I joined during the first Reddit exodus, and it seemed like for ages the amount of Lemmy content was generally increasing (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but overall increasing). Now it seems that when I sort by New, I get through everything since my last visit much more quickly than I used to. Is that my imagination, or is the activity declining?
When I run out of stuff to see on Lemmy, I touch grass. Simple as.
I feel way more in control of my online experience when endless scrolling isn’t possible.
Ah the twice yearly post asking if Lemmy is dying.
Ah the twice yearly post
I’ve definately noticed it too. I’ve tried to look for stats, and most seem to indicate that there is plenty of activity, but I dont really see it. At this point, I can scroll through the day’s all feed in like 20 minutes, nonetheless my subscribed feed. I kind-of wonder if theres one or two instances with a lot of bot activity effectively inflating the numbers.
Edit: Is there a way to see monthly posts by instance, or compare percentage of posts? That would be an easy way to prove or disprove my bots theory.
Edit 2: fediverse.observer shows monthly (Or rather, total by month) local posts by instance but not federated, and their overall stats are warped by a few bot instances that you can’t filter out. That said, for local posts on a few of the big instances, the rate seems stable. That said, smaller instances are shutting down so I don’t know if that has an impact on the overall posting rate.
That was what got me making this post.
I’m actually coming back to Lemmy. I left reddit, but then went back to it with limited participation. And now it’s truly a cesspool. Lemmy may not be a perfect replacement, but it feels better. I should have never left.
Sorry to hear your experience was so bad, but welcome back.
The situation with bots and trolls on Reddit is horrific. Do you remember that time a few years back when Russia disconnected their whole country from the Internet? That day there was a dramatic decrease in assholes and trolls. Like, night and day, it was unmistakeable and widely commented on.
So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.
I’m definitely bored of it.
Why?
Barely any content, endless reposts, and the same content as found on other popular forums
The stats say the userbase is increasing, but it also feels like there’s been a lot less content being posted recently.
Perhaps the closure of Lemm.ee took away some of the quantity and variety of posts and communities?
I think Lemmy needs a better way to federate communities, so if you sub to say a “Star Trek” community on 3 instances, you don’t get the same post 3 times, but instead it’s somehow linked and content federates; this would be at the community and not instance level, so there’s more community self-governance, and communities can migrate instances without so much intervention from instance admins. I think that will really help growth and decentralization.
What about that issue do you think is causing less activity? Just people not wanting to engage as much because of the redundancy?
Yea, if people get too annoyed seeing the same story in 4 communities, I think eventually they consolidate down to one, and the fracturing reduces engagement across ALL the communities; a couple become ghost towns, etc. It’s a different sense of engagement to see 4 threads with 2-4 comments instead of seeing 1 with 20.
I’m trying to relate that to the experience back on Reddit, where the same thing happened. Didn’t seem to hinder growth. But often people would abandon the smaller versions of the communities for the larger ones.
I don’t know how to check for the whole lemmy but seems it’s growing a bit but the MAU dropped a bit probably because of august: https://fedidb.com/servers/lemmy.world
But the fediverse in general doesn’t grow too much except when a scandal happens.
Watch out, the statistics might not say what you think they do.
“Total users” is a meaningless metric. All it showes is how many users aren’t using lemmy anymore.
“Monthly active users” is the only meaningful metric, and it’s fluctuating and currently going down.
“Activity growth” doesn’t actually show the number of new activities per month, but the total count of activities. So with constant activity you’d expect linear “activity growth” and with growing activity you’d see the line curling upward. It is currently mostly linear but slightly declining.
So these statistics show a slow decline, not an increase.
But in a way you can be happy that it doesn’t grow a lot. With the base architecture of ActivityPub (every instance contains a copy of everything, all content needs to be propagated to all instances, all content needs to be duplicate-moderated by all instances’ admins) it is absolutely not designed to handle large amount of users.
If only a tenth of a percent of Reddit users were to switch over to Lemmy, everything would grind to a halt and most instances would have to close down because running them would become to expensive for a non-profit project.
Yeah one has to be careful with statistics and I couldn’t find the whole Lemmy in one place so it’s also not representative of the whole Lemmy.
I thought ActivityPub did scale well and was ATProto (Bluesky) which had a lot more issues. I mean I can comment on Peertube using my Mastodon account meaning the whole Fediverse is properly connected and we are 1M MAU so I would say it already scaled good.
Here’s all of fediverse: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=1000
Also remember, though it says ‘daily’ in the title, that only refers to that the stats are grouped by day. They are still total numbers (e.g. total number of posts that are available on that day, not number of new posts created that day).
Lemmy has the big issue that each instance needs to cache the whole content of each community any user of that instance ever subscribed to. Since Reddit-style platforms only make sense if there are huge communities that means that the biggest communities have most of the traffic while being subscribed to by most instances. That means that most instances have copies of most content.
Same goes with moderation. Since every instance holds a copy of the content, each instance’s operator is liable for illegal content stored on their server, and most instance operators also want their moderation guidelines enforced across the whole instance, even for content coming from other instances, so each instance needs to moderate all content. Content moderation on one instance is not propagated to other instances (unless the moderation happens on the host instance of the community), so you end up with moderators of dozens of instances each having to individually e.g. delete the same post.
This is already such a strain that e.g. Lemmy.ee got shut down because it was just so much work and money doing all of that, and that’s with a miniscule amount of ~40k monthly active users across all of Lemmy. Compare that to the 1.2 billion monthly active users on Reddit. If we only got a tenth of a percent of all Reddit users over to Lemmy, the whole system would come crashing down.
Aah I didn’t knew this issue from Lemmy, really interesting. Creating a decentralized platform raises many new challenges that are hard to solve!
Now I get why piefed approaches moderation in a different manner and tries to be more resource friendly.
Thanks for the info! Really interesting stuff :)
That link is just hanging for me.
