I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
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I moved to Mbin, and I know quite a few people moved to Piefed, so you need to take that into account
I hope Lemmy continues to decline, instead Piefed should reign supreme.
I’m going to be frank.
I’m highly empathetic, and studied history, sociology, economics, international relations, and a few other subjects in university. I dabble in reading as well.
It’s really, really hard for me to stomach the news coming out of the US right now. I’m Australian, so in comparison I live in a utopia. But I just want to cry whenever I see how innocent people are being hurt in the US, Venezuela, Palestine, or really anywhere else. I get angry when I see how the US government, and many others are fucking everything up right now. Things don’t have to be like this.
There is so much American news on this platform. There is so much bad news in general. I don’t come to the internet to stress and worry. I come here to learn stuff about niches and chill out. And every time I’m on Lemmy I’m left with the same bad feelings I get from reading world news subreddits.
Let me be clear; I have no problem with the fact that American news gets posted. It’s that when I get on the lemmy.zip or lemmy.world page, some days 9/10 links are to American news, that is very, very, bad news. It makes me miserable.
So why should I be here instead of just switching off? I love Lemmy, but I find that I just can’t justify coming on here. It makes me feel awful.
When this post is two days old and still on the very top of my feed you know that it’s either a ghost town or the sorting algo doesn’t work.
The more niche communities really suffer I feel from the decentralized pattern. Tv shows, movies, video games, etc. you have everyone trying to be the “de-facto” instance and none of them really get traffic.
Really, Lemmy is just a US political platform with some weak notions of being anything else. And if it wants to survive, it needs more people, with more interesting topic. To many subs are just ghost towns.
I think it is kind of a mistake that Lemmy tries to replicate or replace Reddit. If you want your “niche” content (which I can never figure out what people mean but this but I digress), it requires the network effect of Reddit. Reddit still exists and both Lemmy instances and Reddit are websites. You can easily have two tabs or like both apps on your phone so I’m not sure why it has to be all or nothing.
I think a better use of Lemmy is to provide things that don’t work and don’t exist on Reddit. A good example is https://crazypeople.online/c/eternalplaylist where we post whatever we’re listening to and then sometimes comment on what other people are rocking at the time. I started https://crazypeople.online/c/streamingmovies just to post whatever bullshit I’m watching, maybe if you stream something from https://fmhy.net/ post it and we can all watch it.
I think the people using lemmy as a personal blog are more like what the platform excels at like https://lemmygrad.ml/c/spacedogschronicles and https://crazypeople.online/c/bitofarambler which became https://crazypeople.online/c/travel
Lastly I think the real win for Lemmy as a whole would be to figure out how to better interact with other fedi software. Maybe turning mastodon and pixelfed tags into communities and figuring out how to better integrate there would provide more and interesting content but in a scenario i find much easier to follow than subscribe to poster type twitter style microblogging.
TL;DR being Reddit 2 won’t ever happen until Lemmy has a reason to exist that isn’t being Reddit. Some people are building that and this is still early in the game.
No
It’s quality and quantity. The quality has held despite a drop in users. Just wait and let Reddit have another controversy and we’ll get another infusion of converts. Popularity may only threaten more bots and scams.
Just wait and let Reddit have another controversy
You know, there was a great blog recently that wrote about this, that now is the perfect time to popularize the fediverse. That’s because as tensions with the US are rising, more people in europe are looking for alternative internet platforms to communicate over. So the fediverse can jump in here and offer itself as an alternative.
It’s not just Europe. Plenty of us in the United States looking to circumvent the vanguard party. And fascism is rising globally. We need decentralization and federation to survive going forward.
This.
We’re actually seeing a rise in new user applications over at Feddit.dk. The hostile behavior of the US has gotten some Reddit users to seek alternatives to american platforms.
i suspect reddit has upped thier bannings recently, even banning anti-right wing views. plus they upped thier detection of people who are serial evaders, the ones that use hundreds of accounts to spam(not the propaganda bots though). reddit bans for refrencing physical “damage” to people, not even outright saying it. or implying a “demographic” or anti-zionist comments.
must be the “greenland invasion, distraction by trump thing recently”
When I look at some generic instance’s unfiltered feed all I see is posts about USA/Trump. I can see how this might deter a lot of Europeans who are looking for alternatives to Reddit.
Yeah I’m ngl the All feed kinda sucks.
I don’t think people shouldn’t be talking about the horrors in the US but if “all” is just 5 LW posts in a row on US politics its not exactly enticing for a new user.
Piefed sign up process asks the new user if they want to mute Trump and Musk. That helps a bit.
Just wait and let Reddit have another controversy and we’ll get another infusion of converts.
Just wait
this is how something like Digg swoops in and steals all the users
Or Bluesky / Threads vs Mastodon
Digg? Now with AI? That Digg? You mean the Digg that lost all its users to Reddit in the first place? Not happening.
… Maybe SomethingAwful will somehow make a comback rofl.
It’s quality and quantity. The quality has held despite a drop in users.
This is my experience too; I haven’t really noticed a change. I still see about the same number of conversations and the same depth of conversation as I always have here. I was very surprised that the change in user count was so high.
I wonder if there’s a committed/stable subsection of the userbase, that is mainly responsible for posts and comments, and has largely stuck around throughout? And then most of the swings in user count are from people who were less active to begin with?
its also the fact that we can ban whole communities too, from popping up your feed. since there are less users, blocking the users that are obviously tankies or conservatives, reduces us seeing more posts.
I like it here
Seconded. I just learned it exists last week. It’s good and has a lot of potential.
It is. It’s one of the reasons i’ve pivot back to reddit these last few months.
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More then Reddit this place is an echo chamber for the far left anti capitalist crowd. While I don’t mind a discussion, everything over simplified to EAT THE RICH was getting tiresome.
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No company or institution is here. If I have a problem with my [insert device or appliance here] chances are good someone on reddit will reply and 50/50 there is a useable answer somewhere. Here it just stays silent. Or you get the anti capitalist reply that everything is fucked and we should just eat the rich.
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There are no real gaming or device or brand communities. Want to ask something about modding game x? Not here. Want to hook up with other players of game y? Not here. Want to know how to fix your [household appliance here]? Not here…Have a problem with mainboard from brand z? Not here.
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When you ask something here about Linux or any other gpl software the answer often times boils down to RTFMI! (I= idiot) That also happens on reddit to be honest. But here it’s just more extreme. And I know I’m an idiot. That’s why I asked. I’m too stupid can someone please explain.
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Where the fuck is LJDawson. Sync is dead it seems.
And yes. Reddit more and more feels like an AI test site. For example the AITA posts are getting more and more out of this world. They are unbelievable, that’s just for clicks. So the enshittification is not slowly but very fast becoming a problem and within a few months it will be another youtube, unusable. But for now… It’s the best we have.
- More then Reddit this place is an echo chamber for the far left anti capitalist crowd. While I don’t mind a discussion, everything over simplified to EAT THE RICH was getting tiresome.
That must be so difficult for you compared to all the wonderful corporate platforms full of rightwing hateful trolls who genuinely harass people.
I’m going to tentatively upvote this. There’s a good reason the left wingers on this platform sound bitter (myself included). The Overton Window has shifted right, so they’re pretty much surrounded by toxic right-wing stuff on every other platform.
Still, it doesn’t help Lemmy attract moderates.
What conservatives want is for us to treat them like babies with tiny little fragile baby beliefs that we have to coddle.
I don’t care if you think differently than me, what I care about is babies demanding we take their hateful and irrational ideologies seriously while they simultaneously target vulnerable groups with at a minimum hate speech and harassment.
If we coddle conservatives this place becomes less welcoming to new people, that is how it is.
Yeah you’re absolutely right. Though we are talking about two separate things here; OP and I are talking about “eat the rich” left rhetoric. Like people coming here and seeing comments like, “wheel out the guillotines”, and “kill all CEOs”.
You’re talking about the fact that we shouldn’t welcome conservative voices after they’ve ruined the rest of the internet. I absolutely 100% completely agree with you.
I’ll give you an example; I’m more leftie than my wife. So it surprising to her when I said that people should be allowed to just punch Nazis with no legal ramifications. Like to her it was actually confronting to hear someone she knew advocate for violence. I explained my reasoning. They are corrosive to society’s norms, and really need a different set of rules to regular people to be contained. The only language they understand is violence.
But the point is the average person is going to be immediately repulsed by calls for violence and extreme rhetoric, regardless of whether it is morally justified and the reasoning is technically correct.
So imagine a moderate “regular” person coming to this forum. Without the context of history that you and I have, how do they interpret these comments? Will they want to stay on Lemmy?
I’m not saying Lemmy should change, by the way. I have no problem with the rhetoric, and there’s a case to be made that getting rid of it may make it easier for conservatives to get a foothold here. But it’s worth a discussion, I guess.
And that all said, there’s a chance that by “eat the rich” OP means anything complaining about the rich, in which case they can fuck off to their own instance.
There are no real gaming or device or brand communities.
Some relatively active (in terms of posts, breadth of content and user engagement) gaming communities across Lemmy/Threadi:
- Adventure Games - !adventuregames@retrolemmy.com
- Automation Games - !automationgames@lemmy.zip
- Cozy Games - !cozygames@lemmy.world
- City Builders - !citybuilders@sh.itjust.works
- Indie Games (variety) - !bside@fedia.io
- Lifesim Games - !lifesimulation@lemmy.world
- Open Source Games - !foss_gaming@lemmy.world
- PC RPGs (cRPGs) - !crpg@lemmy.world
- Roguelike Games - !roguelikes@lemmy.world
- RTS Games - !rts@reddthat.com
- Space Games (variety) - !space_games@piefed.world
- Strategy Games - !strategy_games@piefed.world
- Turn-based Strategy (e.g. 4X) - !turnbasedstrategy@piefed.world
- Tycoon / Business Sim Games - !tycoon@lemmy.world
- Video Game Art - !gameart@sopuli.xyz
- Video Game Music - !vgmusic@lemmy.world
- Video Game Questions - !askgaming@piefed.social
I moderate/curate like 6 of them, so I am biased, but we do have a solid selection of gaming communities beyond !games@lemmy.world or !pcgaming@lemmy.ca.
Gaming communities exist, based on genres usually. I’ve used !citybuilders@sh.itjust.works for questions about city building games. !soulslike@lemmy.zip is also there.
For example the AITA posts are getting more and more out of this world.
What’s this AITA sub you speak of?
It’s called r/AmateurStoryWriters ffs, get the name right
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The quality has held despite a drop in users.
I feel like I’m going mental over here because this has not been my experience. The quality has always been spotty, but the last few months I’ve noticed more and more posts linking to awful “news” rags or no source at all. Worse, I rarely see people questioning the lack of quality information, simply gobbling it up because it aligns with their world view. Plus 70% of the comments on this platform could be generated by a classic r/subredditsimulator style bot and nothing would change; the same 5 points about AI, capitalism, and Linux are made in every thread in the exact same style every day.
And yes I’m mostly talking about news communities because Linux comms are usually fine but repetitive and while I’d love to interact with non-news content there just… isn’t much being made.
the sudden rise in 2025 early on, was the massive purges reddit was doing, banning almost anyone left and right, and hitting all thier accounts at once. when they usually never try to multi-ban you before. they did take thier foot of the pedal though, because they realized they were banning too much, lowering thier faux engagements with bots. reddit switched to more insidious bannings in the background.
Is this strictly Lemmy or does it include related platforms like PieFed and Mbin? Because it seems like there has been some shift to PieFed
they are separate, but not huge
They are separate but they are federated, they can see lemmy’s content and viceversa.
Edit: addition: Their success benefits lemmy, this is the beauty of the fediverse, competition is not really competition, we all win.
I thought this too at first: I expected Piefed to have been the main cause. But, it turns out that Lemmy monthly active users have dropped by around 30k, while Piefed has risen to about 5k
Yeah Piefed is great. It’s a night and day difference in experience really
I’m feeling very burnt out. Lemmy is kinda an endless stream of political doom and gloom. For context, I’m in the US and already stressed out by our political situation. But I don’t come here to see more doom and gloom. It’s getting to the point where I think I need to get off for my mental health.
Then there are all the people who if you don’t agree exactly with their opinion they downvote you to hell. You have left leaning politics but not my flavor of left? Downvote! You hate enshitification and big tech privacy practices, but you use a single piece of software that isn’t FOSS? Downvote!
It’s so exhausting. I absolutely hate Reddit but I miss going on there and just laughing at how someone’s TV is too high. I miss laughing at how some restaurant serves food of shovels instead of plates.
And that’s not even getting into the lack of content. That part I understand requires users like myself to be as active as possible. But it’s hard being active when I feel so burnt out from the other stuff here.
Tbh, idk if these issues are specific to Lemmy or just the internet as a whole. I can only speak to the slice of the internet I find myself in. But I just wanna see people that are excited about things: photography, 3d printing, weird keyboards, etc. And that exists here, but it’s drowned out by all the doom and gloom.
Hot take: the biggest issue is actually ever entering a community and seeing zero comments. Most reddit addiction stems from wanting to read comments, so I think people should add a comment to something if they’re upvoting and they see that the thread has zero comments.
Nothing eliminates enthusiasm like seeing 0 comments on every post in a community, especially if that community is driven by bots.
Just talk up Lemmy, the issue is most people doesn’t realize there’s another option to the popular toxic trash fires.
I’ve told people about Lemmy before. I got the same reaction everytime.
“It looks like it’s just people talking about computers.”
And their interest dies. Which tells me there needs to be more diversity of active communities. No one wants to come to a small platform, create a new dead community, and talk to themself.
We need comments, that is the problem. Small communities don’t get any positive feedback via engagement, which causes them to die as the owner/sole poster feels like no one cares.
Simply link dumping (effectively what most posts are on content aggregators) is the easy part. Seeing even 1 comment inclines someone to open up the post to read the comment, which makes them in turn likely to reply and it builds from there to a hot/active conversation.
If you can just aim to write that first comment on or two posts a day in more niche communities, it will help achieve growth.
Now this I do and I’m glad it helps
Thank you for your service o7
75% of small communities, if not higher, don’t use lemmy-federate to expand the visibility of their community. The user makes the community, broadcasts a few posts locally and then gets sad that no-one replies (because it can only be seen locally). Nor do they make use of !newcommunities@lemmy.world or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca to advertise.
I use lemmy-federate a lot to help this, but it’s sometimes too late after they set the comm up.
Good idea, thanks!
That’s another good point.
PieFed has at least taken some steps to work on this, with it automatically posting new communities to NewCommunities and auto-subbing the instance to those posted there.
If the Lemmy devs stopped pushing ML propaganda, transphobia, and genocide denial and actually worked on the software, we might be in a better place today.
I have proposed piefed instances be able to opt into automatic federation with other selected instances when a community is made. I think it might work like that now via a toggle. Rimu would confirm.
Obviously smaller, personal instances would opt out of that but for general-use instances it makes sense.
Might be “Automatically add new remote communities” toggle on the admin side.
Then again if it’s some guy in his corner doing stuff on his own, is it really a community ?
This is my analysis too. And why, instead of just upvoting posts that interest me, I try to think of something to say about them too. The dreaded “0 comments” is never a good look no matter how we much we tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter.
For this reason I tend to believe that many communities just have too much primary content. Too many posts and not enough comments.
Thought experiment. 2 communities:
- /c/one has 15 posts per day, 5 of them with 3 comments, the other 10 with none
- /c/two has 3 posts per day with 5 comments each
Which is the healthier community?
My experience is that it’s more like this:
- /c/one has 15 posts per day, 5 of them with 3 comments, the other 10 with none
- /c/two has 3 posts per day with 0 comments each
Not every post is a hit, so if you cast wide you’re likely to get a greater return on comments as something is bound to attract attention. The way the sorting works is that the 5 posts with 3 comments will show at the top and the 0 posts will drop off view, showing an active community.
I’m trying to think of something to say in riposte in order to boost the comment count.
Riposte? What a fun word, I should incorporate that.
This thread is doing well for engagement, go sort by new and comment on something ;)
Maybe we need a sort/filter for posts with 0 comments, like a “Needs Comments” filter… Might be worth submitting a feature request on Lemmy and PieFed?
So saying something without much effort under a post wothout comments actually helps that post to become more populated?
As long as it’s relevant, yes.
If you just posted say “I agree” or “Totally this” I don’t think that would drive any further engagement.
To be completely honest, Lemmy is kinda dead outside the politics subs and some of the tech ones. When I deleted my reddit account I came here and joined some of the communities I was using reddit for: Pathfinder 2e, RPG, memes, anime. Out of all of them I only see an occasional post from memes while the other ones are literal ghost towns.
Shameless plug.
If you are into computer RPGs (CRPGs), we have a relatively active community:
The JRPG community is also pretty active:
they should link to each other in the sidebar so people know how to find them
Lemmy communities could benefit from a webring concept.
You’re right! That’s perfect! that’s what i was looking for, now i have a name to it. thank you. i think it would maybe work well enough if the sidebar could link to related communities?
We have an open issue for this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5871
I appreciate so much when communities do this. Often the mods are extremely lazy though and don’t bother, or if they do then they do not keep it maintained.
In fairness, some apps seem to do everything in their power to actively hide sidebar as much as possible, for some reason, burying it behind MANY clicks and adding the need to also scroll down sometimes quite large lists of options too.
People seem to forget just how technically far behind Reddit we all still are on the Threadiverse. Nowadays, PieFed even has some features that Reddit itself lacks (bc many of their “features” added in recent years were for increasing their revenue stream, rather than anything that the users themselves wanted), but even PieFed has several broken components.
So if the goal is to make a better Reddit, while keeping it free, and also getting there quickly… well, that’s just not realistic, some compromises are going to necessarily end up being made.
Waiting in my instance to update to Piefed 1.4, I will add World of JRPGs to the sidebar once that happens.
See, the 3 newest posts being 3 over a day old being considered fairly active is one of my issues with Lemmy/fediverse. My whole subscribed feed is like that. Open app, check feed that’s not exclusively doom and gloom politics, and nothing has moved since I checked it the day before.
Yep.
Even the politics stuff, it seems to lag behind reddit by a half day or so.
sometimes a 1-2 days.
Yeah. I lurk reddit via a redlib instance - so I can browse content but can’t log in or of course comment. Often I see some situation unfolding and want to discuss it, but there just isn’t any relevant posts on the fediverse.
ive seen less movies, entertainment, tv shows posts than before, when ee was still alive.
!movies@piefed.social and !television@piefed.social are still around
Agreed. If news headlines and Linux are your jam you’re all set already. That’s enough to keep me coming back but I aggressively join new communities as they’re made to support them. I only post rarely though, do I only do so much as of now
It’s kind of a chicken and the egg problem though, that happens on any new place, so it’s tough to sell them on that unless they already like what’s being talked about. I think it’s probably better to stick to the fundamentals of the fediverse and what makes it better than a centralized platform. In this phase of Lemmy’s popularity we need people that stick around and build communities, and they can only really be enticed to do that based on the merits of the platform.
and if someone had a bad experience with Lemmy you can’t force them to give it another chance, but you could tell them about PieFed
But thats the same with everything, Mastodon and X as well.
Hell, even Governments like mine here in Australia use that shitty platdorm. Why there is no gov.au Mastodon server I don’t know.
I just don’t have conversations with people in which I proselytize internet aggregators. I just don’t talk about this stuff to people.
Besides which, I disagree that the issue is that people don’t know. They don’t know because they haven’t invested the 3 seconds to search “reddit alternatives” and they haven’t done that because they’re happy wherever they are.
Like “most” users think advertising is “good” because it might remind them about things they want. They think it’s “good” that some algorithm might curate content they’re more likely to be interested in. They think it’s fine that there’s a new AI chat bot.
Having an awareness that alternatives exist does not solve these fundamental impediments.
They know there are other options, but they won’t join us on the fediverse. That’s because no celebrities or influencers have moved to the fediverse.
And as for reddit users, most of them just like “huh? I like staying here” or “the lemmy devs are tankies and lemmy is a toxic tankies dumpster”
But that’s okay with me, at least we have fewer toxic people.
or “the lemmy devs are tankies and lemmy is a toxic tankies dumpster”
Well there’s always PieFed
That’s because no celebrities or influencers have moved to the fediverse.
George Takei
Many people improperly exchange “Threadiverse” or even just “Lemmy” with “Fediverse”. George Takei is on Mastodon / the Fediverse, but not on the Threadiverse / Lemmy / PieFed / Mbin.
i actually did this like 2 days ago and the guy agreed to at least try it out. people just need to talk about it and be honest about what is good/bad about the current state
Yeah. They could move to an unpopular toxic trash fire.
i occasionally mention lemmy, on a forum where people got banned from reddit( for people earning money from using massive accounts on reddit)
…I am drifting away from Lemmy myself.
Political communities are echo chambers like Reddit, in a different color. Discussing tech or helping others is better, but still feels like talking in circles.
Wholesome subs like /c/SuperBowl are sublime, but I mostly lurk there.
Information hygiene is awful. Big subs upvote tabloids and Tweets to the sky, as long as they align with their beliefs. I just saw a discussion on a not-obviously AI generated photo with the community sentiment of “misinformation? Who cares. It’s a pro-lefty meme, so spread it.”
Anyway, all this scrolling and impulse commenting eats time. I get the same feeling of shouting into a black hole that I get on corporate social media.
Much of this is my fault, though.
I have several niches I intend to make original posts for, but never do.
It’s somewhere in the giant pile of my IRL executive dysfunction :’(
From my own experience with Lemmy, I can absolutely see why it’s declining.
Lemmy is packed full of miserable people constantly calling for violence. 90% of the feed is packed full of US politics, it doesn’t matter how many filters I use I still see that greasy orange cunt’s face every time I open Lemmy.
The amount of hostility towards outsiders just getting into Lemmy is astounding, and I’ve absolutely seen the whole “quality over quantity” crap that only drives people away from the platform. The IT tech snobbery is also incredibly offputting to people who aren’t tech enthusiests.
In short, Lemmy has a toxic shithead problem that a platform this small can’t afford if it wants to survive long term.
I’m a very new user who wanted to give this a chance, here are the friction points from my point of view:
- The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn’t help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.
- Content discovery sucks ass. My feed stayed mostly the same since I started using Lemmy. I’m presented the same shit over and over again. I’m not sure if it’s something that I do wrong, if there is just no content or if that’s a side effect of ‘no tracking at all’ but either way the experience is just bad
- Someone in here already said it, but ‘Lemmy’ is a horrendous name. That alone was the reason why I didn’t bother to try it at all for a long time. Only recent events pushed me towards it but tbh I’m not sure I’ll stay.
In short the user experience is abysmal.
