlejerk and don’t even want more people that could diversify the content. More power to them, I have already given up on Lemmy as a Reddit replacement.
There are also some of us that are/were trying and experimenting with different types of the fediverse, such as Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Firefish, Pixelfed, etc. I have found myself gravitating toward Firefish, and Mastodon for the feed style, where as Lemmy, and Kbin are better as a forum or Pixelfed for image feeds.
To be fair, part of the reason to use a decentralized platform is because these topics are de facto censored on most of the internet.
FWIW early Bitcoin was the same; they were much more anarchist than they are today. Long after merging with the mainstream, the most anarchist thing most users do today is running the software itself. It’ll be the same way with Lemmy - eventually most users won’t care about anything leftist, they’ll just happen to be using p2p free software because it works better for reasons they refuse to acknowledge.
because these topics are de facto censored on most of the internet
Complaining about capitalism, landlords and US Politics are censored on most of the internet? Have you been to Reddit or Twitter?
Also aren’t a bunch of other websites specifically dedicated for discussing specific topics? I.e. modding video games, agriculture/horticulture, etc?
Are there like a bunch of bloggers complaining about living in the West that are being censored, or are they just not popular because they’re terrible writers and have 0 reach?
Also no one talks about Linux besides weird and niche communities. It’s not censored either. I say this as a Linux user.
Sorry if this was unclear, I only meant the points about capitalism, landlords, and politics are censored. Not Linux.
What do you think we should actually do about those problems? Ask nicer? Vote harder? Since you used Reddit a lot, you must be familiar with “[REDACTED]” - it’s one thing to just complain, but quite another thing to coordinate a defense.
But for the life of me I can’t get any engagement on my r/legalcatadvice dupe at !cattorneys_at_paw Maybe I should have used the original name. I really miss that one.
Reddit cat subs are tightly knit with people suggesting other related subs for some content. Being able to say “aww, cute angry black cat - this would fit on /r/stealthbombers” that sort of interconnection is difficult on Lemmy making the tangent discovery, reposting and niche cat subs more difficult.
Without the fairly consistent cross posting (and thus part of the discovery), such niche subs are going to be harder to grow a community for.
It might be a bit more feasible if there was a “cats and only cats” lemmy instance where all things cats are posted (compare programming.dev and startrek.website which are two single topic instances and browsing communities on each makes targeted discovery more feasible).
The other part is that those niche cat subs are filled with “normal” people. There usage stats show most people used new.reddit.com or the official mobile app - even before the api changes. Most of those people didn’t leave Reddit (with the exception of a few mods where /r/cathostage is restricted but /r/cathostages which was created in response has even more activity).
This also gets to a “there aren’t enough fun things on Lemmy”. The flairs of /r/cathostages are fun.
If you look at /r/leagalcatadvice you will see that most of its activity is from crossposted (not by original poster either) into the sub and then people are having fun there.
The software supporting fun (flairs, easy cross posting) and culture are currently working against Lemmy for niche cat subs. Consider that !cat has 84 users per day and fewer posts per day than /r/oneorangebraincell - it might not be able to support the range of niche cat subs that Reddit is able to.
I’d also point out that Lemmy’s 40,000 active users and 400k total accounts is comparable to the subscriber base of /r/oneorangebraincell that shows 442k accounts… just for pictures of orange cats that share the one brain cell.
I think you have a good point about flairs. The lack of flairs is especially noticable in sports communities. On Reddit, a lot of sports subreddits would have flairs of team logos, which set up for a lot of friendly teasing between fandoms. The lack of flairs in Lemmy takes away the teasing because nobody knows who supports what fandom.
There’s also a similarity between cat communities and sports communities in that there’s probably not enough people to support individual team communities similar to how there isn’t enough people to support more focused cat communities like one orange brain cell.
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.
Maybe fix some structural issues? Apparently Beehaw is looking to shut down and or completely defederate. There are complaints that serious issues are being ignored by devs.
If fixes were on a roadmap, I think that would help.
I don’t know much of anything about the backend, but if a whole community is considering leaving, it may be time to reassess priorities and goals.
For the past three years dessalines and I have been funded to work on Lemmy full-time by generous support from the NLnet foundation. These donations are paid out when we implement certain new features. But now we are busy answering questions, reviewing pull requests and urgently fixing problems. That means we are unable to work on the milestones agreed with NLnet, and won’t receive payments from them. We are increasingly reliant on user donations to pay our bills. These donations currently add up to 1500 Euros per month, which is not even enough to pay minimum wage for the two of us. Hopefully more users can consider donating, so that we can put our full attention to making Lemmy better for everyone, and possibly add more developers to our worker co-op in the future.
Agreed. Based on the little I know, the issues sound like they’re structure/design related.
Edit: didn’t check context and as a result was repetitive.
Based on what Beehaw admins said, I really wonder if the issues they mentioned will be addressed and their recounting of their experiences with devs make me wonder what the devs’ priorities are and why they chose them.
It’s situations like this that kept my employer from ever embracing FOSS solutions. If you can’t staff to fork and support it, you are at the mercy of another’s whim.
As with all things, there is surely another side and also the truth, so I’m interested in seeing where this goes, how it turns out.
Isn’t this ok? I’m not saying it’s better… just OK?
I don’t know if this is just me but why is there always a race to be the “most popular/larger platform”?
Isn’t this kind of race to be the most popular the reason why a lot of platforms/companies/jobs/games/etc are suffering today? Growth for the sake of growth and forcing something to be more popular just because it needs to be more popular is just kind of sad.
It’s not like “corporate fediverse/lemmy” needs more users… At least this is my opinion.
This. I feel the drop in users are the people who came here thinking it was a place for “free speech” and are upset for being downvoted for shit comments.
In reality it’s probably people who checked out the site, saw its mostly software/tech and political communities, a handfull of communities for trans people and reposted memes, and a dash of “the West will fall and China will prevail” communist communities, and decided to leave.
Also the porn is hidden too well, and even when you figure out how to find it, the porn that exists is 90% furry and hentai. Reddit has a huge amateur porn community that I’m certain keeps much of their users coming back.
I recommend Connect for lemmy if you have Android. Can put in filters to block communities that contain any keywords and posts that contain key words. And block entire instances.
When it comes to social media filtering is important to curate out the filler you don’t want.
What place isn’t. If you want unbiased aggregate of news the only option is a rss. There isn’t a place for an unbiased social media for news if it is user submitted and driven by voting or algorithm based.
Definitely recommend subscribing to stuff you’re more interested in and browsing that way. All is always going to be a bit lowest common denominator, same as on every similar site.
It certainly feels like it is, because the user base seems to be made up of exclusively the type of person from reddit that made me want to commit war crimes.
it’s just memes and generic “thing” news aggregators
e.g. i still have to go to r/macosbeta to find out if Sonoma is safe to install yet or not, or r/macgaming if i want to check what new games are runnable on macs.
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