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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It seems strange that these two curves so closely match eachother in shape.
When 6month active users drop that means 6 months ago a user stopped using the platform.
When monthly active users drop that means a month ago a user stopped using the platform.
So this would suggest that there is a correlation between user attrition 6 months ago and last month.I think part of the issue is new users not understanding or feeling comfortable with the fediverse (myself included a while ago). Even after searching for a bit and looking it up I can barely get how it works, but there’s really no guide with the common terms anywhere, how to get started, the difference between platforms and what they have in common etc. The benefits are the first thing you hear about, but they seem more like jargon terms than actually anything functional.
Reddit has better accessibility and user retainment, alongside with a library of old posts that are good for searching some niche stuff up.
For example, if I were to get a friend into lemmy, I’m not really sure how I can explain it to them, or where to start other than the copy paste “decentralized” “federated” stuff. It doesn’t really answer stuff like who moderates it, develops it, owns it, or what’s the difference between lemmy, piefed mbin, how do they interact with each other.
I believe that an introductory “oficial” post on the front of each platform in layman’s terms would be great to get new users to stay.Total servers are way down and so are users. But how come the number of comments has increased?
I don’t know the motives of others, but I’ve been spending increasingly less time on the internet and more time listening to podcasts & reading.
Lemmy attracts only certain types of people who like reading articles and replying long paragraphs arguing with each other or small details. In a time when literacy is falling, means there’s only a smaller and smaller pie left. Maybe we need a book club or pen pal system or a noobie hub to make it a friendlier environment. There’s a cloud of hostility in the air friends, don’t let it take you. Ape strong together.
I’ve been here a few years now and I can say Lemmy’s got issues. You can’t come on here and have a good time anymore when all it’s about is trump trump trump and Linux Linux Linux it gets old. I wanna escape from reality a bit sometimes and there’s few areas to subscribe to that gives any joy anymore.
This is quite concerning indeed.
We should start by being better at retaining what we already have.
Every person is valuable now.
What’s the likelyhood a white hat group scrubs reddit and makes all of its content available on an alternative fedi instance, preferably in a non western friendly jurisdiction?
…I am drifting away from Lemmy myself.
Political communities are echo chambers like Reddit, in a different color. Discussing tech or helping others with it is better, but still feels like talking in circles.
Wholesome subs like /c/SuperBowl are sublime, but I mostly lurk there.
Information hygiene is awful. Big subs upvote tabloids and Tweets to the sky, as long as they align with their beliefs. I just saw a discussion on a not-obviously AI generated photo with the community sentiment of “misinformation? Who cares. It’s a pro-lefty meme, so spread it.”
Anyway, all this scrolling and impulse commenting eats time, an I get the same feeling of shouting into a black hole that I get on corporate social media.
Much of this is my fault, though.
I have several niches I intend to make original posts for, but never do.
It’s somewhere in the giant pile of my IRL executive dysfunction :’(
I’m happy to promote it. I tried to get a few non-technical people to check it out. They felt it was too complicated. I’ve shared it with tech friends and coworkers who use Reddit. They’re aware of Lemmy to varying degrees, and are not enthused about moving to another platform despite hating Reddit.
I think it’s because despite Lemmy being a great alternative, it is more complicated and lacks the user base that users of other social media platforms have.
Bluesky is marginally more complicated than Twitter, but compared to Mastodon it is user friendly. Bluesky worked to create a dedicated, easy to use app that most users use.
Bluesky existed for a while before experiencing explosive growth. This occurred during moments of controversy with X. Bluesky capitalized on these moments, with champions on both platforms that led their followers to change, and there were mechanisms in place to bootstrap a user’s feed with the followers and topics that they had in the other place.
I think Lemmy needs to follow this model. There needs to be a Lemmy app that has a user experience as similar as possible with the Reddit app. It also needs champions that have main stream recognition (George Takei, Mark Hamill, etc.) that can be willing to make noise about switching from Reddit to Lemmy when the next controversy occurs. Repeat with more and more promotion by this evangelists, and Lemmy could grow.
too complicated
This is an Us problem. Download jerboa. Create an account on world. Done. Simple as Reddit. We make it complicated by explaining federation, options, different instances, etc. None of that matters to the masses.
We can make our decentralised network more popular by centralising it feels like an own goal…
If you’re suggesting to your friends you can pick whichever instance you want, but the point is you should choose for them and don’t even tell them that there is a choice
I mean, that is how I recommend linux distros to people :)
It depends what you want. If you want lots of people to join, you need to make it easy to join.
That doesn’t mean we need to get rid of decentralization. You could have a federated joining mechanism that assigned people randomly to any willing instance. Forcing the user to pick is the problem.
The trouble is a random joining procedure will absolutely launch users into unsuitable instances for their personality, political positions.
This. So much of this.
I see the same with any federated platform. People are excited to explain how complicated and clever and different services and integrations and… Shut the fuck up.
App, sign-up, post, like, subscribe. Done.
People will learn the rest if it is important enough to them to master
I followed the directions my instance of choice had posted, also use jerboa. It was a few steps, but the directions given were simple. It didn’t take me long at all to sign up.
I still don’t fully understand federation, but I knew even less when I began here a few years ago. I do like using jerboa
I could not find Jerboa in the App Store. I use Voyager. We need Lemmy.
This is such an underrated point. If we want people to join Lemmy, we need an app called Lemmy, on every platform. And if we want to steal users from Reddit, make the UI a clone of the reddit app but better. And allow people to join via the app, not some separate website.
Or maybe people just need to stop saying “Lemmy” and instead say “Voyager”, or “Boost for Lemmy” or whatever app they would suggest to use?
It’s like Linux, I don’t suggest people to install Linux because that’s not a thing, I suggest they install Bazzite or Fedora KDE, or whatever I think will suit them best
Most people would see “use Voyager or boost” to be akin to “use Reddit or Instagram”. Because why would there be more than one app to connect to the app.
It’s wrong, but any time you break from a standard assumption you require thinking. Once you require thinking, you lose anyone who isn’t otherwise motivated.
Yeah, we need defaults to get people signed up. When it’s too difficult for the average user, they’ll go where it’s easier.
too complicated
Nani? It’s 2026, getting an account on some lemmy and start posting is nearly two orders of magnitude easier than trying to sign up to an email account!
That people are brainrotten due to excessive Fortnite and Instagram is,
unfortunately, not our problem. At some point, the answer is “just get better users”.And answers like this are exactly why non techies don’t join and we get posts like this. You’re the problem
Singing up for a Google account is such a pain, they’ve gotten worse over time
The difference is people think they NEED a Google account, but not a Lemmy account
George Takei, Mark Hamill, …
If someone were to create a Markhamill@lemmy.world account, someone else can simply spin up a Markhamill@lemmings.world, and a Markhamill@Markhamilllemmy.world, and so on. Nobody is ever going to believe that any of those are actually Mark Hamill (especially since none are:-).
Doesn’t Lemmy have any sort of profile cross-identification like Mastodon has?
Absolutely none. Some users do things like list their own alts, though these can fall out of date, and are entirely optional.
Lemmy (and PieFed) allows you to migrate your blocklists and community subscriptions, and PieFed will even pull in all old posts from a community to help migrate it over, though there is still a disconnection point between the new PieFed account for people vs. their old Lemmy account, which are separated.
Some people, like Blaze, create alts all across the Threadiverse for unrelated reasons - primarily since Lemmy reports do not actually federate (though PieFed ones do, see report) - while other people specifically grab other people’s account names just to troll them (or at least some of those alts claim that much:-P), leading to all manner of confusion as to who is then trolling who.
I was mostly using alts to federate communities before Lemmy-federate got created.
Nowadays thanks to Piefed personal feeds I mostly only use this one’
But then how do you mod communities, specifically Lemmy ones, when those reports do not federate (though PieFed ones reportedly do)?
Those are not “Blaze” alts, I have specific alts for that, but they aren’t recognizable
I wonder if we can combine the related fediverse services (like piefed, which is getting more and more traction lately), mbin/kbin, and others.
Because according to this graph I dont exist for example. Im not a “lemmy” user, but I sure interact with a lot of lemmy.
There is also a number of instances that are chosing not to give their numbers anymore either because of AI scrappers getting really aggressive, or because they just dont want to be seen by the different tracking software out there.
Agreed. This seems like the lowest hanging fruit, the absolute minimal solution.
Given the emergence of Bluesky and the parallel rightwing echo chambers, the fediverse does not have the luxury of splittism IMO.
they are separate, but not huge
Part of the issue (I feel a large part ) is that the learning curve is too steep to get on Lemmy
Now I’m not saying it’s hard at all; but it’s significantly higher than simply “go to a main page and create a user name and password”. Lemmy needs a sign up page that just random signs you up to an active instance (per the instances permission) and automatically subscribes you to the 50 most active instances to just get you started up.
Making a getting started page that’s as idiot proof as any .com would probably go a long ways into upping our numbers here.
No search is THE deal breaker for lots.
i would even say searching and finding are about equally important.
finding means that you stumble upon good content by accident, which is i.e. with content recommendation algorithms. We need a system that shows you similar communities to those that you’re already subscribed to. I even made a post about this here.
Also we really need a better way to link to other posts and comments. I.e. it shouldn’t bring you to another site but open the link on your site/app/viewer.
This Lemmy frontend gives a content recommendation algorithm
https://quiblr.com/understanding_your_private_personalized_feed
it shouldn’t bring you to another site but open the link on your site
PieFed does that, FYI.
yeah i just checked, amazing!
piefed also has this amazingly good dialogue when you sign up:
Haha Lemmy has way too much Trump news IMO!
yeah :(
I even went as far as making a browser extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uglymug/
God, he is hideous.
There is a search though?
I would say Lemmy’s search is better than Reddit’s
Reddit search is nearly useless anyway.
Is this strictly Lemmy or does it include related platforms like PieFed and Mbin? Because it seems like there has been some shift to PieFed
I thought this too at first: I expected Piefed to have been the main cause. But, it turns out that Lemmy monthly active users have dropped by around 30k, while Piefed has risen to about 5k
Yeah Piefed is great. It’s a night and day difference in experience really
they are separate, but not huge
They are separate but they are federated, they can see lemmy’s content and viceversa.
Edit: addition: Their success benefits lemmy, this is the beauty of the fediverse, competition is not really competition, we all win.
I think it is kind of a mistake that Lemmy tries to replicate or replace Reddit. If you want your “niche” content (which I can never figure out what people mean but this but I digress), it requires the network effect of Reddit. Reddit still exists and both Lemmy instances and Reddit are websites. You can easily have two tabs or like both apps on your phone so I’m not sure why it has to be all or nothing.
I think a better use of Lemmy is to provide things that don’t work and don’t exist on Reddit. A good example is https://crazypeople.online/c/eternalplaylist where we post whatever we’re listening to and then sometimes comment on what other people are rocking at the time. I started https://crazypeople.online/c/streamingmovies just to post whatever bullshit I’m watching, maybe if you stream something from https://fmhy.net/ post it and we can all watch it.
I think the people using lemmy as a personal blog are more like what the platform excels at like https://lemmygrad.ml/c/spacedogschronicles and https://crazypeople.online/c/bitofarambler which became https://crazypeople.online/c/travel
Lastly I think the real win for Lemmy as a whole would be to figure out how to better interact with other fedi software. Maybe turning mastodon and pixelfed tags into communities and figuring out how to better integrate there would provide more and interesting content but in a scenario i find much easier to follow than subscribe to poster type twitter style microblogging.
TL;DR being Reddit 2 won’t ever happen until Lemmy has a reason to exist that isn’t being Reddit. Some people are building that and this is still early in the game.
I tell people about lemmy and send them links. Mostly people don’t care about anything. Abstract or remote things like “should a platform be owned by one asshole?” just doesn’t even enter their brain.
