Is there a live chart available?
There’s two at fediverse observer and fedidb.
There are dozens of us.
I am one of the proud new users, and this is great to see!
Welcome! It feels fresh to not be on a big tech platform.
I’m pretty new, but I like it here. It feels bigger than 54k MAU, probably because everyone is really active.
It also feels like half the activity on Reddit now comes from bots. It makes it feel emptier than it probably is to me when I go visit there occasionally, especially on the big subs. Which then makes me focus on the small subs, which end up feeling smaller or equal to the fediverse already, just on more niche topics.
I completely agree!
Posting/commenting on Reddit largely feels like a waste of time to me if it’s not something big and attention grabbing. I would get zero people to interact for days, while on Lemmy I usually get a reply within a few hours if I have a question about a post.
Of course this isn’t evidence of anything, but I feel that it’s because Lemmy hasn’t been flooded with bots (yet? Hopefully never).
Help retain users by discussing more than just politics
For real we need more uplifting subs, my feed is just Musk and Trump diarrhea.
be the change you want to see. Post and upvote.
Instructions not clear. Posted upvotes.
I think this is an artifact of what’s oddly the biggest weakness of the fediverse: decentralization.
When I used reddit back pre-api stuff, my front page was 100% niche subs I’d subscribed to, but those niches have trouble le growing here because there’s so many instances.
I was super active in the scuba subreddit. Here on Lemmy, there’s several scuba groups that tried to form, but none of them stuck because they were all on different instances instead of one central location where everyone could work together to make the community.
As a result, most of us haven’t been filtering out 99% of Lemmy because the 1% where we’d be active doesn’t exist. It’s like joining reddit and having your frontpage be /r/all. It’s a shitty experience that g9ves a lot of weight to political posts.
I don’t think the subs failed to get off the ground because of federation, I think they did because they didn’t have a dedicated person tirelessly filling them with posts and single-handedly carrying them. Because that’s still where we are population wise. 50k+ MAUs is very nice, but not nearly enough for niche subs to be self-sustaining. Look at any small but active Lemmy sub right now and it’s often a single person doing 90% of the posting. The only real way to get a new sub going is to be that person.
At least now we have stuff like Lemmy Federate and places like !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca that are both fairly active, so getting a new sub off the ground should be much easier than two years ago.
But you don’t need to be on the same instance to contribute?
No, but there’s fragmentation of communities. Instead of one central place for the community to form, you have to look at dozens of locations, where there may be a sub, but it may have 1 post in the last 4 months.
It doesn’t matter almost at all which instance a community is on. People could just unite the different scuba groups into one. Basically any they see fit. I’m not sure the decentralization really causes this effect. Or does it make it too difficult to find communities? I’ve been plenty able to find communities from various instances, at least.
If people have to follow breadcrumbs to find which of the dozen groups is active, if any, very few people are going to join.
On reddit, if you wanted to find a sub for airbrushing, you would type in /r/airbrush. That was it.
On Lemmy, there’s no central location for communities, but even worse is that most of the big instances WILL have a community with that name - it’ll just be a dead community that someone started but never took off, so there’s a bunch of false leads.
You aren’t wrong with that :)
The problem exists, although its scale isn’t as big as it first seems. On Lemmy you can write “Airbrush” and join the biggest of the communities. It’s quite visible that this is what is happening in several communities. One starts growing and then that’s what people choose to join, etc.
Sort by “hot”
Yeah, I feel like people on here have a bad habit of relating even completely unrelated posts back to US politics. But if you keep reading the news then your brain tends to do that.
I’ve blocked most of it with a keyword filter
Help retain users by discussing more than just politics
One of the things I feel like Lemmy is still missing or is under developed is the niche hobbyist and tech help communities. I’m referring to places users can go to ask questions and start to build up a knowledge base of sorts that people will find and reference. Kind of like how if you want to actually find useful information for something, you used to add “Reddit” to every search to get meaningful results. Hopefully, that can become Lemmy. Assuming of course search engines even index Lemmy well enough
One way to start could be just having people post small tutorials or solutions for popular problems or topics in respective communities. I know the internet has changed a lot but “back in the old days” that was a great way to get engagement going at least on tech forums.
Wouldn’t that be closer to stackexchange?
Well not really, as I’m talking about any type of self-help content not just computers/tech. Any helpful content that people would be able to find vs just all news, politics and memes
search engines hardly index lemmy unfortunately. Probably due to having too much repeated content on different URLs.
Probably due to having too much repeated content on different URLs.
It seems like its gotten better in the last 2 years as I can at least get lemmy results now, and popular instances show up more but yea, still not great.
I have a gimmick sublemmy, !horseblindness@lemmy.world. Post images that may or may not contain horses!
I see no horses posted – oh, right
I hope they feel welcomed here to stick around. I’ve quit Reddirt in 2023 during the API exodus, came to Lemmy and never looked back.
Samesies. About the only thing I ever go back for is askhistorians
About the only thing I ever go back for
Honestly, I miss some subs. But I just cut my losses. The usability and UI of the site went to shit. The toxicity was horrible. The site policies went to shit. No third party apps. No point.
I only come back to answer necrobumps and one time to update my own post that was a support question where I managed to figure out the answer. I don’t want to leave behind those forum posts like in XKCD where they have the same issue but don’t answer anything. 😅
I think it’s OK here, but some communities here are a bit shit and very vocal
Its still a shame that I will never recommend this place to anyone I know until the community changes here.
Its a bit chicken and the egg cause we likely need one for the other. But with the users proclivity for bans, and blocks you end up with a user base even smaller and discussion that more feels like a battle to be right most of the time because intellectual superiority is looked up to rather than conversation.
I still think a community of people competing to be the most right in every comment section does not lead to actual community and doesn’t even help provide facts or info to most communities when there are not many niches to which people in here can participate in. Objective facts work best not in fandoms but in crafts. Like what glue doesn’t melt Styrofoam when doing prop building not which show or game is best.
I may be alone in this but I yearn for “the normies”.
a community of people competing to be the most right in every comment section
I think this depends highly on the type of community. (Although clearly I’m doing it to you right now. Sorry.)
Highly political topics and such are the worst, probably. But others where people come because of a shared interest, like a sport or food or animal or something, a hobby, I think tend to be more chill and mellow.
You would think. I still won’t go back to the gardening community. And will probably just stop participating in anything around here.
The problem is that there is still to few others than those types. The topic seems secondary. The mellow places are where it’s empty.
Maybe it also depends on the topic. But there are always gonna be annoying people everywhere you go in life. 🥲
The topic was how much they hoped my garden withered because I couldn’t afford to fully mulch all of it and was saying I was having to constantly weed the edge of my garden.
They proceeded to gleefully wish harm upon me and hardship for not doing or being exactly like them and as I begged for help from others to not feel alone was told I likely deserved it.Yeah people are truly awful everywhere and not working on getting better.
That sucks. I’m sorry that happened =(
It was like that for me on the Marvel Rivals subreddit on Reddit. I didn’t like all the smurfs (new accounts made by higher ranked players in lower ranked lobbies) but when I complained about it and said lower ranked or more casual players deserve to have fun, too, a bunch of people diminished my experiences, gleefully said they smurf, it’s a skill issue, it’s not a real problem (despite me checking enemy user profiles and sure enough, they’re all experts at this game with barely any time played and all wins in their competitive matches), just to not play, etc. It’s like pro basketball players dunking on little kid community games. They deserve to have fun, too!
Don’t have any advice or anything, and what I said may not have made any sense to people who don’t play the game, just empathizing on how much the internet sucks sometimes and your comment reminded me of that. Now I’m angry just remembering it lol.
Sorry. But yeah. Don’t have an answer but it’s a mess for being a new memeber when it feels communities don’t care to remember that people have to start somewhere.
Sorry that it happened to you too.
Me too, but I still prefer this place to reddit. I have the same exact gripe: those that must be the most right. I’ve just found a lot more of them on reddit than lemmy. I have lost count of the amount of times I start to write something on reddit, then imagine how someone somewhere, from some angle, can decide to be offended if they want to, then just delete the comment. It definitely happens on lemmy too, it’s just in my experience it has happened less here, so I have been more willing to type out comments here. It really sucks that this has not been your experience.
Just keep posting and being the type of person you want to see as a community member here. The other site was exactly like you described above for a very long time!
I can’t be responsible for changing others. That is an unfair request.
I was paraphrasing (see: paraquote, slang) Ghandi. “Be the change you wish to see in the world”.
Yeah, and I am the person I want to be I just don’t expect the change.
this is a problem with fediverse in general imho.
the tools admins and users have are blunt (defederate or block). with all sorts of content moderation policies and opinions you will inevitably end up either alienated from everyone or surrounded by people that think and talk just like you.
fediverse does offer many advantages… creating a better online “town square” is just not going to be one of them.
I have this insane thought that shorter bans but publicly stated when/why/how-long would be more beneficial to keeping a community aligned when it’s all we got. And that it would be harder to abuse and give insight into mods efforts.
But yeah I have said to others I intend to use it more as a link aggregator by effort but not community.
Tool development is one of the things that we’re going to have to go that. Thankfully Creative Energy being poured into server software and apps is something that’s already happening quite natural even that small user base numbers
Be the change you want to see. Host a instance. Show us how it’s done.
Spend money I don’t have to open myself to attacks for people I already say I dislike that don’t like to told what to do at all.
No.
I should host an instance. About Apache. To learn how to do Apache configs. Then I could host an instance.
Oh wait.
This is great but i feel like we still need some speciality communities that will drive people here. This is an amazing start though
I think we need default instances that new users are put in to stream line the sign up process. Instances with little to no defederation so people can window shop for a instance that reflects their values. Or even just browse.
Looking through a intimidating list of instances all with their own special rules is not for everyone.
Would it make sense to a preselected list of general instances in each region and simply have a sort of round robin approach to those instances that are within the users geolocation. This will align with legal laws of that user while removing the complexity and offering some sort of balancing of new signups? I know the idea with the fediverse is to be decentralized which it could still be for the users that care but i feel the most majority of people coming from Reddit probably won’t care (at least not at first)
I agree, though you’ll probably get a lot of pushback on that from Fediverse enthusiasts since it goes against the idea of the decentralised concept and we should “distribute the users more evenly among instances”. At least that was the way discussion went on this topic back in 2023.
For the moment I feel like lemm.ee is a fairly solid “default” to recommend, though. Few defederations and great admins, very stable amd large enough to have a populated /all but not the massive behemoth that is .world (which I do agree has gotten too large).
I’m beyond thrilled! can’t wait to see some of my favorite communities spring up here.
The growth in 2025 has been staggering, ngl. And this is the kind of thing which converts from a trickle to a tsunami very quickly. It never happens with one shock. But a consistent amount of enshittification shocks. Reddit’s desperate struggle for profitability practically ensures those will keep happening, so this is all inevitable at this point. The only thing that is uncertain is whether digg can recapture the fleeing masses who are not cognizant of the dangers of corporate vc-backed enshittification yet, like bluesky did to Twitter.
But a consistent amount of enshittification shocks
I think the proper term is enshittification sharts
Lel
The user growth we’re seeomg could result in an overwhelming flood of users at anytime. Which is why people should consider supporting the lemmy devs and instance admins either financially or through contributions so that the lemmy software and infrastructure is ready to handle the growth.
And then in 5-10 years the users will destroy it like everything else on the Internet…
Seriously, though, make me wrong - because this kind of model is so new to me, I don’t know, is there anything different about this that will resist it going the way of things that were once good and eventually weren’t, like Craigslist and Reddit?
Obviously a lot of Reddit sucks due to how it’s run, but let’s not overlook that part of its downfall, like with Craigslist, is the users as it grew having no respect for the model. I’ve been on my way out since well before the API exodus (and yet I was addicted and too lazy until now, that’s on me). People posting whatever they want wherever they want and having very little understanding of nuance in language (“oddly satisfying” doesn’t just mean “I like this”), misusing downvoting (I know I’m yelling at clouds, but that was where Reddit was doomed from the start to become an echo chamber, and I didn’t know if Lemmy is different in that respect - do votes determine visibility here?), moderators becoming more power hungry, and I’m sorry if this is mean, but the userbase trending younger steering content much more to “mah crush, aitah?,” fake stories for “points,” and I feel the general populace there being more gullible. Not to mention the same comments being made over and over, and I’m not talking about bots, I’m talking about constant “this is the way” and “username checks out.”
I’ve seen so many actual discussions here already that are full of real passion and good points even when they’re heated, some lovely user created and has posted around a really through socialist reading list. I’ve only seen “this is the way” once. Reddit is lazy one-word answers and downvotes. How do we encourage this and discourage that?
Anyway, I rant. This place is great now and will only get better as it grows, but I hope this model will in some way resist that downfall. But I’ve come to accept that nothing on the Internet is permanent. And also that people are gonna people and if I don’t like that, it’s on me to leave.
If your instance gets destroyed, there will be others to join.
The difference is the way it is run. You got it. And if one day Midwest.social starts doing things you hate and treating it’s users like crap, then come on over to lemmy.world or lemmy.ca, or one if the other thousands instances.
People hosting the database are not the owners of the platform unlike Reddit. They get to tell us how we can use it just because they host the database.
I’ve already moved at least once and have been very happy it was as easy as it is.
I’ve never moved, but I assume you just create a new account and start over. Or is there more you can do?
it’s possible to migrate your subs on lemmy
it’s possible to both migrate your subs and make a redirect on mastodon for followers, but the redirect requires the old server to remain in service.
Gotcha. That sounds like a good solution.
rant about eternal September, !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com and the young
There is beehaw.org a very peculiar instance, they defederated from lemmy.world to preserve their unique community vibe. Fediverse enables a more fine grained approach to handle those issues.
A lot of problems are still there but there are other projects that want to address them like piefed
lemmy already has a bunch of echo chambers, I think it’s inevitable from the design of a network like this where the user selects what content to view and be served
I think it’s really important to consume social media/whatever this and Reddit are conscientiously. Be aware you’re in an echo chamber and step outside from to time. Sometimes it’s just annoying (I was really into the show Mr Robot, and one of my many Reddit rage-quits was just being sick of seeing any speculation about where the show was going that was anything but the accepted popular opinion being downvoted) and sometimes just misleading (we all thought Trump couldn’t win), but there are so many ways it sneaks into your consciousness. For me, the tribalist culture wars became really glaring. We hate everyone who drives a car. We hate anyone who has a grass lawn. You can’t advocate for something there without making it about hating everyone else. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I firmly believe a lot of that is by design. I’m sure it will bleed over here eventually if there is a large exodus, but I hope there are counter measures.
You bring up some good points and I do believe that the model that Lemmy use can insulate it from a lot of those issues.
People posting whatever they want wherever they want and having very little understanding of nuance in language I dont think this would be a huge problem, mods can remove unwanted content and instances can decide what type of users they want to accept. As for misusing downvotes I think that issue never has ever mattered and the difference between reddit and lemmy is we have a open source algorithm to decide how content is served. If anyone can think of a better way to server content they’re free to put that in.
moderators becoming more power hungry This is an issue on every platform but Lemmy is more insulated against it than reddit for two reasons. First is that we can have the same community name shared across servers. On reddit once someone gets the catchy community name they can camp it forever. On Lemmy you can just make the community somewhere else with the same name. Second, each instance can decide how it wants to moderate its communities on Lemmy ML they are OK with power hungry mods but on other instances its frowned upon. On reddit its ignored completely.
One thing that makes Lemmy better is that its made by the users for the users. We have the code, we have the protocol its built on. This means we can have Lemmy tailored to however we want. We are not at the whim of a massive company that only cares about profit. If I have an idea for a feature i can goto the github and suggest it, better yet if I could program it I could help build that feature. If I dont like a change that is made by the lemmy devs I can fork the project and remove the change and still interact with the rest of lemmy.
This seems unrealistic in my opinion. Normal people really don’t like to donate, unfortunately. I think that Lemmy needs to make it so anyone can easily self host an instance without too much fuss. Something like docker on an old laptop. I know they have docker containers for Lemmy already, but in my opinion, they aren’t simple enough to set up. And there should be an option to bundle it with a wireguard VPN tunnel, so that they really don’t need to fuff about with reverse proxy to browse on your phone. This way, the cost is distributed across all users. It should be that setting up a domain and port forwarding should be the largest hurdle.
Normal people really don’t like to donate,
I’m on a medium-small instance; if %5 of users donate a dollar a month, the hardware would likely be paid for.
If lemmy.world had %0.01 of users paying, they could probably cover their hardware, storage and network fees.
If you’re not paying the admin’s mortgage, it not that hard to chip in. Unlike the other “options”, no one is getting ad revenue or selling your data, if that’s not worth a cup of cheap coffee a month for 1:20 people they have their priorities in the wrong places. .
Its not unrealistic. I don’t think anyone expects 50% or 100% of users to donate. Also sites sustained off ads get less than a few cents per user. Donating literally anything puts you ahead of an ad supporting user. If Every lemmy user donated a dollar a year there would be 500k in rev to support the development. When the culture shifts from everything must be free to everyone giving a little to the services they use we can easily fund the costs of these platforms.
You can host an instance very easily on low spec hardware but its a lot harder than giving a small donation.
In the sims modding community people pay $5 for a dress and modders make over 100k a year. This is because sims players are happy to pay for things they find valuable.
I can tell you as a sample of one that everything you just said would scare me off
Yeah. Reddit is currently enshitifying in overdrive. They used to just do dumb features nobody wants, but now they are actively harming the base. The entire Luigi over-moderation this is just bad, and it feels like they want the formerly leftist site to go full maga now. and even if I do have to use it, the website often tends to not function properly these days, with the site constantly reloading, or voting functions to be broken. This is the year of lemmy.
I figured the planned paywalling of content was going to be the last straw for me, but then they gave me a fucking warning for upvoting. I made a Lemmy account the same day. Fuck them.
The paywall shit is still planned for this year afaik so be prepared to see more of Reddit heading this way.
I got a warning for a comment. Ive been on reddit for almost 13 years and have never been warned before. It’s crazy. My beliefs and writing style haven’t changed. Reddit has.
Yup. Literally the day they announced that shit I peaced out.
want the formerly leftist site to go full maga now.
Reddit and X, sitting in a tree.
Worth noting is that what counts as an “active user” has changed between now and then. During the Reddit API exodus, an “active user” was a user who had posted or commented in the past month. Now, it includes users who have voted. If the 54k MAU record was set using the first algorithm, it is likely that the MAU using the new algorithm (which includes voting) would have been much higher.
Huzzah, us lurkers now count towards the global stats!
Good point
I think that change was done way back when. Do you have a reference for the algorithm change? I tried a quick search and came out empty.
Thanks 👍
Probably in the 0.19.3 changelog. There was a bump when LW changed, and I don’t think they’ve updated since
Woo! That’s awesome. I am seeing quite a few more people.
We are already successful, I’m seeing stories, news articles, and videos that normally would never get pushed to the top. We can actually talk about things without overwhelming censorship, strange algorithms, or ads.
We can actually talk about things without overwhelming censorship, strange algorithms, or ads.
Maybe just maybe a link aggregator and discussion platform doesn’t need to make money. Maybe it can just be good and make the users happy.
I’ll just say, the more I hang around Lemmy, the more I enjoy the genuine conversations. It feels like less snark, less joke replies, and just a generally more community-type feeling. Reminds me of when I first tried Reddit after leaving Digg way back when.
Hopefully, us exiles can leave the Reddit back at Reddit.
I find a bunch of snark here, but it absolutely feels more genuine. With reddit it felt like half the comments I saw were from bots. More than half, maybe.
I hate everyone on lemmy but at least I’m hating people
Aw. We hate you too.
Yeah, fighting with bots is just boring. At least if a human gets mad at me it’s more real.
I feel the exact same, and I’ve been hanging around here for almost two years (the great 3rd party app exodus of ‘23).
This place feels more like a community filled with people versus a firehose of internet wrapped in layers of corporate and right wing BS.
Reddit was almost exclusively read-only for me. Here, I am commenting all the time.
This is one of the reasons I stayed. It was still small enough back then that you actually started to recognize people you had conversations with, and not just the troll farms.
I like a lot of things here better than Reddit. For one thing, I don’t see the stupid buzzwords like literally or cringe in 98% of all posts. There’s no hivemind here…yet. And hopefully there won’t be.
Also not the same 5 memes repeated for 15 years.
A democracy, if you can keep it, in a sense. Lemmy is healthy. Time will tell if the idea works, but I think it is a huge advantage tearing away corporate ownership and really investing in a platform that is owned by its users.
hey! fuck you! i resent your sentiment somehow and also want you to feel bad!
but seriously I agree.
Fantastic! New people (and old as well), please give to the community! Post and/or comment as much as possible, to make Lemmy an even better place!
You can do so by just regularly commenting and/or posting, but also by creating new communities and bringing some activity to inactive ones!
This!!
Help the communities you like to see grow.
Just making one or two posts in communities that seem dead gets the ball rolling in making them alive.
It also motivates others to post.
Slow and steady wins the race. Also helps to not be shit. looking at reddit.
Also helps to not be shit.
Yeah, we also turn a lot of people away by having boring UI and no Algorhythm, but I consider those to be more of a personality filter.
Fuck the algorithm. Idk why people like that shit.
Especially on Lemmy, the only thing it’s really doing is bringing some discoverability but the discoverability isn’t all that bad on Lemmy you have to look around for like 2 minutes to find the communities, okay, well you have to understand that there are like communities on multiple instances, figure out how to switch from local to all, then look around for 2 minutes
After hanging out on Blue sky for a bit I’m pretty sure Mastodon could use a little algorithmic help. The communities on Mastodon are so loosely formed they can be a little hard to find, you end up looking for people with the same taste and follow their followers. It works but nothing ever gets surface to you that you didn’t actually actively look for and it seems to be kind of a mess in a Twitter scenario.
Maybe we do want a minimum barrier to entry that involves the slightest amount of patience and forethought.
Maybe it’s like playing mosquito tones through speakers at malls. You have to be old enough to live through text-forward websites to put up with a text-forward websites.
Except I know there are some younger people here, I don’t know what it is exactly, It just seems to me that there’s better discussion and more acceptance on sites that have less frills.
Honestly the Tankie presence on lemmy is kind of a shit experience. But its shit that doesn’t sell your data so I’m cool with it.
They’re being diluted though! It was so much worse last year
Block lemmy.ml if you don’t like it
(Actually, is lemmy.world on too old of a version to have instance blocking? They’re so far behind on updates)
It’s so nice to see the servers are not crashing anymore this time around like how Lemmy.world did for me a few times back when I first joined in 2023 and I remember when the only app that was available on ios was just Wefwef before Memmy and Mlem came out of testflight. Today the apps are much more developed as we now have: 6 ios apps, 10 android apps, advanced search, moderator tools, user tags, in-app video playback, baby account indicator, advanced markdown editors, crossposting, watch support, expanded customizations, content filters, fediseer integration, side by side posts, alternate sources menu, song service integration, direct messages in app, gallery view, local sub count on communities, troll buster, user theme directory, open web post in app, gestures, media bias check, alt check and personal contribution stats.
Yes I remember the lemmy.world servers being DDOS’ed every couple of days and having to switch between 3 clients and the webinterface because all of the apps were missing some features. The alternative frontends like photon and tesseract have really improved and imo should be the new defaults.
