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.

A part of me feels like the .ml instance is working on behalf of meta and reddit to drive people away.

Obviously that isn’t what is happening, but when one of the largest instances’ user bases is turning every post into Palestine debates and allowing coordinated harassment against anybody who disagrees with them, clearly people are going to leave.

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There have been a lot of political articles and not much besides.

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.

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

I’ve noticed a downward trend, not necessarily “dropped off suddenly”. One of the most notable signs I’ve seen is from the new comments sort.

When I’m interested in seeing what’s actually active and where the action is at, one of the things I will do is click to sort by “New Comments” and change my view to Comments. Typically I go to that page, see if any of the headlines or comments catch my attention, then go read or reply.

In the past couple of months, I’m seeing more and more new comments on that first page of results that are 5+ minutes old. When I get to the bottom of the page and click to refresh the results, there are times now when I don’t even get a full new set of comments because there haven’t been enough new ones to bump the prior comments off the first page.

That didn’t used to happen much at all, it was rare enough that it really sticks out when it does happen. Typically, the comments on that first page would be anywhere from seconds to maybe 2 or 3 minutes old and every time I hit refresh (I wasn’t spamming the button), I’d have a completely new set of comments to peruse (other than a bug in older versions of Lemmy that would cause some comments to get stuck at the top of that page even when they were significantly older than anything else).

My overall interpretation of this is that it appears there’s less commenting, at least during the times of day that I tend to be most active on here. Of course that’s not the only possibility. But like OP, I’m noticing a lot fewer posts in those top 6, top 12 filters with lots of comments than I used to see. So, those types of observations do have me thinking things are on a bit of a down trend. It could be a seasonal thing, perhaps a temporary lull.

Agreed. It’s been getting quieter

It’s been going up and up in my experience

The problem with Lemmy and with reddit too. Is that conversations Die off or stale too quickly. Reason being most engagement happens with older more upvoted comments. And newer contributions don’t benefit from the same exposure. Which doesn’t give much incentives for people to comment. Which in return deplets the platform of its userbase. Lemmy apps should ship with viewing newer comments by default to combat this. And Lemmy users should also change this setting in their apps.

I’m fairly new. Finding it hard to get truly into the experience given some of the more extreme takes that Lemmy seems to allow (or at least some federated servers)

Seems like Lemmee is sadly becoming a fairly isolated echo chamber for certain opinions only.

edit: An example of “Extreme takes”. Not linking the post. it’s been upvoted 17 times, and online for 18 hours unmoderated: in the post, the user encourages execution. Murder and destruction of property:

so, as an actual radical:

yeah pretty spot on with healthcare. this is basic ‘having a society’ shit.

I don’t want a job that pays so much as an actual society I can contribute to and nurture and be a fucking part of that will take care of me some noticeable fraction of how I take care of it. I’d rather not have money involved, if its all the same to you.

I do actually want a free place to live. I’ll help build it or whatever, but I’m fucking done compromising with landlord parasites; watched too many of their victims die.

I do not want corporations to be unprofitable; I want them dismantled and their boards executed. worker co-ops are cool. individual enterprise is cool. no more exploitation, no more not having a voice.

I think the entire concept we have of ‘democracy’ is absolutely cucked. I could write some essays on what real democracy looks like, but the short version is: fuck your bourgoise elections.

kill the billionaires; tjwyre literal monsters who drink children’s blood steal and transfuse the blood of the young to grasp vainly at eternal youth while burning our futures. no problem with your party yacht if its green and you built it with your friends, but I think we need a reset on ‘wealth’.

Reading shit like that a LOT on this site is a massive turn off to the average user, and why I have a hard time truly diving in and giving a shit about it.

Edited once more: Bolded the problem points I have with above. My issue is not the message itself, but the words and what this user encourages. Don’t gaslight that the language used in that post was beyond reasonable and encourages violence

I’m still here!

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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.

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