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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me asf
Fediverse is changing. People used to put the text of images, like comics, in the body of the OP to be more accessible, but I haven’t seen that in ages. It’s something I noticed.
To the user mines!
I actually don’t mind a smaller community of more intelligent people. Too much riff raff and the quality degrades.
My two cents is that more users oughta establish new communities when they find the absence of one. Even if they don’t have the time to devote for moderating it, as people join the responsibilities can be allocated among the early adopters. Especially those with strong political and moral backgrounds (to mitigate abuses of power like those infamously cultivated over at Reddit).
I am curious why there is such a bigger difference between FediDB and Fedi Observer.
FediDB has Lemmy at 48 K MAU:
https://fedidb.com/ (Lemmy is the fourth entry on the platform list).
Possibly different instances on fedidb.
Interestingly enough, the stats for Piefed are nearly identical for both sources, the Lemmy delta is huge though.
Well for one thing, “accounts” is nearly a meaningless number. Even Reddit finally acknowledged that and is starting to abolish them. I personally have had several accounts (kbin.earth, startrek.website, discuss.online), and some people here have roughly one account per instances - which since Lemmy has not federated moderation reports was basically essential (see e.g. this post).
This btw messes with the stats even for “active” accounts, by inflating them so that multiple accounts get counted even though representing fewer people.
Though in contrast, someone who made an account once 3 years ago, then left and never returned… this means next to nothing, making the https://fedidb.com/ website not nearly as useful for that purpose (instead it would track mainly “older” instances, except even there it does not work for that purpose, since e.g. lemm.ee is of course missing).
Also, I notice that hexbear.net is missing too, and I recall that at least one point it was one of the largest instances. Note that it is missing from both websites though, leaving both of them imprecise, yet it would seem not equally so.
I’m here everyday, unfortunately I don’t have a great deal to post only comment.
I’m very busy with real life work to create content
Lemmy is more stable than what that graph makes it out. I’m not sure how easy it is to track fediverse since instances can pop up at any moment then grow or even the domain can change for an instance
I think posting quality content (or at least trying to be quality content hahaha) and good comments keep the users visiting back.
I just try to post one or two posts a day (to not spam things), comment a little bit, it seems it grows some communities on our instance. Some communities were dead, now at least some people post at these places.
if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall
I don’t consider this a given. E.g. your new users might all be dingleberries, or they might attract more bots. It also depends on your definition of quality. I quite like recognizing and conversing with regulars that I know from lemmy. This is something you lose with a larger userbase.
Here’s another way a high monthly active user count doesn’t necessarily lead to a quality platform. Suppose most users post once a month. Conversations will largely be dominated by posts from folks who have no real connection with each other. Any meaningful conversation is drowned in an ocean of seagulls going “have my updoot, kind sir” and “this!”. Higher user count, lower quality.
Aside from that, vanity metrics like bare user count typically don’t tell you whether you have a sustainable non-ad based platform. You don’t need users, you need users willing to donate for the operation (to instance admins) and maintenance (to the devs) of the platform. And I feel (0 data to back this up) like users are more likely to be donating users if they feel like they know the operators and devs personally.
I’m not saying the idea of getting more users is bad, I’m just saying its goodness is very far from established.
I was meaning to buy a bunch of sticker for all sort of cool stuff I support (lemmy/fedi being one of those things) and stick it around the city. Know its not much, but its fun! :)
can you please share the sticker design? :)
then others can use them too
let me cook. :)
will be posting it on here.
Isn’t this not much better than graffiti? I think advocating for the fediverse is great, but let’s not plaster unnecessary and potentially illegal posters/advertisements everywhere.
If you want to display an appreciation for the fediverse, perhaps there are T-shirts with the fediverse logo?
graffiti is cool though :(
found a lot of cool projects and organizations through stickers. i prefer it over a big bright televisions plastering the city trying to sell you unhealthy things.
I definitely do not find graffiti cool. It’s illegal and antisocial behavior. The art can be cool of course (although it very rarely is in my experience), but the illegal act is not.
The “Workers over billionaires” sticker advocating for workers right, sits on the post of a grocery cart corral. I smile everytime I see it. I’m thankful for who ever stuck it there, and even cooler, it’s not been scrubbed off after a full year.
You can cry rules/laws if you want, but where I am, the powers at large are not bound by any law, so why must I be bound to something so arbitrary? Why should we not advocate for ourselves in anyway possible?
Do you understand how hopeful it is to see graffiti/stickers in support of your values out in the wild? I was filled with hope when I first saw that sticker, for we are not alone
It feels really arrogant to call these acts antisocial behavior. It’s not
There’s also plenty of community boards around one could post a sticker to with a thumb tack, and it breaks no rule. It’s free for use.
It might be because I am in Denmark which has quite a functioning and lawful system and where I see the most graffiti is in public transport, like on trains and train stations. The transport company spends a lot of money cleaning that graffiti, making public transport more expensive for everyone else (hence antisocial behavior).
So I can understand where you are coming from but my perspective is just different.
the difference between graffiti and stickers is that typically, you can remove stickers quite easily, while graffiti is a more difficult-to-remove thing. so there’s not much damage done.
I mean, that’s still acknowledging that damage is being done, just less than actual graffiti. I’d rather not associate the fediverse with defacing public spaces with half-scraped off stickers.
Again, feel like a t-shirt or a cap is a much better option.
ehh, there’s spaces where adding stickers (that advocate for public-benefit, non-commercial stuff) is considered socially acceptable, such as in certain university buildings, pubs/bars, the back of your own laptop, …
Alright alright, definitely in those contexts there is no problem, of course.
The only way non tech users who comprises of 90% of the world will join Lemmy only if they have one instance which is baked in the app.
People don’t understand and don’t want to learn what instances are, how it works etc. Non tech users don’t give a shit. All they need is an app with username and password which hopefully the remember.
Once you get an app like that and the UI is reddit like , then 100% will move.
I don’t have the data to refute this but it just seems nuts to me.
Surely there are apps that allow signups from the app itself and suggest a default instance.
The other option is that anybody who recommends Lemmy, actually just recommends an instance. Make an account on examplelemmyserver.org and download the app XYZ should be the go-to recommendation. Not ”there are so many cool options”.
People over-react because it’s new to them, but it’s not really that complicated. It’s not like email never caught on because it’s federated.
90% dont care or want to learn tech but need fancy gadgets. Basically they need a screen and apps on a device which has been marketed successfully.
I think it’s really overstated how tech savvy you have to be. I don’t do anything highly technical here. I signed up to a server, searched for things I was interested in, and subscribed to communities with the stuff I liked. I vote, comment, and post. There are great apps on the mainstream app stores. Yes, more than one thing is inherently a bit more complicated than one thing. But, lest we forget, one is also the loneliest number.
We should really be telling people how easy this shit is.
There’s a reason nobody uses it because people like you are in every corner of Lemmy. Put it this way, if everybodys brain worked the same way then you’ll be a billionaire like Donald J trump or elon musk.
There’s a reason you’re slaving a 9-5 and trying to push Lemmy to get a purpose in life.
No doubt, if the goal was to be some rich, worthless scumfuck I’d be doing different things. I’d probably have to spend my days trying to suck Trump Coins out of some grifter’s dick. Or maybe I’d build a time machine to go back and make sure I popped out of a lady with a connection to an emerald mine. But… we all have our paths to walk. Mine is to toil endlessly in pursuit of purpose…
This conversation is actually a great example of complexity not mattering. You’re on an Australian server, I’m on a Canadian server. We’re replying to a post from a user on a third server to a community on a fourth server that people mistakenly think is American but is actually hosted in Germany. None of that matters because it just works. It’s indistinguishable from posts and comments – including you trying blame the whole thing on me – at the same place. You can make it seem very complicated but all anyone has to do is type words in the little box and press the button to post it.
The way too many people think about the Fediverse right now is like thinking that you need to know every minor detail about how a call could make it from a cell phone in Australia to a cell phone in Canada. You don’t need to know that to make a call. You don’t need to know all the minutia about ActivityPub or federation to use the fediverse.
How do you know what they do?
Is there anything wrong with trying to promote Lemmy to begin with?
Mate prolly all 9-5 slaves here. I have studied 9-5 aka middle and poor class behaviour for 15-20 years and I know when they start pushing something because they need a purpose in life like they have achieved something. Nothing wrong with that , every poor and middle class should have a purpose to exist.
Once you get an app like that and the UI is reddit like , then 100% will move.
I agree completely, and I think this was shown definitively shown by Mastodon/Bluesky during the Twitter exodus.
While there is definitely something to be said for gradually assimilating new users into the customs of the network (I really like that Mastodon on the whole is a very respectful and inclusive space, with care paid to content warnings, alt text etc), on balance I would much rather have everyone on the fediverse - even if they brought all their Twitter-isms and Reddit-isms with them - but with strong moderation tools and protective spaces for those who want it. Then, we can win people over to those customs separately.
If you want to play Minecraft with friends, you need to find a server. Still the most popular game in the world.
Stfu nerd
Gamers are a bit more tech savvy than average people tho
This. Normal people can barely remember a domain name unless it’s also the name of the brand. So this platform is filtering for tech enthusiasts which leaves us with the same two-dimensional profile as every other platform.
Many of the same apps that used to work on Reddit now work here on Lemmy, and some of the Lemmy apps now also work with PieFed.
Agreed on the sign-up but I think that too was mainly taken care of, back when lemmy.world was the default and over on Reddit people were sent direct links to the likes of e.g. feddit.org and discuss.online.
But there’s barely any content here, especially outside of leftist politics and GNU/Linux, and the people are quite toxic. The issues may be insurmountable though I am placing my hopes into PieFed, getting away from the tankie issue and also offering significantly better moderation tools.
But there’s barely any content here, especially outside of leftist politics and GNU/Linux
We used to have a thriving Star Trek instance before that one guy made that one post
Which post?
A cisgender repost farmer made a post accusing the admins of being transphobic with absolutely zero evidence, and got the other repost farmers to move with him to a community on lemmy.world. He and his friends are now some of Lemmy’s biggest power mods, with influence across dozens of popular communities. The Star Trek instance had discussion forums, lore, news, and casual conversation about Trek in addition to memes. Now people only use the .world and dbzero meme communities.
Sounds like Section 31 to me.
Is that the original instance? https://startrek.website/
I think we have to think more about network effects and be willing to move away further from copying Reddit. Otherwise we end up with the same powermod problems. Reddit has used Subreddits to split a massive crowd. We don’t have such a big crowd so there could be better ways to organise our posts.
Tbf, that’s not why the only or even I would guess primarily the reason why the startrek.website instance is used less. That was my first instance hop after Kbin.Earth died off (with that whole Ernst fiasco), and I abandonded it due to the very MANY technical glitches - like I remember making a post a couple times that did not make its way over to Lemmy.World for like a week, by which time of course nobody saw it, since even though it was “new” (to them) the time had gotten back-dated to its original, so it looked and acted like it had simply been passed over and ignored by the community previously, at which point it simply continued to be so forever.
Also seveal times I would write a comment but if I spent >1 minute doing so, then it would not let me post - though neither would it deny my post either, instead simply spinning forever trying but never succeeded, my only recourse being to copy and paste it into another window to try again, and hope to avoid duplicates. Sometimes even voting was problematic, requiring MANY presses and also waiting between each to see if it “took” because of the network issues.
Please note that most non-Lemmy.World instances were having those kinds of problems at the time, one of the multiple reasons being due to how Lemmy would send each individual item on its own (a vote, a comment, a post) rather than bundled together in packets of information, causing especially instances that are geographically far from Lemmy.World to struggle severely and be behind for weeks to MONTHS (aussie.zone was hit particularly hard). So I do not blame the instance admins for that, although the problem was more severe on STW, so I created what at first was an alt to use during the the times that STW was most problematic, but since Discuss.Online had such fantastic uptime, just started using it permanently.
Also I don’t know if you are talking about Stamets or FlyingSquid or whoever, but I will note that the Tenforward community is now even more fragmented before, with a version now on Piefed.world (it is the #2 community located there), where ironically they decided NOT to put a link back to tenforward@lemmy.world (e.g. as a Sister community), plus they still call the new one by the same name, making it at least LOOK like they want it to become the new default?
Anyway PieFed has the ability to fight against such fragmentation effects by joining together all related communities into a single conjoined multi-community (“Topics” are made by admins and the “Feed” versions are user-customizeable and shareable!), see e.g. https://piefed.social/topic/tv-movies/star-trek that puts Risa, Tenforward, Daystrom Institute, and Star Trek all together.
Startrek.website was never primarily local traffic. It used to be mostly lemmy.world users posting Star Trek content to the Star Trek communities, a lot like dullsters.net, but less extreme.
The off-instance users mostly stopped posting there and moved to Ten Forward, because of that clique’s post.
Maybe. I did not even know about that post at the time - and I still am not sure that I do even now - and to similar posts people seemed to have mostly responded that they too were not aware of things. People might be a lot lazier than you are giving them credit for!:-P e.g. people coming over from Reddit simply hop onto lemmy.world without giving a single moment’s thought to any considerations like spreading things out across the Threadiverse - which for someone’s first instance choice I do not criticize (at least, back then it was more understandable), since they can best learn about the Threadiverse by having joined it, and then make a different decision later on.
Nowadays, lemmy.world makes up roughly a third of the Threadiverse (14.2k / (35.2k + 2K PieFed + 0.7k Mbin). Over on r/RedditAlternatives, people like Blaze primarily direct new users towards feddit.org (iirc) or discuss.online (for people in the USA), or more recently PieFed (both are generalist instances and avoid issues with having the name “Lemmy” as part of it). Setting aside any issues with Lemmy.World’s moderation practices (which personally I think are mostly overblown… though perhaps not entirely), it is just good practice to help spread people out a bit.
Though back then, Lemmy.World made up a whopping ~80% of the Threadiverse. So having “mostly lemmy.world users” posting was the experience shared by pretty much every community across the entire Threadiverse (back then, mainly just called Lemmy, as first Kbin and then Mbin were always barely noticeable blips with <1k active users except the very first month it started).
I do not doubt that there was additional specific drama there - several of those mods are kinda known for being drama lamas:-P - just adding this background context to it all.
I’m doing my part. I can’t stop making communities and having debates.
I think I interact with Lemmy less now because I noticed that I grew tired of reading useless comments and to find and read articles I want to read I have RSS which doesn’t bombard me with stuff I don’t care about.
The presence of comments leads me to only want to read the comments and I hate that.
i remember hearing about when the empire State building was first built, the would light up some of the offices to make it look busy, to attract other people.
No
