In recent weeks, I have posted an absolutely staggering amount of content on Lemmy.
My goal is simply to support the platform. I hate huge corporations.
Now I’m taking a break. I won’t post anything or I’ll post very little (I still feel a little guilty!! Who will post new content 😢?)
But I need to focus on improving my own life and relax.
However… I’m just curious.
Is the number of Lemmy users actually increasing, decreasing, or staying the same? Is that data even available?
Edit: I will still post stuff. I’ll just post a lot less!
Its the perfect size right now. Big enough to have a good variety of content and discussions while still small enough and niche to not be plagued by bots or targeted by corpos
Lemmy will never really grow beyond what it is now. Even if there was another influx of users, the retention rate is going to be low and the amount of active users is going to be even lower. It will forever remain a niche platform for 3 reasons:
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It’s made by and for people on the far left, tech/privacy nerds, and people who have been kicked out of Reddit. Because of this, the actual active users on here tend to fall into of these 3 groups, and they define Lemmy’s culture, and this includes the developers. Because of this, much of content on here revolve around niche topics and so there isn’t much here to appeal to the mainstream.
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It is fundamentally flawed by design. There are bunch of different communities on different instances about the same topic, and there is no way to consolidate them. Because of this, you have a bunch of dead communities that operate as independent nodes, instead of having centralized communities that are big and active. This issue would’ve been solved if Lemmy was designed to have each instance be a community in of itself (AskLemmy has its own instance and so does tech, gaming, and so on), but instead we have the current implementation.
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Lemmy has many of the problems that drive people away from Reddit. Sure, Lemmy isn’t a greedy corporation, which is nice, but it still has terminally online powermods with little to no accountability, a hostile and negative community, weird/extreme echo chambers that make most people cringe, and so on. If you sign up for Lemmy, you’re going to get the same problems but with a worse experience because it’s way smaller and has less content, so why would you come to Lemmy instead of making another Reddit account?
I just don’t see Lemmy every becoming mainstream or overtaking Reddit. It’s already been 6 years since the start of Lemmy’s development, and 2 years since the big influx of users from Reddit’s API fiasco, and it STILL has to rely on the same dozen or so people spamming the platform to keep it barely active. Lemmy won’t collapse, but it also won’t be more than what it is now, at least not any time soon.
It is fundamentally flawed by design. There are bunch of different communities on different instances about the same topic, and there is no way to consolidate them.
Piefed consolidated comments from all crossposts
Example : https://piefed.zip/post/406867?sort=new#post_replies
About #2: you have any suggestion on how you could achieve that and still be federated?
It seem like you would need a central “oficial” instance that defines who is the “real” AskLemmy, etc…
But yeah, I really want to hear if you have ideas on how achieve this and maintain it as a federation.
Piefed consolidated comments from all crossposts
Example : https://piefed.zip/post/406867?sort=new#post_replies
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https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
Currently trending down. And it’s all your fault for taking a break. 😔
I don’t even know what is fundamentally different between Lemmy and Piefed aside from Piefed’s web interface. AFAIK, they’re basically the same thing but Lemmy is primarily developed by a harmful douche. 🫤
Is there any reason beside that to choose one or the other?
PieFed, like Mbin, was written from the ground up, and in a totally different language than Lemmy.
But it interoperates with Lemmy, so yeah it’s very similar. Except the LARGE list of features that PieFed has that Lemmy lacks, and a handful of features that Lemmy still does better on.
Moreover, Lemmy will likely not ever catch up to PieFed. One reason being that certain features are incompatible with the authoritarian mindset - e.g. when a moderator removes your content, why should you as the poster be notified of that fact?
But also, PieFed is written in Python that is a heck of a lot easier to code in than Rust, so the fact that PieFed not only caught up to Lemmy but has already surpassed it in SO MANY ways is a strong indicator of its future success.
But aside from the tankies building in tankie philosophy right into the core of the Lemmy software, it depends on whether someone wants those additional features or not. Like polls, flairs (both user and post), categories of communities, which btw are user customizable and shareable, combining all comments across all cross-posts (helping to reverse the fragmentation effect inherent in federated platforms), and so much more.
I bet that if you tried out PieFed for a day, you’d fall in love with it. You can also do entirely different workflows with it, like trigger notifications to be sent to you that really helps you to stay on top of posts from communities that are very low-volume (and so have trouble making it into your Subscribed feed, like poetry rather than politics or worshipping Arch Linux), but those are likely to take more than a day to figure out - there’s definitely a learning curve. Also note that ymmv with regard to the different apps not (yet!) fully utilizing all the features offered by the PieFed back-end.
Moreover, Lemmy will likely not ever catch up to PieFed. One reason being that certain features are incompatible with the authoritarian mindset - e.g. when a moderator removes your content, why should you as the poster be notified of that fact?
So Piefed sends me a PM when actions have been taken against my account/content?
Don’t even need to acknowledge the flairs and polls; sign me the fuck up.
From what I’ve seen, no - the number of people actually regularly on here is going down, as I’m just seeing the same people more and more. When I use voyager you can see when your personal upvote/downvote score for every user on every one of their posts, and I’m mostly seeing people with a != 0 score, meaning I’ve interacted with their comments before. Means I’m not frequently seeing new people.
People like me who came here to escape the reddit bullshit of authoritarian power hungry mods and admins, insane censorship of anything right of “far left”, and reinforcements of echo chambers through moderation, quickly found out that, if anything, Lemmy is already worse in some regards than reddit.
honest question because personally I’m not seeing it or maybe I’m just blinded to it but how is it worse? From what I’ve seen the moderation hasn’t been anywhere near as heavy handed as on Reddit with the exception of nuking bots. Maybe because I’m just blocking certain instances that I’m not seeing it.
I think they give away their real complaint when they mentioned “anything to the right of far left” as if reddit only allows far left views.
Have you not been on reddit in the last 5 years? It’s a highly censored, tightly controlled, far left echo chamber.
Reddit is anything but far left. Only a conservative would think that
far left echo chamber
Here we go again with people who call themselves right-wingers making themselves the victims.
You want to explain how /r/Conservative bans anyone who has a different opinion? Or why /r/worldnews is controlled by AIPAC interests that support the genocide in Palestine through the terrorist IDF army. Or why /r/protectandserve is a heavily moderated far right-wing subreddit that supports police brutality?
It’s almost like people with fucked up views don’t like to get told they’re fucked up. Wow, what a revelation.
Thank you for taking the time to call out these specific examples of ops claim being a ridiculous farce
Previous thread on the same topic 4 days ago: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/post/238765
Also, OP, as a general request, could you please consider posting to
- !movies@piefed.social rather than !movies@lemmy.world
- !privacy@programming.dev rather than whatever other privacy community you are using
Those two communities have several active members posting, and are trying to gather enough activity to become sustainable. !movies@lemmy.world was barely active before you started posting it to it, and now provides people with https://lawsofux.com/choice-overload when they want to post about movies.
Feel also free to join !fedigrow@lemmy.zip where we discuss growing communities
I get the ick from piefed. it feels like “bluesky”.
I would not “fit in” on any piefed instance, so I have blocked any piefed instances.
when lemmy dies because everyone is on piefed I’ll just go back to what I was doing before Reddit.
WHAT!? I am genuinely curious why you think this?
For one thing PieFed was only centralized for a bit there at its start, whereas now there are already numerous piefed instances. It is true that piefed.social is still the #1 instance (much as lemmy.world had 80% of the Lemmy userbase at some point - but you still remain there even now so that does not seem to bother you?), but now piefed.blahaj.zone (not even 3 months old yet!!!), and piefed.world each have >100 active users, and piefed.ca, feddit.online, piefed.zip, quokk.au, piefed.au, etc. each have multiple tens of users.
More to the point, PieFed is FOSS. You could download the code and have your own personal instance spun up by the end of the day tomorrow.
I am guessing that you mean that the opinions of a single dev (Rimu) have an exagerated effect on the development of the code - which was definitely true in the past, but he also listens to feedback, apologies when he is wrong, and is amenable to going in other directions when the community wants that. The private voting debacle is one such example: I argued against it from the start, but he did it anyway, then abolished it and apologized to people when it received heavy criticism. You can read a really frank discussion about the topic where dbzer0 was considering whether to make a PieFed instance. Look especially at the comment starting with “I don’t trust Piefed at all - they’re far too eager to curate my experience, and they’ve reintroduced all of the reputation anti-features (plus more) that were part of what drove me away from Reddit and the absence of which is part of what I like about Lemmy and Mbin.”
TLDR: it was a new project back then, and things were different. Also you might be unaware of the history of the development of Lemmy too, and of lemmy.world. These things are common, and nowhere close to be unique to PieFed. BlueSky on the other hand is corporate and so WILL be enshittified, eventually. PieFed on the other hand is just a better Lemmy :-).
The fuck are you on about, Piefed is just a different software. We’re the same user base.
like ml is the same user base?
edit: or maybe hexbear?
Piefeds users don’t tend to be tankies or campists, and Piefed.social itself is defederated from Hexbear and Lemmygrad.
you missed my whole point.
lemmy instances cultivate their own user base. piefed is no different. so not as they said, “the same user base”.
Well currently Piefed is growing prominently from Lemmy users. Most of the audience are ‘ex-Lemmy’ users.
where else would they come from?
is piefed advertising on Reddit? maybe Facebook?
sarcasm btw, just thought I’d blatantly point it out because it seems you might need the help.
I couldn’t care less where users are coming from. Piefed users give me the ick because they try so damn hard to get users to join piefed. they are also some of the most blindly optimistic users I have ever interacted with. they remind me of “happy Christians”. you know the type; happy wife, 2.5 kids, live in a HOA white neighborhood, live-laugh-pray. it feels like a young cult right now and gives me a feeling that something just isn’t right.
I’ll stick with lemmy, thanks. I’ll take a flawed platform over one that insists it’s better.
Lol its just Lemmy with more features. And less funding if we are being honest. Rimu is an awesome Dev.
less funding plus more features isn’t selling it. just means it’s not maintainable long term.
besides my ick is more from the user base not the software. any if the piefed users I’ve ran across are trying to hard sell piefed. I don’t like car salesmen, so it just gives me the ick.
less funding plus more features isn’t selling it. just means it’s not maintainable long term.
All the other instances survive across the Fediverse on less funding.
besides my ick is more from the user base not the software. any if the piefed users I’ve ran across are trying to hard sell piefed. I don’t like car salesmen, so it just gives me the ick.
It’s quite advanced in comparison to Lemmy in many ways, regardless of what you think of how people try to sell it.
