I love Lemmy but I find the extreme pro-FOSS bias and hatred of everything else to be pretty abrasive and not conducive to useful or interesting discussion. And that’s coming from someone who both loves to use and contribute to FOSS. But my preferred desktop OS isn’t Linux which apparently according to the Lemmy hivemind is a big no-no.
I think more Lemmy users need to learn that the upvote and downvote buttons aren’t meant to be used to indicate agreement and disagreement respectively, it’s to indicate if a comment is valuable contribution to the discussion regardless of whether or not you agree.
In a post discussing Chrome, a few comments about alternative browsers make sense. But if there are 100s and 100s of comments all just saying some variation of “switch to Firefox otherwise you suck” and those are the only ones that are upvoted, then the whole comment section becomes pointless.
I think more Lemmy users need to learn that the upvote and downvote buttons aren’t meant to be used to indicate agreement and disagreement respectively, it’s to indicate if a comment is valuable contribution to the discussion regardless of whether or not you agree.
Not saying I disagree in any way, but this will never ever happen. Its the same idea on reddit and its basically been a lost fight, its the “I like/dont like this comment” button 99% of the time, and I just dont see widespread adoption of the “quality of content” idea ever taking hold on a site that is open to the gen public.
The same kind of applies to your 3rd point… Why people feel the need to add a 4,600 “I like firefox” to a thread about Chrome I will never know, but they do and always will.
I love Lemmy but I find the extreme pro-FOSS bias and hatred of everything else to be pretty abrasive and not conducive to useful or interesting discussion. And that’s coming from someone who both loves to use and contribute to FOSS. But my preferred desktop OS isn’t Linux which apparently according to the Lemmy hivemind is a big no-no.
I guess that will come over time once Lemmy’s feature stabilize and it will attract more people.
When I first joined, I hopped around instances and tried out a bunch. But eventually I settled on this one and I haven’t logged in to any other account in a while. I probably count as like 5 inactive users. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a lot of that.
Posts are going up pretty steady, that matters more.
I count for at least 10. Lol. I’ve made a bunch of alts, between trying to find an instance I vibe with, and then finding more instances I vibe enough with to use when there’s downtime. Lol
As many others have said, it’s only natural for the trends to plateau. After a sudden surge of users, due to the Reddit controversy, some of the less “devoted” (can’t think of the best word) are bound to leave in search of a more user-friendly experience or a community with more active users. I too, also wish that some of the more niche communities had more active users, however I also understand that these things take time and A LOT more users. For that reason and for the sake of a freer internet, I reckon I’m in for the long haul. I’m also trying to contribute as much as I can with the limited time I have. I think people need to understand that because we aren’t the product/customer anymore, we need to help to contribute content and help the build new communities.
I think it still has potential but it needs more time to grow
There were lots of interesting online communities with great information and conversations before Reddit but they mostly died out as people moved on to other platforms. It’s a tale as old as time.
Lemmy’s just a platform and communities take a while to grow and there’s no guarantee they even will
I wouldnt quite go that far, but reddit has the numbers and thus they have the content. There are sometimes post that I will see for 4-5 days in a row on my “home page”, whereas on reddit its not out of the question to back 6-8 hours later and have a totally new string of content. Certainly every day there is a full, new page of links on almost any well populated sub.
Kind of hard to stick around when that is the case
But we do need to learn from our mistakes. Mastodon for example now adapted search, because they hope it will be a useful feature that was missing - what if they hadnt learned from their communities feedback? In the worst case, another fediverse service takes over. There is also competition there and corporate owned social media e.g. bluesky also already knocks on the door.
To be expected. After any exodus and reaches a peak and dies down some. The real question will be long time retention and addition if new users over the course of a couple years, not months.
That’s a difficult question, for starters people around here tend to misinterpret what you’re saying accidentally or willfully, far more than my experience with reddit previously. Idk if it’s because the place just filled with the worst of reddit or the dumbest of reddit, but it seems like reading comprehension is at an all time low.
Second, there needs to be clear divides between communities and their uses. When c/memes and c/linuxmemes have the same content, it’s going to give new users the impression that this place is for a very specific kind of person and then they’ll quit altogether.
for starters people around here tend to misinterpret what you’re saying accidentally or willfully, far more than my experience with reddit previously.
Honestly, this is what has driven me away. No matter how innocuous something I say is, there are a bunch of “well, askshewly” asshats to argue an irrelevant part of your statement, or start the “whataboutism” shit. It’s exhausting, and frankly, takes all the fun out of it.
That and the bots reposting reddit shit. I may as well go back to reddit. Plus Narwhal is still working…
I feel like my comments here have received more thoughtful responses than Reddit. I’m guessing it’s pretty community dependent and I’ve just lucked out so far.
On the first point, I can’t speak to the overall volume, but I can definitely say that people willfully misinterpreting me was a pretty common occurrence over on Reddit and definitely pushed me to comment less over time, just for the sake of my mental health. I don’t think I’ve been on Lemmy long enough to make a meaningful comparison though.
To add to your second point, Lemmy definitely feels very stale very quickly. Reddit, for all its faults, has a much larger user base with thousands of active communities. On Lemmy, even browsing the everything feed, I only see maybe a couple dozen new and interesting posts a day, and it only takes about 10 minutes of scrolling before I’m looking at stuff from days or weeks ago. Most communities I’ve tried to explore have one, maybe two posters. Subbing to a community often feels like subbing to one person and hoping it becomes a real community in the future.
I dunno if any of that will push me back to Reddit. If Lemmy doesn’t really fit me… I’ll probably just give up this last little bit of social media and just browse Imgur for memes when I want.
Try to sort the servers by Total users, Lemmy.world is on top, but the next 7 try to look at the row of numbers, you will see servers with many “total users” have almost zero activity posts and comments, compared to the number of claimed Total users.
I’m guessing those users are all fake. Why people generate fake users IDK, but there is clearly attempts to sabotage the Lemmy network.
Trying to penetrate the noise, and figure out more real numbers, I’m sure Lemmy remains quite healthy and is growing in real numbers, if you filter servers that are actively and properly maintained.
May the next iteration of the internet include more people journeying to smaller communities that fit them, and less scooping everyone up and exposing them to as much outrage as possible to addict them.
Isn’t this ok? I’m not saying it’s better… just OK?
I don’t know if this is just me but why is there always a race to be the “most popular/larger platform”?
Isn’t this kind of race to be the most popular the reason why a lot of platforms/companies/jobs/games/etc are suffering today? Growth for the sake of growth and forcing something to be more popular just because it needs to be more popular is just kind of sad.
It’s not like “corporate fediverse/lemmy” needs more users… At least this is my opinion.
Most recently lemmyloves.art. Exploding heads shut down. waveform.social was DDOS’ed and decided to shut down. And then there’s the vlemmy.net disappearance. I’m sure there are many others.
If the total user count is based off the users on the instances, instances shutting down would reduce the total number of users.
On fedidb.org/software/lemmy one of the charts is total instances. It recorded 1312 instances in July and 1249 in August.
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