this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
72 points (88.3% liked)

Fediverse

27490 readers
586 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

It's been a while since I last seen anyone posting graphs showing user base growth. Are we past the initial rush and bleeding numbers now?

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Slow organic growth is far better than explosives, unsustainable growth. We continue to provide content and actual authentic conversation and they will come.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yep, I also love the late 00s and early 10s feeling to Lemmy now. I find myself having more stuff done IRL since quitting reddit and browsing Lemmy occasionally.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm finding I use Lemmy more than Reddit, because the place is less hostile and the discussions are usually actually worth reading again.

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

And I'm finding myself actually posting comments instead of drafting and deleting them like I did on Reddit for the last 6-7 years. The comment threads really deteriorated on Reddit over the last decade

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I came. And I agree. Anything that gets too popular too quickly just turns to shit. A huge influx of users who stuck around would have ended up turning this place into Reddit 2.0

I don't want this to be Reddit 2.0

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I came.

🤓

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

It very nearly did. I was noticing reddit like behavior during the july 1 period of lemmy. Thankfully it has subsided and the general civility of discourse has returned.

Either that or it's because I have blocked enough people already to weed out the assholes.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What kind of behavior happened during July 1?

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

I noticed a somewhat trend of reddit like replies, you know the usual one liner tired puns, never ending chain of them. The replies were aggressive and argumentative. Some comments straying from the topic of the post, in favor of making in jokes that were traceable to reddit it's origin (obviously because majority came from reddit)

Right now, there is less of that. Might be most people got tired and returned to reddit.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That’s possible. I think kbin/lemmy were less ready to replace Reddit yet for most users this time.

There was one guy in office who posts screenshots of funny Reddit posts in slack. Guess which app was he using! Official Reddit iOS app.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The two mayor problems here are:

1- The Fediverse's current lack of network infrastructure (on the idea that it pretends to be an alternative to both Reddit and Twitter).

2- The lack of an app that satisfies the users needs, while also having a nice layout and stability.

I do still have hope though, as Boost for Lemmy is yet to release.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Connect is fine, been doomscrolling on it for weeks with no issues.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

It genuinely doesn't matter. I'd prefer it if it would stay at this level. Reddit sucks now. This is like Reddit was 13 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Stats would indicate that we may be approaching the leveling out phase.

I don't think we will be able to tell until we are looking back at it

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I wonder why the number of comments went up so drastically last Friday.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

I was drunk and on Lemmy.

You're welcome.

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

That is wierd huh.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

So posts are going up, users go down. I know that millions have been purged, but the loss looks much more organic.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Until the next big social media fuck up, which neither Spez nor Musk can stop themselves from making.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Oh I don't mind at all. I liked it here. I think it only bugs me when statistics reporting is contingent on good news.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Content is up but users are down. Take that as you will.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Link bots with thousands and thousands of posts.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I think while the general communities have made it, a lot of niche communities failed to attract enough population to keep on generating more content. As an example, just search for the "Imaginary" series of landscape art communities on the Fediverse (eg. ImaginaryVistas). Many of them don't have any recent posts or 1 post per days or weeks. That's not enough to keep people invested. Even the largest digital art community is still mostly carried by 1 person.

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

Maybe we got to ambitious with niche communities and should have stayed broad.

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

But the niche communities were the best parts of Reddit. I pretty much avoided the general subreddits.

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

Yeah but in the beginning of reddit there wasn't niche community.

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

Yes! I think we have many communities that are either:

  • way too specific
  • carbon copies of identical topic on another instance
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Carbon copies are actually quite of an issue on the long term. It is difficult to understand the best one for a topic unless one visits many of them.

Also because the number of subscriptions that one sees is only from their instance

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

As someone who mostly lurks/occasionally comments and someone who likes to view hot/active posts from all communities, repeat posts from similar communities in different instances is something I find really annoying. I'll see the same post four or five times as I scroll. It can make things feel really empty to see the same things more than once.

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

Also because the number of subscriptions that one sees is only from their instance

Huh is that actually a thing? That's kinda dumb, but explains the tiny numbers I've seen a few times.

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

Yeah, unfortunately that is a thing. Example:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/[email protected] (lemmy.sdf.org's local view of Collapse @ lemmy.ml) shows 22 subscribers. In effect, this is the number of people on lemmy.sdf.org who have subscribed to this remote community. https://lemmy.ml/c/collapse (the original/direct view of Collapse @ lemmy.ml) shows 2.11k subscribers. I don't know whether this number shows only subscribers from lemmy.ml or an aggregate of all subscribers across the fediverse.

Unfortunately, another issue even if the count on the direct link to the community is an aggregate, is that it's probably not counting people who are stuck in a "subscribe pending" state. A ton of the communities I subscribed to weeks ago still show in this state on my communities page. I understand that what this means is that I'm subscribed on my end so that everything works for me, but the original community hasn't acknowledged my subscription, so I expect that this means it also doesn't count me as a subscriber.

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

Ahh interesting. Well, that's growing pains, and fairly minor ones I'd say. Let's hope it'll eventually get better.

Also thanks for explaining "subscribe pending", I was wondering about that.

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

For sure. The growing pains haven't been too bad for me either. I think that things will definitely get better with Lemmy.

You're welcome.

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

I think a lot of the imaginary communities were on one of the .ml instances so are currently in suspended animation.

That domain shutdown was really badly timed...

( I mod a imaginary (community)[https://sffa.community/c/imaginarycosmere] for the Cosmere book series(es))

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

Yeah, I don't think asking communities that are already fairly small on Reddit to create the same community on Lemmy was a good idea.

For something like this it'd be best to start with a single community for the whole broad topic (like, ImaginaryStuff). Hell, Reddit used to be a "single subreddit" originally. And the niche subreddits didn't pop up until fairly recently where they were actually able to entice enough people to use them.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

September will be a boost when HS and college get going.

Then Reddit will mess up again and we will have another big influx. Its bound to happen.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wait for Boost and/or Sync to release, that will be the real gold rush

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

So far memmy is the best app in my books, pretty close to what Apollo used to be but still missing some key features like the jump bar.

Voyager/wefwef is literally just an Apollo clone but it limits its search functionality to lemmy.worlds instance allow and block lists, cutting off less savoury parts of the fediverse, even if your account is hosted with a Switzerland (everyone allowed, nothing blocked).

I just don’t like the idea of not having access to ALL of the instances, even if I never choose to go there. But like I said, memmy is the only app that truly searches across all instances sfw or not.

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

Voyager/wefwef is literally most an Apollo clone

That’s an extremely good quality, imo

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

Doubt but would be great to see. We're already all here using alternative apps until sync/boost releases then we'll move over. Will suck for existing apps to see a big loss.

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

I've seen a lot of comments on disgruntled users on Reddit that are willing to give Lemmy a try, but only with a polished app. We'll see

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That would be an honest shame. All of this fuss of moving over and for what? Just for that rush of a breeze of not being on Reddit? I wondered how many treated it as that, took a break from Reddit before hopping back onto Reddit expecting things to magically improve during the time they were gone for.

It's still a shitty place, people.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Who cares. Just use it and enjoy.

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

For now.... until reddit's admins find themselves some more feet to shoot themselves in. In the interim there's always going to be a steady flow of those who have been permabanned for obscure and arbitrary reasons