I’m a super happy new Lemmy user. Last week, I created an account on Reddit for the first time ever. I replied to 3 posts in a polite manner and right on topic (in a Linux-related community, someone asked for a book recommendation. The other two were answers to technical questions on Rust and Linux). A couple of hours later, I was reading about what
shadowbanmeant. I waited a few days, sent some messages to admins / support but to no avail. Then I searched for alternatives to Reddit and landed here. It’s been 4 days, and I absolutely love it here. Lemmy seems to have that spirit of the Internet of the 90s, which I thought was long gone. Also, my assumption is that Lemmy users are of a higher quality than those on Reddit. It’s very easy to end up on Reddit / IG / Facebook / etc. On the other hand, to become a Lemmy user, one actually needs to apply some effort and do at least some research. Or to have a cool friend who can recommend becoming a user here (if you have a cool friend, that makes you kind of cool too, right?). I should probably start telling my friends about Lemmy 🤔Welcome…
Comrade.
Welcome here!
Lemmy seems to have that spirit of the Internet of the 90s, which I thought was long gone.
That’s what I like about the Fediverse too. After Big Tech started hoovering up eyeballs, I got disenchanted but this has put fire back in my belly.
Thank you Lemmy. Reddit can go piss in the wind.
The interesting thing to note is each website I go to that looks at the total number of lemmy users is wildly different. Im wondering if there is some sort of blocker/defederated instance that occurred a couple of months ago? Im not sure.
I think counting fediverse users is about as difficult as counting e-mail adresses.
Your probably right. And if an instance defederates with others, it may look like the number of users dropped without actually dropping.
Are we sure it’s counting 1.5 M users and not 1.5 M memes posted by picard, pug, and squid?
I don’t think lemmy would be what it is without the contributions of any one of these three- let alone all of them.
Just wouldn’t want any newcomers to the history communities to up and think the place was dead! Lemmy cannot live on Linux alone 🙏
are you entirely a human? you post really often
No, I’m part metal. Helps to keep going longer than mere organics, but getting through the airport is a bitch.
More seriously, I take 2-4 times a day to grab some pics from my stashes and post them real quick on my regular communities. Takes maybe 15 minutes each time. 60 minutes every day is a good chunk, but it’s far from grueling.
Now, my FOMO causing me to check my notifications every moment I get free time? That’s a little more grotesque.
Oh shit you mean like AskHistorians? Is there enough density now for that?
I answer on AskHistorians, but don’t post there. But I’d love to see activity there too! Mostly I run three history meme communities (HistoryMemes, RoughRomanMemes, and ShermanPosting), and four communities for sharing historical images of interest (HistoryPorn [not my choice of name, it’s just for photos], HistoryIllustrations, HistoryRuins, and HistoryArtifacts)
And meme free space
That’s great. The history communities on the other site were such great quality on average and I miss them. How do you have time to do all that?
Know where to look to grab pics real quick + Light moderation load + Not many other hobbies + Work from home with downtime between tasks
Keep up the good work
[email protected] to discover active communities
If you’re new there’s resources at [email protected]
“More!!” -Kylo Ren
“MORE!”
believe it or not also Kylo Ren
Which iOS client are y’all using? The native Lemmy website was just way too slow in loading and refreshing posts. I’m using Memmy but it often crashes when searching for communities…
Mlem as it has the best ui.
Voyager. It’s a very near approximation of Apollo’s UI.
Connect is good too.
I myself use voyager, but there are many different clients available.
How does that site count active accounts?
Vote, post or comment
Seems like a severe undercounting
Always difficult to accurately count lurkers
ooh, gradual
Data is ugly, why would you write complete ISO format dates ob the x axis? Can’t read shit on a mobile device.
I use boost and it has a HD button that makes the image readable.
Because that is the only valid date format, ever, everywhere. There are just too many of them in this graph.
I started using lemmy because of the reddit api fiasco and the platform really feels more alive now. Or maybe the bots got smarter.
As an AI language model, I fully agree with your last point.
Sure! I can find agreement between AI language models and actual users of lemmy decentralized communication systems with your last two points…
To find agreement with your last two points, AI language models would need to agree with both of your last two points.
First, AI language models would have to agree with your first point.
Next, AI language models would have to agree with your second and last point.
In summary you would need AI language models to agree independently to each of your two different points so that it can agree to both.
Here are my last two points and AI’s input:
I’m sure it’s little of column A and a little of column 01000010
active users are declining
I’ve BEEN saying this for a while now. How Lemmy users need to welcome new people with interests that are different than their own. People from different generations than their own.
I’ve given ideas how to make starting an account easier. The concept of picking a home instance for someone who’s never heard terms like “instance”, “federated” or “decentralized” can be quite intimidating to start. And if you fuck up, and randomly choose the wrong instance? You have to start over. All your comment history gets left behind.
So people are going to choose the most active instance, trusting the idea that OTHER people know what they’re doing.
I gave the idea that Lemmy needs to adopt standards across all instances so you can push a button and move your account. All your data would come with you.
Instead I was given a list of technical reasons why it would never work. The basis of these reasons came down to “it won’t work because it would be a lot of work”.
I hear a lot of people on here complain about corporate greed, and enshitification, but you gotta admit that they do get shit done.
In 2010 Steve Jobs was reviewing the new iphone prototype. Jobs said he wanted it slimmer, and wanted it airtight. The developers said it was pretty airtight, and there was no more room inside to make it slimmer.
Essentially telling Jobs that his demands were not going to be met because it would be a lot of work. So Jobs stood up, grabbed the prototype, walked to a fish tank, and dropped it in. It sank, and bubbles came out. Thus destroying it.
He said “See that? Bubbles. There’s air inside, which means there’s room inside. It also not airtight. Make it smaller, and make it airtight.” Then he left the room. When it released to the public, the final design was smaller, and airtight.
Not saying it WON’T be hard work to make true account migration a reality, but it IS possible. The developers just figuratively need their prototype dunked in a metaphorical fish tank.
Because until this process is easier, and users are greeted with a friendlier userbase, people are just going to sign up, realize they fucked up, realize the experience isn’t great, and leave. If they have access to reddit, they will leave.
It seems everytime I search for a topic all the results are from a year ago. Which suggests to me that reddit fucked up, users exploded here, gave it a chance, disliked it, and left.
Meanwhile, I point out just SOME of the glaring problems. But instead of embracing the problem and starting a think tank on how to fix it, my posts are instead turned into an echo chamber of how wrong I am. How the ideas will never work, and the problems presented persist to this day.
All because I’m thinking from the perspective of the normie 95%, and not the linux minded 5%. Which really places an artificial self installed glass ceiling on top of you.
I agree with your argument, but not what you’ve applied it to.
“Federation” isn’t the main feature of Lemmy, and we don’t need to focus on it. It’s enough that it exists. When selling a house, would the first thing you focus on be the insurance rates if something goes wrong?
I think your idea is a good one, and I’d like to see that happen someday.
I would point out though, that Apple was a behemoth company with large teams and massive budgets (essentially unlimited resources). Whereas Lemmy is just two guys barely scraping by a living wage from donations while slowly tackling an endless list of bug reports and feature requests.
Tossing Lemmy in the equivalent of a fish tank to motivate the devs would, most likely, just cause extreme burnout and a throwing up of hands. They are resource and time limited to a pretty extreme degree considering how popular Lemmy has become, and that should be appreciated and taken into account.
I I wasn’t talking in a place where the developers gather. I was talking here. With other users, whom I assumed would have the health of the fediverse in mind.
The idea wasn’t me stating a final idea of “do this now!”. It was more of a starting point of a think tank. I was expecting to start the batton running, and pass it off to the next idea, or the continuation of the idea.
Instead, nobody joined in. Nobody took the batton. They swatted the batton down, and collectively said “No batton! No change!”
I was expecting to start the batton running, and pass it off to the next idea, or the continuation of the idea.
I think I see what you’re saying. Lemmy is indeed a place where it’s very easy to get involved, and people get involved in different ways. A lot of us just pick a community and start posting regularly. Some of us adopt dormant communities and bring them back to life. Others contribute by becoming mods or admins or setting up their own instances or debugging/coding. Even those people who were giving you reasons why the “transfer your account easily” project was difficult, they were helping you by telling you the challenges involved. Whenever a well-run project is started, you think about the hurdles, risks, and mitigations, then integrate those into your project plan.
I encourage you to keep getting involved. The trick is to find the right level of involvement for you, then sticking with it and seeing it through.
Nice comment, also cool to see you around
They swatted the batton down, and collectively said “No batton! No change!”
That’s not what happened. People just agreed that other features have a higher priority.
The list of upcoming features is available here: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy
Among them
- Multicommunities
- Moderation tools improvement
- Private communities
- Post tags
- Ease discovery of federated communities
- Post scheduling
- Plugin system
- Etc.
Which one of those features would you deprioritize compared to the account migration?
but you gotta admit that they do get shit done.
I opened Reddit again today to have a look at my local city sub, where I’m an (inactive) mod, the interface to moderate now offers a terrible experience. Bloated, clunky, slow. So I’m not so sure they get things done.
All your comment history gets left behind.
What’s the big deal with you leaving an old account behind? Lemmy has no karma, if you keep the same username (and even more with the same picture), people are going to recognize you, you can even add links to both accounts in the bio to make sure. I’m on probably my 10th alt, people still recognize me from time to time, whatever the account.
Instead I was given a list of technical reasons why it would never work. The basis of these reasons came down to “it won’t work because it would be a lot of work”.
As @[email protected] pointed out, the 2 main developers have limited time and resources. What is the community supposed to do, threaten them to leave will the vast majority finds account migration a non-critical feature?
The concept of picking a home instance for someone who’s never heard terms like “instance”, “federated” or “decentralized” can be quite intimidating to start.
Here’s the post I made a few days ago on /r/RedditAlternatives: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/
Federation is confusing, people want a single website they can go to
Go to https://lemm.ee/
Have a look around, see if the content and the formatting is appealing to you, register an account if you want to be able to curate your feed further
Go to https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.
Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your “instance”, use “lemm.ee”
If you want more choices for apps, have a look at https://www.lemmyapps.com/
Email has been working on a federation model for decades. People have to remember if they use Gmail or Outlook, but that’s it. It’s similar here.
There is a whole community here who has no idea what an instance or federation is, but they still use this community, and post 100 comments every 3 days. The platform is similar enough to Reddit for them to use. And I can tell you very confidently none of them (between 100 and 150 monthly active users) use Linux.
It seems everytime I search for a topic all the results are from a year ago.
Of course if you ask questions on a very niche topic on a dead community nobody will answer. That’s what [email protected] threads are for, to make active communities emerge.
There is even https://quiblr.com/ if people want more tailored suggestions
The statement about comment history is inconsiderate. People absolutely care about their content. I don’t have to know nor care for their reasons why but it is important to users.
I agree with you that the onboarding process is complicated for a user that doesn’t want to invest time into learning how the fediverse works.
I think that is a positive thing.
The good thing about the Fediverse is that it isn’t profit driven, it isn’t necessary to grow without end, and because of this it also isn’t necessary to appeal to the mass of users who don’t want to learn how things work here. It’s a filter, weeding out the people who aren’t open to new structures - that often comes paired with the inability to have open minded discussions.
I do agree with you regarding the missing transfer options, but since karma isn’t a thing here, a simple import/export function for subscribed communities and blocked items should suffice, and shouldn’t be too hard to implement.
I’m gonna say it, Blockchain might actually have a usecase for Lemmy accounts.
I’m unclear what that means.
You could decentralize user accounts so that they aren’t attached to any instance, or at least the account owner can move their account from one instance to another.
This would be way easier to implement without blockchain. Data portability doesn’t require any of the consensus mechanisms or distributed computation, even if they would result in user data being portable.
If your instance disappears, then how can you make sure that you could use your same username on an instance that is created after that one disappears?
The decline might be because instance owners have strengthened the account creation process. I remember in “the early days” how there were an insane amount of bots, but now it seems like most of them have been banned or mitigated.
Again the interesting thing is that a lot of other sites have a huge difference in numbers. But they are all saying the same thing, “Active” users are declining or getting close to equilibrium but number of users are increasing. Strange.
I personally think that piefed/mastodon/other servers federating with lemmy might be messing up the numbers in some way. Both pumping up the numbers and making others “go down” in different sites and how they are pulling the data. Like if I respond via my mastodon account, is that a “new” account? Does that make it pop up as an active user? If I dont repost it via the mastodon account for a while, will I now be an inactive account, even though I still look at lemmy with it? Im not sure.
The same plot with a more reasonable y-axis:
Active users (monthly is what you should be looking at) is very slowly declining, however we are still above the level that we were before the most recent influx.
I’m probably missing something, but what are the two bumps in December and Feb from?
December changed the way active users were counting, adding the votes on top of posts and comments
February was LW applying that update
Well that was anticlimactic, but I appreciate the information
Oh so they are not new users coming in? Well that paints a pretty different picture then
Indeed, actually the change in calculation makes it hard to actually evaluate
They’ll be back.
Very interesting, thanks!
Gotta ask why it seems to slowly decline after each influx, tho, rather than slowly rise or stay stable.
Seems at least some of these people are not liking what they find.
Sometimes you need u/spez to give you a couple more blows before you say “fuck it, fuck this”. It happened to me.
before you say “fuck this, fuck you”
FTFY 🙂
Does he give blows?
Gotta ask why it seems to slowly decline after each influx, tho, rather than slowly rise or stay stable.
Because there is a big influx of people looking for a new home and some of them don’t feel this is it and move on.
What is Interesting about the graph is that the drop-off after Rexxit was much steeper and, despite the drops, the numbers don’t go below the level they were before.
It used to be a much more significant decline, it seems to have leveled off mostly at 45k, so those who are left are pretty dedicated. I’m sure we’ll get another influx if Reddit messes up badly again.
ifwhen
What counts as an active user? If you are a lurker do you still count as an active user?
You count as active if you post, comment or vote.
If you vote, post or comment, you count as active user.
Insane to start the plot at 45k. The rate of decline is rather minimal
In the last 3 months it went down by about 10,000 users. Comparing with the rate of increase in total Lemmy users, active user rate should have at least been stable. I guess we will have to wait for reddit to fuck up again for another influx. And Lemmy is only getting better with time so probably on every influx more users are going to stay.
I try to get people from niche subs I follow to move to Lemmy but every time I do I get downvoted. Could be automated by reddit idk
I try to get people from niche subs I follow to move to Lemmy but every time I do I get downvoted. Could be automated by reddit idk
Have you tried opening your comments from a private window? Sometimes they get shadow removed too
People generally don’t like being proselytized.
Right. Just make great lemmy content and screenshot it. Then when people ask for the source you provide the lemmy link
Or only mention it to people actively looking for an alternative. I see that from time to time, then I point them to /r/RedditAlternatives where most of the posts are about Lemmy
The starting point is just so you can adequately see trends for both plots shown and is quite sane. I also don’t know if I could call an ~5% decline and clear trend minimal either.
If you start the plot at 0, you can distinguish between a strong trend, a weak trend and a lack of a trend. This one is terrible for gauging that.
All starting at 0 would do is ensure that you have no way to accurately gauge the data points values. It would also just compress the data to an incomprehensible smudge of a line.
Let’s put that to a test
Showing the data over an entirely different timescale than what’s currently under discussion means nothing in this context to illustrate your point.
Starting from 0 on the y axis just means you need to change the scale, which like I said makes reading any data points incomprehensible, or end up with an unnecessary amount of whitespace.
If you start at 0, you see exactly what you’re supposed to: there is a rather negligible trend in the given timeframe.
That’s the point. The number of users has very slightly declined in the past few months. Under the original plot, you have a lot of people (rightly) misinterpreting the data, and saying that a lot of users are leaving the site.
That’s why you start at 0. So that people interpret the data correctly.
Bit discouraging tbh
Nice post on 3D printing
You could have a promising career in finance
If this chart is right that’s pretty good, looks like this platform is getting some traction.
I like lemmy. I spend maybe an hour a day scrolling so enough content. i am happy there isnt more cuz i would spend more time here then.
Only thing missing is a lot of niches in all kind of categories, be that gaming specific subs or what the internet is rly made for.
I believe we need some Lemmynade to celebrate
