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It is summer time. Students can now browse the internet more.
What happened on March 3rd? (Mass increase in active users)
Oh man, and what happened on April 3rd? (Mass drop in average comments)
Did I miss a meeting where we decided to just have massive shifts on the 3rd of every month? Is something big happening now, am I missing it?
I imagine all this activity is due to bots
What happened on March 3rd? (Mass increase in active users)
LW updated to 19.3, which counts votes as activity (before, it was only comments and posts)
I think it’s much less intimidating to new users now compared to when I joined last year. The barrier to entry has been reduced significantly.
There are tons of active communities now, mobile apps that work great (this is a big one), and many more tools to block content that you don’t want to see.
I still have no clue how instances work but whatever I’m doing has been working fine for nearly a year
Most often I’ve seen instances use as super communities. Largely revolving around a bigger topic. KDE runs their own with their own subcommunities for instance. They are far from the only ones. Just the one I use the most and a came to mind first. Having your own instance slap server allows you far more control over your communities then just hosting on someone else’s server. But from an end user perspective very largely transparent. not even being noticeable oftentimes.
instances are just distinct servers really.
and some of them are purpose/politics specific.
I still have no clue how instances work but whatever I’m doing has been working fine for nearly a year
You have a user account “Got_Bent”, on an instance (you can think of this as a “server”), lemmy.world. That’s your home instance. Thus, you are @[email protected].
You can view communities on that instance. This post, in fact, is on a community on the lemmy.world instance, [email protected].
You can also view communities on any other other instances that lemmy.world is federated with (which is most of them). For example, [email protected]. By-and-large, you can use them the same way you can communities on your home instance.
Reddit is pretty similar, just that with Reddit, there’s only one “instance”, Reddit.
Instances might go down (so users with that instance as their home instance can’t log in and communities on that instance aren’t accessible. Some have certain rules about what users who use that instance as their home instance can do. Others have certain rules about what communities on their instance are allowed to do. For example, my home instance, lemmy.today, wants to avoid defederating with other instances (which means that people with that home instance can see all other content). Some instances, like beehaw.org, want to keep some content that might be objectionable to their users out, and will tend to defederate with other instances if they consider them to be problematic. Some instances allow hosting communities that have pornography (like lemmynsfw.com) and some do not (like sh.itjust.works). Same thing for communities dealing with religion or extreme political views, and so on.
In general, it’s helpful to have a home instance in the same rough part of the world as you, as it’ll make things more-responsive.
From an end user perspective there’s not that much to think about, thankfully.
Basically, it’s like having two websites that mirror each other’s content. You can sign up for Forum A and be able to read and write posts that users on Forum B can also see. People’s names are tagged with the name of the forum they are registered at, but otherwise everything you do and see happens on your own site of choice and there’s no difference where it comes from.
If Forum A doesn’t like Forum C, but Forum B doesn’t mind, Forum A can choose to disconnect from Forum C and hide their users and posts, while Forum B can still see both. It only gets tricky when someone from Forum B makes a post that people from both Forums A and C are in, but all of the posts from C users are invisible to A users.
It’s like how there’s loads of different email providers but they can all still email each other.
Just like Gmail can send mail to Outlook and any other @EmailProvider.com, lemmy.world can populate it’s feed/comments from lemm.ee and any other @LemmyInstance.com
there is also more diverse content than the crap that was on here six months ago.
when 50% of the frontpage is linux memes… you’re not going to gain the interest of most new users. now it seems to be down to about 20%
And cause of windows 11, those 20% are more relevant than ever.
Do I hear you say there’s not enough linux memes? Let’s fix that!
Anyway to make the all page more diverse? I feel like it’s just 10 communities that appear there and it’s basically broken down to tech, memes and politics. I’m on lemmy.world and ysint voyager. Every once in a while I see stuff from sh.itjust.works.
I know when I used to use kbin, you first had to let your device sync with other instances before they started populating onto your feed.
From my side
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
And then a few specific
Please don’t delete this list. I am checking it out later.
I knew about most of these, but had not stumbled upon casual conversation yet, thank you!
use Scaled sort
also just using the Subscribed feed is better than All, I spend a lot more time on Subscribed than on All
just look for communities on https://lemmyverse.net/communities
and subscribe to [email protected]
Didn’t even think to try scaled. It most definitely is showing more diverse posts. Downside is that it brings back a lot of non english speaking communities. Still a good option for exploring though!
Set your language options in your profile settings, should hide some of them, I think they’re still working on improving Lemmy’s default language settings
It’s also worth noting I’ve recently been seeing a lot of Linux posts from people who just switched, this was somewhat of a trend on Reddit as well but imo the Linux posting has gotten noticeably less toxic toward newer users and a lot more understanding of the “using Linux without wanting to spend hours configuring everything” perspective.
Side point that’s somewhat related to that: I wonder how the growth of other platforms FOSS platforms like Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix, etc. has impacted Linux project development. Not sure if it’s just me but it seems like it’s helped a lot with making Linux communities more accessible.
New user here…what? Easy to use? I’ve gotten to the point where I know how to do things, but, it’s still needlessly complicated. Yes there are many active communities, but there are also not very many of them. The ironic thing is, you need to be discussing mainstream topics on the non-mainstream platform. If I wanted to talk about my favorite band? Nobody is here to do that. And if I do find a niche community here, but it’s on another instance? NOW I know what to do. But when I first got here, I was ONLY subscribing to sublemmys on .world because it’s the only way I knew how.
For this platform to grow, we’re going to have to make it easy. Like, braindead easy.
Make it so you just click “join”. Make it so you’re logged in across ALL of Lemmy. Your posts may originate from Lemmy.World, but a non-techie wouldn’t know or care about any of that. I see Lemmy making a big deal about the seperate instances. Like it’s a selling point. It’s only a selling point for people smart enough to understand it.
But imagine Britney. Now Britney is a fictional person I just made up to represent your bottom of the barrel intelligence level of people these days. Britney is just some pretty valley girl. She doesn’t know what RSS is. She’s never heard of Linux, despite having an android phone. Britney is who you cater the site to. Because Britney is America. She wants sublemmys about “The Voice” and “The Masked Singer”. She wants a sublemmy for Taylor Swift. I think you’re starting to get the type of person I’m talking about.
You can still operate Lemmy almost exactly how it is now. Just make it so even if you know NONE of that stuff, you can still operate it freely. I will use MySpace as an example (for the brief 4 years it was the top social media). There was a default MySpace look. If all you did was sign up, and do nothing else, you still had a myspace account, and you could still customize it to an extent. It’s the basic profile everyone thinks of when you think of a myspace profile. The colors, the layout, the look. It was still usable. Then you had people using CSS and HTML and I think Javascript was available. Now suddenly you have 50 different profiles, all looking completely different. All functioning exactly the same, but you could go as deep or as shallow as you wanted.
THATS what this site needs. Don’t take away the stuff for the techie people. Let them go nuts. Let them do crazy things with this platform. But also, to increase userbase, make it as shallow as possible unless the user changes things. America wants shallow and not challenging. America doesn’t want to think. Britney just wants a place to type “I LOVE TAYLOR! I LOVE TAYLOR! I LOVE TAYLOR!” over and over. You can keep her happy, and keep yourselves happy. And I’m somewhere in the middle. It needs to be a platform that conforms to the user. Because if the user needs to conform to the platform, they will not join that platform.
I’m doing my part!
That’s nice. Hopefully thanks to this outcome. More niche hobbyist community’s will appear on lemmy
And hopefully less auth left tankiesI would like to see more posts and communities that bring more people together and not apart. Arts and crafts,Gaming,music,History,Exercise,Cooking,foraging Essentially the world’s the oyster. There’s a million hobbies out there I would hope there’s a good amount of Lemmy communities based upon those hobbiesLemmy hasn’t really gotten over the fragmentation of communities. There are multiple gaming subs, some have double digit users, some have thousands. That shit needs to be consolidated.
It’s happening.
[email protected] got locked to consolidate people to [email protected]
We discuss this in [email protected], if that’s something that interests you
Reddit is like that too though, games, gaming, videogames, gamers, pcgaming, etc.
True, but Lemmy doesn’t have the number of users needed to populate so many subs.
I mean, some of those are fragmented for a reason. Like, [email protected] is pretty decent, but beehaw.org has a low bar for defederating from other instances, and has defederated from lemmy.world, which is the largest Lemmy instance, so anyone using lemmy.world as their home instance can’t use that community.
Beehaw.org’s not gonna refederate due to the split – that was intentional. The people on [email protected] aren’t gonna shut down their community, because they can’t use [email protected]. Ditto for lemmy.world people on [email protected]; they can’t use [email protected].
I subscribe to and enjoy both communities.
What was the drama there?
I don’t know the specifics.
I would like to see more posts and communities that bring more people together and not apart. Arts and crafts,Gaming,music,History,Exercise,Cooking,foraging Essentially the world’s the oyster. There’s a million hobbies out there I would hope there’s a good amount of Lemmy communities based upon those hobbies
Be the change you want to see - share interesting posts, start communities if you see a niche, etc.
probably because reddit just broke the api clients again (including their own app).
Yes, I just noticed that on [email protected]
They are also using automation to review comments that might harm their advertising partners. After 15 year a joke about Boeing got my account suspended. I deleted my top comments and closed it after that. Fucking trash. Now I only got to the site if Google search takes me there and with ad block enabled. Spez can suck it.
This is fucking hilarious.
The entire time since that announcement last year dropped I have been using the modified Infinity for Reddit client that has my own API code in it.
I told myself if that stops working, whatever, I will not try to keep the app up to date and I will not switch apps. Lemmy works well enough for me now.
Up to this day the few times I have been accessing reddit through it I have no issues whatsoever. Amazing. Then again I never tried while they had issues with their official app, I suppose. Unless that is right now as I type this, because right now my app is still working fine.
As long as it doesn’t become Reddit 2.0.
It won’t. Some instances will get close, like Lemmy.world, but federation makes Lemmy fundamentally different.
It will if Lemmy becomes successful. It will have to stay tiny and very niche. Or else all communities have to deal with Eternal September if they start getting a lot of users. Then communities will gravitate towards the same lowest common denominator content and comments seen elsewhere.
Nah, that’s the whole point of federation. To keep it from becoming Reddit. The problem with Reddit isn’t that it’s big, it’s that it’s highly censored on a wide variety of topics that aren’t anywhere near offensive but simply counter to Western hegemony.
I’ve been here since the API changes at Reddit and the sub blackouts that followed, and I think it’s becoming more interesting all the time. Back in the early days there was no point in refreshing the /all feed more than once every 4 hours as it just wouldn’t have changed, now it’s much more than that. The number of posts with actual discussions are increasing, and other than a few blocked users, communities and one instance, I like the people I’m sharing space with.
I also greatly prefer the people on Lemmy and I hope that continues even as more and more redditors show up. Without a spez calling the shots, perhaps instances will tend to ban and defederate from far-right radicalization chambers instead of promoting them to the front page.
Pretty much all of the far-right instances are defederated from the major servers, except lemm.ee, which intentionally lets users block instances they don’t like.
I was word of mouthed here yesterday. As someone interested in self hosting and open source i might be the target audience sure, but I am here due to recent news and such
I don’t know man…kind of seems like reddit is the dark side, and spez is Darth Vader.
Welcome! We’re really nice here. Stay a while.
Welcome!
Still hang around both. But I’ve noticed I’ve had more to engage with on Lemmy lately, which is great.
Lemmy W. I hope more people join.
Why?
I kinda like how I often quickly run out of new interesting posts to comment on, but there is enough that I can have engaging conversations.
The more people that come the more it gets watered down. Not that I am gatekeeping, people can do as they like. Just I am happy right now.
Edit: Curious about the downvotes. Considering I explicitly said I’m not trying to gate keep and people can do as they please.
The hardware communities are not active enough. We need more people who are interested in niche topics
Find a smaller instance with similar interests or views, and scroll by local!
I wouldn’t find twice the number of people, so that a few niche communities get more activity.
[email protected] for instance is pretty quiet with how popular the sport is.
Also a few “real life” communities like [email protected] and [email protected] would benefit from more activity
indeed.
I just subbed to all three of those.
I find half the battle here is finding new places to sub to. I’ll browse all but always forget to sub to new ones I see.
I think for sports, it’s difficult as it seems most of us early adopters here are, well let’s say nerdier than the average, and as a rule tend to follow sport less.
Even me, I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch sport, aside from the olympics. But as an introvert that had a shitty home life I learnt quickly how to be a fake extrovert and thus had a lot of friends and so got surrounded by sport and stuff.
[email protected] and [email protected] might be useful to you
I find half the battle here is finding new places to sub to.
At the moment, none of Lemmy – and AFAIK, kbin/mbin/etc – or any of the clients provide a native way to search all of the Threadiverse. Some of that is kind of intrinsic to the distributed design, intended to help it scale, let instances be small if required. An instance doesn’t track all the activity on all the instances out there.
However, if you go to lemmyverse.net, they have a list of all of the communities across all of the instances on the Threadiverse. You can search and filter by various criteria.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
I really think that that should be the starting point for most users.
You can search for communities across all federated instances by clicking on “All” in the communities page: https://lemmy.ml/communities?listingType=All
That only shows you the communities that your particular instance knows about. But it’s not even all communities over all federated instances.
An instance only “knows” about a community on another instance once both (a) it has federated with the other instance and (b) someone has explicitly triggered a search for “!communityname@remoteinstancename” on an instance. Like, that community doesn’t get added to the list of known communities on federated instances just because someone has created it.
For example, take bbs.9tail.net, a small lemmy instance.
You can see that that it’s federated with lemmy.world on its instances page:
https://bbs.9tail.net/instances
And it’s only blocked a single instance, lemmygrad.ml.
But (as of this writing, and that could change if someone goes and starts triggering searches for stuff on there), it only has two pages of communities, with 63 (in a quick count) known. There are far more than 63 communities on lemmy.world alone, not to mention on all the other instances that bbs.9tail.net is federated with.
Lemmyverse.net, on the other hand, crawls all the instances it can find and builds a full index. Currently has over 27,000 communities. Once you get a “!community@instance” name from there, you can trigger a search for it on your home instance, and your home instance will learn about it. But until you or someone else does that, your home instance won’t know about that community.
Because almost all niche topic communities that i am interested in have very few people posting. The niche topics were also what made reddit interesting to me, i hardly ever browsed all there.
People have to be willing to give things a try, so I think it will definitely grow. I was never a Reddit user, I tried this on a whim, just to try and have conversations with different people. The one good thing is that there are many functional apps, and you will only see things you are interested in, and when you don’t, you down vote it.
But ultimately it’s still the same echo chamber that all social media is, but without ads.
All social media, and irl too, has biases. As we do ofc - e.g. we linux Linux, especially Arch btw:-P - but it seems to me that the Fediverse is fundamentally different, b/c of the nature of consent.
On Facebook, YouTube, Twitter/X, and Reddit now that it is acting more like the former, ThE aLgOrItHm makes choices for you, whereas here if you want to create an echo chamber, you have to put in a LOT of effort to ensure that you are never exposed to anything that you would disagree with.
For one thing, you would have to subscribe to communities first, and those would have to have enough content to hold your interest, which means a continual search for more of such communities. Scrolling through the All feed would absolutely be prohibited if you wanted to make an echo chamber for yourself.
Again, literally every social media platform has biases, but here those do not rise to the level of “echo chamber”, imho? I do concede that it is not entirely unlike one of those, and yet on the spectrum, aren’t we far less than most other common platforms?
I think it’s really easy to make an echo chamber here, make a community and only follow said community? I enjoy Lemmy, because look,we are having legitimate conversations, but some posts I have come across - it’s like no conversation, just putting down an opposite point of view.
Me personally, I do my best to try and avoid the political stuff, but even that is difficult at times.
But yes, subscribe to the communities and if the content is there, great, if not, make some or help promote it.
Okay so it is theoretically possible but is it plausible that this could be a common use-case?
Anyway, you said “it’s still the same echo chamber that all social media is” - and that statement goes far beyond using the Fediverse as an echo chamber to say that it is that way for everyone (further implication: all the time). i.e. the most command-language interpretation of your words would be that they meant that that tiny little theoretical possibility is what this place is, therefore I wanted to point out that there is so much more to consider, e.g. there are other ways to use it.
Ok… it’s not that serious. Enjoy your day.
Don’t downvote stuff just because you’re not interested in it! There’s no algorithm you’re training, you’re just being rude to people.
Downvotes should be for worthless content and people being dicks.
I run many small communities and it kills me when people from “all” downvote stuff.
If you don’t care about the topic, block the community or skip the posts
Correct. If you don’t like the content in the community, then why be there? Just join things that interest you, no need to be a 💩
I agree - no algorithm - but if someone is posting 💩 then it’s 💩 they get. Hey if I post 💩 I would fully expect that. Lol
so downvote most things on lemmy then?
Ironically your comment is the only one I’ve seen in this post that qualifies.
I would like to see a participation per capita breakdown. IOW who posts the most per person relative to the number of participants. Edit: by country and community.
I think we are now in a positive cycle:
- More and more useful comments are posted,
- Which means more people get interested,
- which attracts more and more people to the platform
- That increases the quality and quantity of posts/comments/etc.
- etc.
Hey, ya get what ya pay for. Pay a little money, get a little quality. Pay a LOT of money, get a LOT of quality.
Well, I didn’t get paid ANYTHING to be here, so you can imagine the quality of MY posts!
Hey, why did the poop walk into the poop?
To poop to the other poop! :D
See? Just zero quality…
It’s beans worthy quality content.
This is fun but partially incorrect; yes, more money is better quality, however zero money means infinite quality. Prove me wrong, exhibit A is “the other site”.
