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?
I think I’ve just reduced social media participation in general.
I still browse a lot but with so much AI bollocks and rage bait and engagement farming and any other manner of “fake stuff pretending to be real stuff” going on it just doesn’t seem worth it to actually participate much.
Best case: I get some upvotes, and my comment is stolen for training an AI
Worst case: I get no upvotes, and my comment is stolen for training an AI
I’m actually coming back to Lemmy. I left reddit, but then went back to it with limited participation. And now it’s truly a cesspool. Lemmy may not be a perfect replacement, but it feels better. I should have never left.
There’s way less content here but the content that is here is way better, and the level of intelligence and civility on display is night and day vs Reddit.
Sorry to hear your experience was so bad, but welcome back.
The situation with bots and trolls on Reddit is horrific. Do you remember that time a few years back when Russia disconnected their whole country from the Internet? That day there was a dramatic decrease in assholes and trolls. Like, night and day, it was unmistakeable and widely commented on.
So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.
So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.
At the very least, I suspect Lemmy, as a federated network, has more power to filter them. We saw years ago what happened when the Wolfballs bigots tried to join, they were eventually isolated by most other instances who continued to run without them. So as long as we can retain a situation where the largest instances actually take a solid stance against assholes and trolls and bigots, then it becomes much easier to make them all optional, shunned to register on the more liberalist permissive instances.
Good point. Also worth noting that, since Lemmy isn’t owned by a company trying to make a profit, there’s no incentive to put up with outrageous jerks who drive up engagement.
Seems the same
I feel the same
Ah the twice yearly post asking if Lemmy is dying.
Ah the twice yearly post
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).
This fits my profile. I actively browsed and contributed to Lemmy for about 4 months following the US inauguration, but all the useful stuff I want is still on Reddit and Twitter. I still look at Lemmy around once per week, but honestly it seems like there’s a lot more political rage bait and not as much in the way of niche community content.
I can relate to that. Most of the info I usually need from Reddit is about gaming, and the majority of games I play aren’t even mentioned here. I also agree on the political ragebait part. I narrow my feed down to the communities I follow only, because the moment I use “All”, I get a lot of these.
Games genre communities (!jrpg@lemmy.zip ) are doing okay, game-specific communities are probably too niche for now yet.
yeah, talk about all jrpgs in that community until it’s busy enough to subdivide
The world is a pretty depressing place 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.
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.
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.
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 is why I haven’t touched grass in a while. I see so much content on here than when I first started
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.
It’s summer, a few active posters are busy with either kids or time off
!fedigrow@lemmy.zip 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
Could be your instance not federatinv with everything.
I blocked half of fedi as such as DNC whores over at lemmy wrld and shepooh cock riders on ml
Still get a decent trickle.
There are plenty of new posts created, the problem is that most of them stay at 0 comments for ever.
Your instance, lemmy.ca has blocked or defederated from a significantly high number of other servers. So that’s the reason
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.
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
