this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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At least from the nerd side of Lemmy, communities pertaining to technology, self-hosting, etc. — which I’d imagine to be the larger drivers due to how complicated it is to join compared to a traditional centralized setup (see also same hurdle for mastodon vs Twitter; which doesn’t gain adoption until Thread and BlueSky started to attract the less technical users), I’m seeing troubling signs of slowing down and shrinking.
If people actually want Lemmy in these areas to grow, it is important to be a lot more inclusive, and understand when to not participate in order to foster better community growth.
What I mean on the inclusive side is those FOSS advocates need to back off with the “You don’t understand FOSS, and go make your own instance” comments so other users don’t just bounce right off and leave after being bored with nothing to interact with.
What I mean by understand when not to participate is literally don’t participate in niche communities that doesn’t apply to you. So many Android users commenting irrelevant anti-Apple sentiments in Apple Enthusiasts community, for example. This is driving away actual users who are interested in discussions.
The charts don’t lie. Lemmy is shrinking, not growing. After getting a new lease on life with 0.19 due to what is essentially clever accounting, the community is still slowing down/shrinking. And for the nerdier side of the userbase, unless the community by and large start to interact more inclusively, the whole thing is sadly going to be just a small blip that’ll soon fizzle out.
Yeah, it's something I observed, too. I'm new here, coming from a STEM field myself - Many places give off a tech-elitist vibe, though.
Customization options for Firefox get reactions like "nobody needs this". I like it here so far, but the tech-bubble is obviously super prominent here, and in many places it simply seems very "If you're not a tech-y don't talk to me because I know better". It's worrying because it will lead to people leaving again when they get the cliché reactions of "use Linux, don't use Windows" or "ewww, Reddit". People should be less hostile, but I guess that's just a problem of the Internet in general and doesn't just apply here.
I hope to see it succeed, though!
Open source culture remains the biggest problem with open source software, sadly.
It's really a major problem. Every time I mention how a lot of open source software suffers from bad UX, I get a lot of down votes instead of agreement and calls to improve things.
But at the receiving end you'll have a talented backend developer who has created something impressive, and who instead of being recognised and motivated for her work just receives a bunch of shit about the UX being awful. Which is not great either.
It's a tricky thing to get right.
Thought only I had this take in the whole world. Usually open source software are best but you have to spend some time picking the right one. Usually 5/7 would have great UI but only 1/7 would have the UX you might like.
A lot of people talk about the decentralization being a barrier of entry, but I don't think it is.
Generally speaking, your average social media user won't care about that one way or the other. You tell them an instance to look at, they will check it out.
Where I think it goes wrong is the general Lemmy attitude of curating your own feed. Your average Lemmy user will say the best part is that you just block the communities and instances that you don't want to see.
Your average social media user on the other hand, doesn't want to spend an hour or a month blocking people and communities to make the site useable. Most folks will come in, see a feed full of tech bros, repost bots with zero discussion, 30 different fetish porn communities, Star Trek memes, and bottom of the barrel shitposts, and they'll just leave.
The only way I see Lemmy overcoming this is for instance admins to heavily curate the default experience so the feed is friendlier to new users. This would likely require some more tools in place to allow for this, possibly even a default block list that users can customize after they are already drawn in
Also the sorting could be better.
I think admins curating the feed is... Interesting but also kind of dangerous and it sounds like it could be very manipulative. But of course you could go to instances that don't do it but it might not be obvious.
That said, I agree the sorting could be better. The active sort still showing 2 days old posts is not ideal.
just letting the admins set defaults would be better than forcing these choices upon their users, which I think is was the above user was suggesting, which is kinda what Reddit does with having default subs
why not? if they're getting new comments then they're still active
it's like something inbetween Hot and classic forums-style sorting (New Comments sort in Lemmy)
but I do not think that should be the default sort method, instance admins can already adjust what the default sort method is
Strong agree
Also agree
I'm not quite as pessimistic, but I agree that inclusivity is important to keep in mind.
I've noticed similar behaviour as well, and it concerns me. There was a related post a few weeks ago on downvoting etiquette which received a surprising amount of pushback (+63/-108).
I think this is a side effect of Lemmy's small platform size pushing users towards browsing by /all. I never browsed /all on Reddit, and I don't think this the best way to regularly use Lemmy either.
Ideally, I think users should mostly stick to their subscribed feeds, and browse /all only occasionally to discover new communities they might want to subscribe to. (I recognize that what I think users "should" do is irrelevant when it comes to actual user behaviour.)
As the platform currently stands, we have a bit of a "chicken or egg" problem. Too many users browsing by /all can stifle the growth of niche communities, and the lack of niche communities can induce users to browse by /all. I'm not sure the best way to fix this, other than to hope that niche communities manage to grow despite uninclusive behaviour.
Do you have any ideas which could help make Lemmy more inclusive?
Promotion of communities to [email protected] and [email protected], and promotion of those communities to the wider audience