this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Fediverse

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It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.

Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren't attracted enough to become regular visitors.

Curious to see at which number we'll stabilize.

Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)

Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

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[–] [email protected] 167 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Maybe it’s because the content here just isn’t as vast. I’m nkt going back to reddit for awhile, but there’s so little to see on lemmy to me. Despite numerous subscriptions, I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same. Sometimes this place feels like a hive-mind. Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale

[–] [email protected] 125 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same.

That's funny because the meme subs still far outpace posting from politics subs for me, and I mostly see memes.

In fact, a few weeks ago, there were lots of complaints in meme comments of how the only thing they saw on the site was memes.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Memes may be thriving but niche interest communities can't even get off the ground.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

So just like reddit 14 years ago when I first left Digg for greener pastures. When I joined, it was years before my local city subreddit sprang to life, and for years, it had around 1000 active accounts and only now has over 10k accounts.

Man, if the people on reddit back in the day had sat around complaining about lack of content like this, the site would have died. Instead they started making fucking content.

It takes time for communities to grow, and it feels like a lot of the folks who left reddit only ever knew reddit as a ready-made-community filled with thousands of people already. As in, they were latecomers and missed all the slow growth.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, considering we are in a post about the userbase shrinking maybe the situation is not quite the same.

I also don't have that kind of time and energy to get a whole community running just for the kicks anymore, and I definitely do not appreciate to have the deficiencies of this place thrown on my face as if that's my responsibility. It's not exactly welcoming or motivating.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Well, considering we are in a post about the userbase shrinking maybe the situation is not quite the same.

Reddit admins literally ran bot accounts to fill content on reddit and make it seem more active at first. The users who came from Digg had similar complaints, and reddit userbase fluctuated at lot in the first few years. It's actually exactly the same (minus the admins using bots to make it seem more active).

I also don’t have that kind of time and energy to get a whole community running just for the kicks anymore

No one is asking you, specifically, to do it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Maybe we should ask spez to come over and help generate engagement :P

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Eh, remains to be seen. The pacing of the internet today is very different.

No one is asking you, specifically, to do it.

Then don't get on my case for not liking the lack of content, geez!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Sorry, I just think it's a dumb, entitled complaint. I'm not asking you to do anything other than stop whinging.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Redditor-level rudeness sure showed up quickly though

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

That's funny, I thought it was redditor-level entitlement that showed up.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Even the memes are pretty stale, definitely not dank. Many of these memes are reposts of stuff I saw years ago on Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Political memes are so stale these days.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see very few memes and far too much political content

Where are you even looking? My timeline is flooded with memes all the damn time. They're practically drowning out any posts of value at this point.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You should block the meme communities if you dislike it, keep the communities with contributions you like.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale

Been saying this for months. No one seems to understand what made reddit grow, and it is ironically very much like /r/place when you get down to it:

Reddit was a singular canvas that all users worked on together. Posts, comments, and voting shaped the site as a whole. The front page of Reddit was the result of it's userbase, and it's userbase was diverse. Because Reddit forced all users, of all backgrounds and ideologies, to exist together in the same space, and work on the same canvas, it created something living and varied.

You may not have ever gotten along with people from a certain subreddit in th comments, but I promise, the two of you worked together at one point to get a post to the front page or a comment to the top, and you didn't even know it. Thos little moments where diametrically opposed people shared a liking of something by how they voted. On the surface, everyone bickered. Under the hood, they were all unknowingly agreeing and cooperating all the time, and that was what powered reddit's engine: it's diverse userbase's activity.

That's why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

That’s why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.

The phrasing here kinda implies this is a bad thing and everyone should be focused on 🚀 constant growth 🚀.

Tildes in particular has an extreme focus on quality over quantity and has some really interesting ideas on moderation (that haven't been implemented due to lack of time on Deimos' part). The site is still considered an alpha after all this time.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the default activity sort is part of the problem. Sorting by activity means everyone is just looking at and engaging with the same topics for 24 hours or so. There needs to be some "hot" category or something so that new stuff gets churned through a bit more regularly. New is too new, top is even more stale, activity causes things with high activity to stay high. It makes for very samey content.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In my experience, Active and Hot have been opposite extremes of freshness. Active shows posts that are more than a day old, and Hot shows posts that have no comments and are just a couple of minutes old.

Not to say it's all bad. Your post was just a couple of scrolls down on my feed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I vote for sorting by new comments... I'm generally entertained with this setup

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have they finally fixed this to not show old posts out of nowhere in the "Hot" feed? I've been avoiding this sorting because of that and hadn't read anything about it being corrected... yet.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't remember if it was fixed in 18.3 or 18.4, but it has been for a while.

Worth giving it a try, even if your instance is still 18.3

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Ooo! I will, thanks!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I see very few memes and far too much political content.

This is what is turning me off from lemmy, worst of it I see a lot of shitty political memes, it wasn't this bad at the beginning of the reddit exodus.

And then there isn't seem to be a neutral instance, I was in world and then they banned the piracy community, I moved to lemm.ee and all I see is stupid hexbear posts, I appreciate that they don't defederate willy nilly but Lemmy urgently needs the block instance feature from user level.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

In the meantime there are some apps that "block" instances. Connect has it, but it doesn't fully block the instance, more like it shows up in the feed with a content warning that the message is from a blocked instance and you can choose to view it if you want. I also do think lemm.ee will defederate from hexbear pretty soon. The admin has had personally horrendous experiences with their users and that meta thread about it was a dumpster fire of hexbear users making unrelated political comments and blocking the actual instance users from having a discussion. It got locked at almost 2000 comments so I'm sure he's still digging through that toxic waste to make his decision.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Noted! Good feedback.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Every time I peek into reddit, it's just a dumpster fire of toxic comments screaming at each other with strawman arguments and reeing that videos are fake. It's exhausting.