Honestly a lot of it is probably people getting comfortable lurking again, Lemmy only counts post and comments as active users
So glad I decided to stop lurking and actually start participating right as the whole fediverse dies out, it's not just lemmy.
I find it more comfortable to contribute to Lemmy than to other sites. There seems to be actual discussion and opportunities to learn, which can be much harder to come across on the other platforms.
And fewer comments that are clearly a chat bot.
It's funny how despite social media becoming very normal, the old phenomenon of most content getting generated by a small portion of power users persists.
I comment on stuff to try to make discussions active, it rarely works.
You should have seen Lemmy before June 2023. All posts were from the same five people. For now the community seems to be alive and healthy.
I wonder if those same five people are sad, presumably because their posts aren't as popular.
I exclusively surf "top 6 hours" and I've actually noticed an uptick in niche community content, lately. Different kind of growth, maybe a sort of settling into itself, finally.
Let's look at some numbers and do some napkin math:
Currently, the top post of Lemmy can usually get a little more than 2K upvotes, which puts Lemmy at about late 2010 to early 2011 reddit level of activity, which is right before reddit hits its explosive growth phase in 2012 with SOPA, Kony, and the Obama AMA. While active user count has been going down, the amount of post and comments have both been steadily going up.
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity. (unless you count 9gag or the_donald for some reason.)
It's very simple, most of the posts here are circle jerks (Linux, FOSS, boy howdy aren't we better than Reddit, communism) or rage bait.
I only come here when I'm having a good day and I want to reel myself in a bit
Edit: see below to see how far Lemmy users will go to circle jerk how much better they are than Reddit
Yeah the "All" in particular is pretty bad for the average person. They're not going to enjoy a Star Trek meme, followed by a Arch meme, a Self-hosted post, a grad-student Science meme, followed by a privacy post.
I'm also convinced Lemmy's "hot" algorithm is broken; I can easily find posts with ONE UPVOTE on the all feed. Hot is supposed to be a balance between acceleration and total vote count, but it seems like it just only acceleration. Go look at the front page of reddit. The difference is night and day.
We need a normie.world that has an "all" feed that doesn't contain 70% niche communities. We have c/humor, c/news, etc but they're completely diluted by overpowered niche posts.
That's not lemmy, that's all social media (albite divisive topics are a bit different among different communities).
This is a hot take, but I think humanity is slowly turning it's back on social media because of it's toxic nature. You can only open a browser and get your nuts kicked so many times before you finally decide you don't like getting your nuts kicked.
It's worth noting that Lemmy only had around 1000 active users for the first half of 2023. (Kbin had fewer than 40 active users until May 2023!) Currently Lemmy + Kbin have about 38,000 active users.
That's the reality of where we are. A quiet rural village that turned into a boom town, and now is finding a new normal.
I never even new lemmy existed until the reddixit and I never went back because I think lemmy is a lot less toxic. Also worth pointing out that this post alone has more than 800 likes When I firsf came around top posts had 100 likes tops
Personnaly, I'm really enjoying it. You can interact without the Reddit toxicity. I miss a few specialized communities but I can live without it.
I won't lie. I mostly don't engage with content I see here. I didn't do that when I was on Reddit either and mostly for the same reason: I don't really have much to say and, even when I do have an opinion, I don't usually want to engage in what's often a protracted debate about something that will probably just end up being frustrating.
That's not to say I haven't had positive experiences on the Fediverse - I've had more here than anywhere else - I'm just not particularly motivated most of the time.
Social media as a whole is slowing down I think. People are starting to realize it makes them angry, sad, and annoyed.
People had multiple accounts because servers were unstable. Now that stability has increased we're just abandoning the alts.
We need more idiots who can comment "this" on everything
I completely disagree. What this place needs is a bunch of bot accounts that endlessly spam the top comments from when whatever's posted was on the front page last week.
Or the week before that I guess..
lemmy still isnt nearly as good as reddit was by a long shot. niche communities suck, porn sucks, c/all content isnt bad but if you scroll once youll just repeat everything on refresh.
but god damn the reddit app is terrible now and the content sucks there now too it literally feels like its trying to be a tik tok clone.
I mostly lurk so this is me being proactive!
The quality here is far better with the exception of maybe some user generated text stories. Posts don't just get lost in a sea of posts. The users here may not be as many, but it appears to have more consistent engagement and far less people PM'ing me offering me Amazon gift cards for feet pics.
Infinite growth is not a good thing, numbers rise and fall just let it do it's own thing. That being said, maybe if the Lemmy instances would stop defederating like children snatching toys from one another at a daycare it would get more engagement.
Less content, that is spread across multiple instances that can have duplicate communities.
You just can't keep doomscrolling here, the "active" search repeats all the time and the "best of the day" is like two pages.
And then there's specific communities that just... Stayed on Reddit.
So do the new posts and everything. But Reddit is a shithole and Omegle got sued to death, online gaming is either a full time job or a money sink, streaming services start to cancel out each other and most of the regular games and their performance suck ass.
Guess I’ll just be productive then.
We should be more active to keep this ship afloat. Don't be stingy with the comments.
Edit: spelling
I prefer social media not based on addiction. Lemmy has been much better for my lifestyle, than my reddit addiction.
Coulda fooled me, the content quality has continued to climb, and that's all that matters. Look at this post, it's an original meme only relevant to this community, and it's blowing up.
It really doesn't bother me tbh. The fediverse isn't for everyone and I'd rather people just use whatever platform they prefer than endlessly complaining on Lemmy when it's clearly simply not for them. And that's okay, use whatever platform suits you.
Why does this matter? Do we need to appease the shareholders or something? Do we need endless month over month growth, lest the world completely stops turning?
Do we need SYNERGIES??!!!?
As someone who posts a ton, I've noticed that a lot of people seem to check the top posts once a day or so. Posts can be slow to get engagement and traction, but the ones that become super active still seem to hit similar peaks as before (1-2k upvotes, hundreds of comments).
But yeah, people aren't as actively engaged and commenting on everything all day like they used to on reddit. The framework is here, and I think if there were another big exodus, Lemmy is set up to be a great landing point.
I see more people complaining on Lemmy about problems than I do the actual problems they're complaining about.
Just use the thing, and put the content and comments you want on it? You don't have to be a passive observer just staring out the window as monkeys dance for you. Be the monkey. Dance how you want. Eat a banana. Fling poo if that's what you want. Just stop expecting everyone else to create your dream routine and then having a sook because they step-pause-turn-pause-pivot-step-paused when you wanted them to step-pause-turn-pause-pivot-step-step.
Lemmy is neither popular nor heavily advertised, so people join at a slow rate
On the other hand, the amount political discussions, Hexbear, and lack of content result in disinterested people leaving Lemmy and joining Reddit
So the user count is decreasing because Reddit refugees are leaving faster than new people are joining
It was better before people absolutely fucking insisted on scraping reddit posts to bring over here. Post after post after post of regurgitated bot posts, without a single comment, no engagement at all. Fun!
Hexbear is holding pretty steady, I think there are just a lot of Ledditors elsewhere still who were never going to stick around longterm
Maybe if every community wasn't just another Linux memes community we wouldn't have lost all of the users.
Told you guys this shit was gonna happen.
There are plenty of other communities people made, just most didn't become very active. If the Linux memes are everywhere, it's because those are the people actually active here
I am still on Lemmy. It's still my primary timewaster. I was clean from Reddit until a few weeks ago and I relapsed. The app is shit. Lemmy feels more like what I loved about Reddit but without the content. Reddit still has content but the app doesn't feel good to use.I m stuck going back and forth. First to Lemmy then to Reddit. I'll stick with Lemmy until it gets better or it dies.
It doesn't help that every feds response to literally any perceived slight is OH MY GOD DEFEDERATE NOW. Kinda defeats the purpose and advantage of the fediverse.
Hexbear still going strong though. We'll be here after every else continues to splinter and defed from each other I'll bet
tbh its true: apart from my french instance where i like to hang out, most of Lemmy is just memes, Linux related posts, or self hosting posts. No meaningful content for ur average person really. In fact i scroll throu 'All' in new and reach yesterday's posts in just few minutes, given the amount of 'not so meaningful content' i am filtering ..
In the early days of Reddit it's motto was fake it until you make it. It was a ghost town so they set up an army of bots to generate content and fake activity. Not much has changed tbh.
idk, I'm not going anywhere
Tbf, I have like 7 accounts and I'm currently only using 2 or 3 since Lemmy servers are much more stable than they used to be
I'm one of the people who has stopped coming here. I'll keep visiting occasionally but the lack of content and pro-east/anti-west rhetoric is just as irritating as the maga/conspiracy crowds on reddit.
Yeah I lurk most of the time and comment on neutral topics sometimes, but generally the content isn't too engaging.
It's either memes, Linux (or memes about Linux), or this or that type of politics. Lots of bot-generated content, too many American-based sports teams; lots of repeating topic content (e.g. shitload of musk, trump/biden/whatever), lots of community and/or news duplicates. I won't be lying I've seen like 5 reposts of some amd threadripper news in my active feed within 10 pages.
Sometimes I know that engaging into a small comment will yield zero replies, and other times I feel like the response will most likely be frustrating. What I valued about reddit is diverse topic discussions, interesting questions and fun reads. But people seem to have more fun bypassing my anti-politics filters in-between porn. I honestly think we need to revive many communities related to questions, interesting topics, and overall "lets-have-a-chat-on-something" (preferably not related to what I mentioned above, or at least that touches a broader audience).
Do I contribute a lot? Am I the one to tell people what to do? I don't think so, but when I have a will to create some content, that will is usually cut off by zero-to-none expected engagement from other people. People wanna do what they wanna do, I guess. I don't blame em.
