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.
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.
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
I have a gimmick sublemmy, !horseblindness@lemmy.world. Post images that may or may not contain horses!
I see no horses posted – oh, right
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.
Is there a live chart available?
There’s two at fediverse observer and fedidb.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If your instance gets destroyed, there will be others to join.
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.
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.
Makes me happy to see it, a future for a platform that is not locked by a single large player. Instead, I can have my own profile that I actually own and do not “lend”.
Yep! We come from all over.
To anyone new wondering about phone apps for Lemmy, I use “Thunder” and it works great.
Also, feel free to say Luigi without getting banned.
Voyager also work good.
Or if you like it simple I can only recommend Jerboa
Yup that’s what I’ve been using. The only downside is it’s hard to know who responds to whom.
Luigi!
Luigi?
I personally prefer Raccoon at the moment, but the gestures are starting to wear on me, so I might be switching back to Thunder. Honestly, can’t remember why I left it. I’m a persnickety bitch about apps sometimes lol
I switched to thunder from boost and it’s great.
Just stay on the right side of pineapple on pizza.
/s
Insta-ban!
I love that neither of us made it a point of which side is right :P
We all know the right answer…
Are tomato’s on pizza ok?
Are tomatoes a fruit?
I’m calling this one the exodus of st mangione
Luigi Migratione
I like Lemmy, I like that the ratio of tankie scum to normal person is decreasing, but I really don’t like people who worship Luigi.
Have you considered reddit? I hear it’s a great platform for people without any sense of humour.
lol what did it say
Just some very basic moaning about tankies and pro-luigi memes, I don’t remember too well
The bitching about tankies gets more grating than the tankies when the tankies aren’t there. Bitch about them when they say stupid shot otherwise stfu and don’t mention them.
Reddit refugee here. Can I say Luigi?
It’s more frowned upon to not do so.
Can you say Luigi lol. Son, you’re required to pledge allegiance to Luigi before every post you make here.
Friend, you can say Luigi is a hero.
lemmy.world might have some rules against endorsing violence, but on most Lemmy instances, I can even tell you I hope all the healthcare CEOs are assassinated the same way. No corporate overlords to appease here!
Can I say Luigi
Only if you finish in a sock or something.
This is exactly what I was wondering.
It’s more of a requirement than a punishable offense on Lemmy.
And we love you for it❤️
✨️
The MAU of lemmy.world is ~18,600 which is a bit greater than the combined MAU of the next 7 instances (a big help here is lemm.ee which has ~7000 MAU). This is a really healthy spread of users and it means we don’t lose lemmy if the biggest instance goes down.
Compare that to Mastodon, where mastodon.social has more MAU (~372,000) than the combined MAU of the next 30 instances at least (I gave up counting). Thats not healthy for the ecosystem. Though tbf the total MAU of mastodon is ~899,000 so without mastodon.social they will still have ~527,000 but it will be very spread out.
I don’t think it’s healthy enough but certainly better than the mastodon ecosystem
It’s mostly because people keep recommending LW instead of other instances.
I didn’t really understand this on the way in. Is there an explanation somewhere. I found a mobile browser app and it sort of stuck me on one without me being able to select.
I think I’m with lemme ee?
Got it. Is there a way for me to transfer or do you just register into a new account once I figure out the best server for me?
You have to make a new account in order to move instances. But I think you can export your subscriptions.
Awesome thanks! I will scan around for a couple weeks and then register into a new account. Being a reddifugee with the recent censorship and a big “Center for humane tech” nerd am excited to be shifting in a better direction - so will for sure be invested in server and site health.
Register for a new account, but you can also export, then import your subscription list and other settings.
You can browse instances without an account before applying for one, if you want to get a taste first.
Think of your instance you signed up as as your email provider. Using that email you can send messages to anyone else who has an email. You do not have to pick a specific email provider to use email, gmail, hotmail etc they can all talk to each other. Lemmy works in a similar way except it not limited to DMs, the instance you sign up for allows you to talk to people across all Lemmy instances and see posts from other instances. When you go to “All” on Lemmy you are seeing all posts across all instances. When you go to Local, you are only seeing your home instance.
I think the biggest instance, lemmy.world, not being operated by the Lemmy devs is also a good health indicator - on every other Fedi service I can think of, the server run by the devs is the biggest by far.
think the biggest instance, lemmy.world, not being operated by the Lemmy devs is also a good health indicator
Doubly so considering how the main devs manage their instance according to their highly controversial political views LMAO
the point is that it doesn’t matter, since most people are on lemmy.world anyways
I think the distribution is fine as long as we still have nodes with good capacity. Our real issue is everyone demanding to be on the same instance because they’re scared of Federation.
What I’d REALLY like to see is a Federated Resource Locator service, kinda like nameservice for a federated user.
rumba@mastodon.social is 101254684, if I move to rumba@ingrowntownail.es, I want all my followers to do that lookup and still be following me. It’s great to have my settings migrate with me, but it would be bangin’ to have other people linked to me to still follow me.
There are no followers on Lemmy
there are on mastodon
Lemmy is more polished and populated now than before. Hope influx stays and we got all the real people from reddit and bots stay there.
Downloading an app instead of using the web gui helped me a lot, almost gave up on Lemmy couple days ago. But some of these apps are so well made. Really shows commitment
I dig alexandrite if you are looking for a web ui.
Onboarding process is definitely smoother, and we fixed a lot of the Federation bugs. Usability is an all-time high. I don’t know what the critical mass is, but we are definitely gaming momentum.
