I joined during the first Reddit exodus, and it seemed like for ages the amount of Lemmy content was generally increasing (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but overall increasing). Now it seems that when I sort by New, I get through everything since my last visit much more quickly than I used to. Is that my imagination, or is the activity declining?
Seems the same
I feel the same
Ah the twice yearly post asking if Lemmy is dying.
I recently re-joined Lemmy, so I am not sure how it changed, but I am mostly a Mastodon user and I noticed that people were flooding it in large quantities when something stupid happened on Twitter (again), and then leaving it after a short while to go back to Twitter or quitting social media altogether. I would suspect that people either started going back to Reddit, or decided to get a mental health break from the internet as a whole (which wouldn’t surprise me, the internet is pretty depressing lately).
Also re:lemmy/piefed - there are quite a few people who are very loud and vocal about things, and a lot of the opinions here lean to the left a lot. Not that it is a bad thing, but some folk appear to have got fed up of this and as a result have migrated elsewhere. I like it here, but it can be far from helpful at times
I’m in the UK and I am seeing a decline across virtually everything tinternet related. Years of rising rpices, job security worries and just a shift in attitudes has made people far more wary and less time to post, interact etc. plus the modern fragmented web doesn’t help
I rarely post but comment a fair amount. To me, it’s only been recent, but I’ve noticed a decline, too.
When I run out of stuff to see on Lemmy, I touch grass. Simple as.
I feel way more in control of my online experience when endless scrolling isn’t possible.
This might seem like a clever way to say “sour grapes” to me. Saying that “little content is good because it avoids endless scrolling” is as weird as saying “living in the desert is good because it helps me control my diet”.
To address the point: activity seems very much slowed down, and we have two years since the Reddit “exodus” and very little progress to show. We are yet to convert any significant significant community, most people just accepted the status quo and you can bet that the few active people around here still rely on Reddit to find content and repost here.
Aside from this meta-discussion about Lemmy and the Fediverse, there is basically no native group or community emerging.
subbed.
I’m doing my part! Just joined a couple days ago. Thought I could stick with Reddit but it got too far to the right for me. They crossed a line I can’t ignore, but I like the format, so I’m here. I knew Reddit was going to be winding down soon so I didn’t put as much effort in. I’d like to start a couple communities here, whereas I wouldn’t have tried over there. I just hope the toxic people who run the communities there don’t see what I’m doing and try to invade. I mean we could use the numbers but not the toxicity — though I feel that that comes with any influx of new users.
Welcome! While you are still looking around, you may want to check out PieFed as well & e.g. https://piefed.zip/ . It offers tons of features that Lemmy lacks, like categories of communities, which are user customizable and shareable, flairs (both user and post), polls, combining together all cross-posts across all communities, etc. Check it out and prepare to just fall in love with it!:-)
Even better, while Lemmy is written in the Rust language and adds features at the timescale of multiple years (not joking here) whereas PieFed is written in Python and adds new stuff literally weekly. So the gap in feature sets, instead of ever closing, will only continue to widen over time.
Although if you are going to stay with Lemmy, you would be hard pressed to find a better one than what you are on now. Fortunately, you may not have to choose, if it opens up a PieFed instance by the same people (discussion).
So let me see if I understand you correctly. The “one I’m on now” you refer to in the third paragraph, meaning dbzer0, is an instance of Lemmy (along with others) that are federated (loosely united) together in the same feed.
You’re on piefed.social, so you’re federated with dbzer0 and the other Lemmy feeds. So it’s not like you’re on a whole other federated social network like Bluesky (which is more like Twitter whereas Lemmy is more like Reddit). But it has different programming, so you can access more/different features from your end than I can on mine, but we still have access to the same communities?
Still kinda struggling to understand how fediverse stuff works.
Yup, as said already, exactly like that.
Most social media these days is a single system / platform, like Facebook or Reddit. Federated media is rather like email where whichever service you send it from (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), the recipient receives it and you don’t need to care about exactly how.
I feel that analogy is overly simplistic, and leaves people baffled as to what defederation means. So instead I like the idea that federation is akin to ships (pirate or free trade) passing messages around - some captains have beef with other captains and refuse to talk with them, but otherwise you have access to the entire network of all messages.
It does get slightly more complicated when you rise up above the forum-based “Threadiverse” (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and arguably flarum and nodeBB) to discuss the wider ActivityPub-based “Fediverse” - those entirely different platforms can pass messages between them, but it is not always so easy or straightforward, e.g. Mastodon is based on people whereas the Threadiverse is centered around “communities” (on Reddit these were called subreddits), so for someone on Mastodon to talk to someone on Lemmy (or PieFed) they would have to jump through several hoops to make it happen (although Mbin eases that process). That’s basically the end of my knowledge there bc I don’t use Mastodon but I hope that helps to have gone that far at least.
Getting back to the ship analogy, you personally could, in theory, have your own ship, which you could use either privately, or share with a few friends, or even open it up to the public. That “machine” that you use, that “server”, in Fediverse terminology is called an “instance”. And it will have “admins” who run it, as well as “moderators” who run the communities on it. Also, it will need to pick which variety of software to run, so like there are Lemmy instances, and PieFed instances, and Mbin instances, etc. Sometimes the same admins run multiple of them, e.g. lemmy.world is by far the largest Lemmy instance, and now they have branched out to try out a PieFed instance as well called PieFed.world. It’s the same people, possibly running on the same machine or at least you could imagine that, but a different software platform.
lemmy.dbzer0.com is a Lemmy instance, and one day that awesome admin dbzer0 (a real person, though surely that’s not their irl name😂) may likewise make a PieFed instance, perhaps it will be called PieFed.dbzer0.com, or something, who knows.:-)
Regardless, the messages will get passed between them. Your choice of instance gives you a different experience bc you are picking a different captain of your boat - maybe you’ll even decide to become one yourself - and then yes the software that is run on the instance greatly changes your method of access. e.g. PieFed has flairs (both user and post varieties) and polls, but since Lemmy lacks those, the only way to participate in such is to use that same software, i.e. to sign up on an instance that runs it (or maybe one day Lemmy will catch up and offer all 3 of those? I am sure that it will, but I sincerely doubt it will happen anytime “soon”). Here is an example of a post that uses a poll (and a couple of post flairs, and also hashtags too). Btw the sidebar of that community has some good resources to learn more about the Fediverse if you are interested. But that post itself is not able to be viewed on a Lemmy instance, since it uses a poll which Lemmy does not know how to handle.
And then defederation is a whole other thing. When one captain (admin) gets mad at another captain (admin) for just absolutely REFUSING to respect the rules that collectively were agreed upon - sending spam, harassment of users, trolling behaviors etc. - defederation can be a method of last resort to cut off all communication with them. It stops any messages from that point forward - for good or bad - which can cause confusion but I want to point out that the captain (“admin”) is literally the owner of their personal ship (machine/“instance”) and so has the right to do as they please with it. And all the more so if the instance is open to the public, in which case they arguably have the responsibility to protect their users from the trolling and harassment campaigns. “Free speech” is never free, someone must always bear the cost, of maintenance, of platforming it, and so on.
Exactly like that.
Thanks! I went and followed the discussion link the other guy posted. I saw one concern — the handling of voting. But someone/some people are going behind a lot of those comments and saying they fixed it based on user feedback. So that’s good. I also feel I understand the two (Lemmy and Piefed) and their relationship a bit more.
If it sounds like I’m a bit eager to learn, it’s because I like to help others, but to do that I have to understand things first.
Welcome!
Thank you! Subscribed to both and found a few things to sub to in the second one.
Well, welcome aboard! It’s pretty good here. Fewer bots, fewer trolls, more civil conversation. I hope it works for you.
Thank you! I’m mostly treating it like “Reddit but for left leaning people” and enjoying learning the differences.
Yeah, it is that. I’m way left leaning, but I actually wish Lemmy was more of a cross section. I’m not sorry to see the total assholes on the far right not here (or not very vocal), but I don’t prefer an echo chamber.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
Total posts by month appears fairly linear.
Thank you, I had been looking for actual data and couldn’t find it. You’re right, does not seem to be declining.
I wonder if there an increasing percentage of bot posts, since I have prolific bot accounts blocked.
I wonder what’s up with that number of servers decline.
I wonder what’s up with that number of servers decline.
Consolidation? Which is fine to that extent.
I’d wager many experimented with hosting a younger Lemmy, and hosts who couldn’t sustain it got shaken out over time.
I wouldn’t assume the rise in posts/comments is all bots, either. I don’t have anyone blocked, and it doesn’t feel overrun to me.
Yeah, it would figure that if the activity is flat but the number of servers is declining that it’s either consolidation or that people are abandoning very small instances.
And activity is rising as far as I can tell, look at the graphs at the bottom.
Some of it had to do with there not being enough admins to go around afaik. Lemm.ee for instance couldn’t find enough admins so they shut down. Moderating an instance seems like one of the hurdles that go along with running an instance. I could imagine some people dipped out of Lemmy for a little while if their server was deleted since they’re starting from scratch again. It took me a good month or so to make this account and ramp back up my own activity here for instance.
The admins across the servers do a good job of keeping bots out imo. If it ever becomes a problem the admins could look to adopt BlueSky’s moderation tools down the line, I feel. As BlueSky makes it easy to filter bots, misinformation spreaders, and have user level content controls.
Total Lemmy Active Users by Month
There’s a big spike during summer time. On reddit it was known as summer reddit. Basically all of the kids are out of school and have nothing better to do but shitpost online. Now they’re going back to school. It could be the lack of different users you’re noticing. Not sure why it dipped in July though, should have dipped in August.
Wasn’t July 1st when lemm.ee shut down?
Ah, good point. Forgot about that. That’s probably it.
The slight dip so far this month could be the beginning of the end of the summer Lemmy. Schools just started this week near me, and green is 30 day users so it should take 30 days for that to fully drop.
Fediverse Observer says Piefed MAU were 352 in May, 1068 in June and 1615 in July. So thats a rise of ~1300 people in two months.
Yeah, agreed. Between lemm.ee closing leading to people moving over to Piefed in droves and Summer Lemmy coming to an end I don’t see anything concerning in the data I think.
Also keep an eye on: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats A couple thousand people (and several communities) moved there after lemm.ee died, but we interact with lemmy.
As for why it subjectively seems to be declining… maybe you know what you’re gonna see in New, and so you engage less with posts? Maybe it’s time to be more of a poster!
I noticed on the redditalternatives subreddit whenever someone mentions Lemmy and someone else is like “I didnt like it because of XYZ” someone else will often say “you should look into Piefed its much better”
Which is funny to me but at least it’s working!
And if they don’t like PieFed then tell them to try Mbin next lol
As for why it subjectively seems to be declining… maybe you know what you’re gonna see in New, and so you engage less with posts?
I don’t think so. For ages (maybe two years) I’ll sometimes sit in bed in the morning and browse New until I hit the stuff I saw previously. That used to take me well over an hour - maybe two - but now it takes less than thirty minutes.
Yeah, OP. Ten million posts a month isn’t good enough for you?!?
Ten million and one would be better
It’s not 10 millions created during a month, it’s 10 millions existing posts at a certain month, whatever their creation date.
The actual number of posts per month would be the different between the total number of posts between two months.
I would call that flat, not linear. Linear implies a non exponential increase. This looks flat.
I specifically said linear and not flat because it is a non-exponential increase.
You could say the rate of posts is flat, but the data series is posts, not rate of posts.
I don’t see much of an increase in those charts.
A couple million posts isn’t much?
Looking at the more detailed breakdowns, it looks like there are a couple of servers (Lemmit.online, alien.top among others) with huge numbers of posts/comments that appear to be entirely bots. Are those counted in the stats? Could those be messing with the overall graphs? If Lemmit’s quarter of a million posts a month are counted, its going to make the monthly posts stat useless when even .world only has about 15k posts a month.
Edit: Comparing the graphs to the server list, it looks like Lemmit is counted, so the main graph is likely misleading. I did look through some of the bigger servers, and their rate of posting seemed fairly linear, but there isn’t a good way to check overall.
If i’m not mistaken, the very last graph showing posts by month shows a significant decreasing over the summer, or at least specifically july (since august is not over yet). It says June is around 12M posts and July around 9M. August seems already over 9M and we’re only 2/3 in, so maybe there was some drop around July for some reason, which could explain OP’s feeling.
As for the reason, i’m not sure, maybe a combination of factors like some server blocking access from UK with the latest privacy bullshit, some server having signficant downtime (i think slrpnk.net had a problem with servers locking themselves up while tech admin was abroad), and maybe non-Lemmy factors like holidays (though they don’t seem to impact previous years stats).
It’s summer, a few active posters are busy with either kids or time off
[email protected] has a weekly thread for active posters, it used to be more active in June
It’s fine, people will probably come back in September
!
It’s funny though, because someone else said activity spikes in the summer because kids are out of school.
I doubt people on lemmy are below the age of 20, give or take.
I saw it, but I’m not sure it’s correct as the graph in that comment shows a dip rather than a spike
Also, most of the kids today are mostly on Tiktok or Twitch rather than text-based forum, be it Reddit or Lemmy/Piefed
I honestly think that the whole internet is in decline.
I was just thinking everything seems to either be in decline, stagnation, or regression.
Maybe the whole age verification thing is keeping people offline.
Missing the Internet of my youth makes me feel older than almost anything else.
Fewer things are sadder than the reality of the Internet compared to what we envisioned early on.
It’s perhaps the greatest tragedy of my lifetime, I’m truly not exaggerating. We went from the free sharing of the majority of human knowledge to forcing people to sell their souls for YouTube money.
I feel the same way. I was a CS major in the early 80s. I watched the internet become something amazing, and then I watched it rot. Heartbreaking.
I’m not in a country with the age verification thing, but has it been turned on for Lemmy servers?
UK user here, several big lemmy instances are unavailable for me apart from when I’m on erm holiday
I don’t know, but I was thinking it might be causing people to be less online generally, even if Lemmy itself isn’t a problem. I wonder what the Lemmy NSFW people are doing.
I don’t know of any servers that have started to verify ages, but some have started to geoblock countries whose laws require it.
no
That’s just UK currently
Right, but I’m assuming there’s a nontrivial number of UK users.
Well there’s an amount, but it wouldn’t have much impact on the Fediverse as there’s no age-ID here.
Therefore to comply, the server would relocate or go offline.
Lemmy.zip is the only notable instance to have done this. Mostly because the owner is based in the UK.
Hardly bothers me. I’ll be scrolling for maybe 2 minutes and reach yesterdays posts, get caught up. It’s nice to be on social media where you aren’t constantly scrolling.
Same. I feel like Lemmy is really a lot like early Reddit (pre 2012) and the sizes of the communities are perfect. You can actually contribute to a discussion instead of drowning in 20k inane joke posts.
Some niches remain underpopulated but I feel like this will eventually rectify itself as the more critical and thoughtful people move away from vapid platforms like Reddit, FB or IG. We’ll continue to welcome them with open arms.
Totally agree. It’s way more conversation here, you had no chance really talking on reddit unless it was a small sub. I like that you get to know people here as well
Okay, but that sounds like you’re experiencing the same thing I am: there are fewer posts. But the data says there’s not. Very strange.
Oh for me it’s been like this since I first signed up.
But if you really think theres too few posts maybe thats a good call for you to start posting? :)
I made this one!
Your instance, lemmy.ca has blocked or defederated from a significantly high number of other servers. So that’s the reason
You may want to check the list of instances defederated by your PieFed instance out then as it may by much longer that on lemmy.ca…
I’m on the official PieFed instance and I am totally fine with their current defederation policy, because so far I haven’t corresponded with any trolls since the beginning of my account creation.
Quality over quantity:-D
Hmm, my original account is on .world, but I started using this alt because it got slow. Maybe I should try browsing new there and seeing if it makes a difference.
Same amount of posts, more comments. I’d wager on growing.
