I don’t know if others are experiencing a similar situation. My all feed is very sparse with engagement. If I sort top six hours or by top 12 most posts have between 5-10 comments. I feel like there was more in the past? Is engagement dropping off? I’m on lemmy.world as my instance.
I think it comes in bursts. You get all the content followed by an afternoon of doom refreshing with nothing new.
I’ve noticed that some instances, including lemmy.world, are getting more aggressive with blocking other instances (also due to assumed “spam”). At the same time, the /all/ feed is only populated by the communities that other users of your instance are subscribing to. I’d look in some newcommunities communities to subscribe to more interesting communities so that they pop up in your /all/ feed. Another reason is probably also that many people are moving away from lemmy.world to smaller instances.
This is how I see things as well. I moved away from lemmy.world because one of their updates completely fucked my account, and since then I’ve noticed more people doing the same, or complaining about issues with federation.
Anyone who expects Lemmy to become the new reddit is both setting themselves up for disappointment and missing out on the enjoyment of a smaller community imo. People can use reddit/facebook/twitter for doom scrolling if that’s their thing.
I am enjoying the slower pace of posts, and higher level of quality engagement. I also enjoy zero ads, far less toxic behavior and general niceness on Lemmy compared to Reddit.
I like this. Quality > Quantity.
When people say they want Lemmy to become the new reddit, they are not talking about the reddit of today, more like the one from <2015.
I miss the crazy shit that there used to be on reddit. Not that I liked or agreed with all the subs at the time but it really did feel at the time that there was a sub for everything. Now reddit feels stale and sanitized which makes me feel bored when scrolling through or searching for random subs.
Reddit just feels like Facebook these days. Niche subs are not affected as much, but the vast majority is just low quality trash, gossip, selfies and unhinged political discussion.
Some people probably mean that, while others want a literal transplant or reddit without spez pulling the strings. Part of the challenge of new communities is figuring out what you are, and I think Lemmy is still deep in that stage.
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Thanks for being one more ass hole standing up and screaming “block me”
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“Are you not entertain ??!!!” - Alberto Antstein
Honestly, lemmy isn’t that welcoming. Read through comments and you’ll notice most of them are kinda snarky and rude. Look at no stupid questions (idk the name of “subreddits”) you ask a serious questions and almost none of them are on topic just people giving you shit for asking. If you have tech problems it’s “install linux,degoogle,stay away from that brand” for someone new reading through them they’ll probably leave because of the toxic community.
I agree about the tone of most responses on Lemmy being rude.
I want to be nice. 🙏
Yea, I try to be as nice as I can on the internet. There’s no reason to be an ass other than you’re miserable and want other people to be as well.
It’s a mixed bag though, I’ve had some people be assholes but I ignore them if they have nothing of substance to say and focus on the positive communications.
Also, blocking the Linux communities really helped my feed. Idk what it is about the Linux superiority complex. Although I feel like most of it comes from a good place, the delivery of the information usually isn’t the best.
Too many ‘linux good, windows bad’, NSFW anime without NSFW tag, politics - for me Need a third place
** Tips Fedora ** I agree though. The linux glazing is unending. It’s a sea of penguin glaze as far as the eye can see
How is it that I never see any of this nsfw anime everyone keeps complaining about
I just want to know where it is so I can make sure to avoid it.
Some instances are pretty bad. I did some early blocking and don’t see it anymore.
Over the past two months, I’ve noticed a drop in engagement on Lemmy. Communities that used to have a decent amount of new content posted over a week, are now lacking or nonexistent. I’ve noticed this to be highly true with all communities with less than 3k subscribers. I don’t recall the name of the theory, but it was something like ‘community content theory.’ It goes something like this:
‘Around 1% of people in an online community will share content and/or try to provide original content. To have this number grow, you have to provide a way for the content posters to continue to post.’
https://www.psychreg.org/psychology-content-creating-why-we-share-what-we-share/
- Self-expression and presenting one’s identity/ideal self
- Seeking social validation through likes, comments, shares
- Connecting with communities of shared interests
- Educating others and providing helpful resources
- The “helper’s high” of gratification from assisting people
In my experience, the third one rings true most often with people.
That being said, we should take a look at the kind of communities that are not getting much engagement.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active
Here we can see the stats for all of the communities across hundreds of instances. (Filters can be applied.)
What’s surprising to me, is the ratio of subs to active users there are. After a two minute look, I believe I see that there are a few outliers where they have nearly all of the subs active and fewer that have more actives to subs. Most of what I’m seeing is around 1/3 ratio of subs to active users per week, of the best performers. Definitely not the norm.
I have a few theories as to why this is, but would love to hear from others.
Ooh nice.
I enjoyed your analysis! I think you meant
Most of what I’m seeing is around
1/3[3:1] ratio of subs to active users per week, of the best performersSubs being subscribers, and these data possibly providing evidence of there being less engagement of late, per OP’s point
People are running out of memes to repost from reddit
There have been a lot of political articles and not much besides.
And a lot of tyrannical mods who ban for dissenting opinions
yep - especially in the news/worldnews, and all *.ml communities
A lot of the same opinion based rage baiting articles. same as we’ve seen spammed on Reddit communities.
Bet that drops off after.the election, too
I’d agree. Also Lemmy is too much just dropping news articles and discussing world politics for my taste. Maybe being just another comment feed underneath a news article isn’t that engaging and interesting. I’d like to see more about hobbies and meaningful, sustainable talk about specific topics.
Exactly how I feel. I’ve unsubscribed to the politics ones but kept at least one or two news ones because I’d like to see a little bit of news, but it seems like that’s too big a chunk of what I get. I wonder if the experience would be different on a different instance but if I’m subscribed to communities across different instances I’m not sure how it would differ
It’s the same as long as you watch your subscribed communities. Lemmy is federated and that means generally you have the same access to content regardless of which unstance you chose. I mean we also have individual moderation and “local” and “all” feeds. But I don’t use them. It’s just too random and uninteresting to scroll through everything.
The niche communities are missing. It’s a bit of a wasteland. What is holding people from migrating over I wonder?
Setup was a pain in the ass for me, but I was determined not to return to reddit after the API changes. I’m tech-savvy enough to build a PC, format/partition disks, and provide tech support for my extremely confused mother, but Mastadon was so off-putting that I jumped ship during setup, and Lemmy had a learning curve that the average person may not be willing to figure out.
Even my brother who is familiar with using Tor and such couldn’t quite figure out Lemmy. He wound up joining (what I assume was) one of the shitty instances right after the first large migration, and it must have been defederated for one reason or other because he denounced the rampant censorship and went back to reddit. If he were right wing or a Nazi I could probably connect the dots there, but my brother is even further left than I am. He actually got me into politics while he was campaigning for Bernie Sanders. So I’m not exactly sure what soured his experience more-so than the initial setup (which he also struggled to wrap his head around).
I suspect he didn’t understand why his instance was defederated, and just saw the people around him complaining that it had happened. Kind of a bummer because he introduced me to Sync and would fit in really well here, but something went awry.
Defederation is the biggest issue holding lemmy back IMO. If we could honestly say you can join any instance and it doesn’t matter it would make onboarding a lot easier.
I found set up to be a little involved as well. Was there any particular aspect about it that you recall being unnecessarily complicated?
I don’t know if it’s still this way, but at the time I felt as though I had joined an empty cell on reddit and had to go through pages upon pages of potential subs/interests, many of which were vastly under-populated or duplicates from various other instances. It felt a bit like using a radio dial to find stations out in the static, and most of them weren’t interesting. I was using Jerboa and didn’t care much for it, but after Sync arrived my experience became nearly indistinguishable from reddit… except I’m not always stressed out and constantly dealing with inflammatory assholes and social confrontation.
Lemmy has definitely grown a lot since I arrived, though. I do miss niche communities, especially for old PC games that are no longer mainstream… But I haven’t been back to reddit since before the blackouts. It wasn’t good for my mental health.
Lemmy has way, way too much dross. Any user that pops in to check it out finds a billion foreign language posts, a billion weirdo anime shitposts and a billion Linux posts. It’s a massive turnoff. I spent 6 months blocking communities that had zero interest to me and I’m left with news and Star Trek posts. I don’t even like Star Trek but it’s the only OC in this place.
It would be interesting to compare Lemmy to the community on Tildes. What do you think of Tildes?
I don’t know Tildes. Never been there.
You could just follow the communities you are actually interested in.
“All” was shit on reddit so it’s going to be shit on any reddit replacement.
My subscribed list has, like, 4 posts a day. I browse all in a hope to see new communities I might like.
I’ve found more communities that I like by browsing “Hot” and near the end of “top 6 hours” for what it’s worth.
That’s precisely their point: once you filter out all of the noise, you are left with very, very, little substance. And the communities with any substance are active at a ratio that makes them flood your feed with ONLY those one or two topics.
IIRC: Devs added the new filter, “Scaled” for this exact reason. Gives newer and smaller communities a chance in the sun.
Nice tip! I didn’t know about that. Thanks.
I love star trek but 10 forward generates so much content that it becomes noise on the main feed. I’m also guilty of not contributing much though.
I think it’s a combination of several factors. First of all there is the network effect. A social media platform gets interesting once there are enough people and we’re just about 50.000 active users. Which isn’t much compared to other forums, discord servers and fanbases of single individuals (streamers, …)
Next there needs to be some motivation to join or some attention. We had that for a moment when the Reddit API thing happened. But I don’t see that as of now. We need interesting content. And a nice and welcoming community. Or something that motivates people to come here.
And there is the technical issues. We’ve had lots of them. Federation broke for some time. There are still some bugs and user interface issues. Moderation tools still are an issue. Onboarding (choosing an instance, finding a good app) is a bit complicated. And I don’t see big leaps in software development, things that are visible/obvious to the user.
Agreed. It’s been getting quieter
Well then let’s increase our engagement! Make some dank memes and post them, create more text content, ask more questions. Just no more weird anime shit, jesus christ
Haha ok. I try to post in niche communities. I’ll do my part!
My comments seem like they’re getting more votes/replies than usual. That could just be because of better stability though, also coincidental/context?
Though I posted 2 threads (OC, simple 3D models with vertex colors. banan) 2 weeks ago that didn’t do much (and they both had federation issues in different places, one went to lemmy.world and not other places and the other thread did the opposite) in Kbin communities that don’t have any new activity still. I thought about posting to artshare (on LW) to see if that’d be better but I also haven’t done anything new with it recently.
When it warms up I tend to spend less time on my devices. This is the case where I live and will be for the next 3-4 months.
Probably a good suggestion it’s time to go out and touch some grass. 🥲
Damn, missed my toxic comment opportunity 🙂↔️
Here in the Southwest US, when it warms up I spend more time on my devices 🫠
Lemmy is very polarizing. I’ve had to block a few instances because of just all the garbage that gets posted.
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I agree…I’m just comparing to previous months.
Yes, it’s gone down a lot. Most people went back to Reddit with the, “but my niche community!” As an excuse then just main-lined the enshitification.
The problem with getting niche communities started here is the average user doesn’t want to be a mod.
I’m not sure I’ve seen this take expressed here before… but here I go. I think the thing I appreciate about Lemmy is that it isn’t absurdly active. Before my switch to Lemmy (from Reddit ofc), I was compulsively checking Reddit for new content every 20 minutes, even taking priority over hyperfixations of mine. I like that there isn’t new content every 20 minutes. It’s like checking your fridge every 20 minutes for new food, and Reddit just keeps feeding you until you’re upset. This place feels like it “restocks” every day so that I don’t feel the need to check it obsessively. It’s improved my relationship with social media entirely. My only issue is the amount of bait, not just in the form of trolls but people riling themselves and others up with politics. I get it, I’m extremely far left too, but god if I come here in hopes of being less anxious I always see something that feels designed to make me angry. It’s less than Reddit but we could all work on considering if engaging is worth it. Learn to appreciate boredom and understimulation and it will change your life, especially those of you like me with an anxiety disorder.
sorry for the tangent, tl;dr less content actually makes me less anxious and more comfortable and we should learn to appreciate the boredom that comes with that
You know, I appreciate this take. I’ve felt it too. Since I switched over from Reddit the doom scrolling has gone away. I’ve even started reading more books&comics. Maybe it’s time to appreciate what we have 🙂
