lack of communities, not found on lemmy, but is active on reddit. even some mirrors are rarely have new posts. more pros than cons though.
The tankies are far and away the largest problem. It’s the number one reason why lemmy hasn’t grown. Even when I signed up years ago from the reddit exodus every post I saw was heavily cautioned with “it’s filled with tankies”. And now every mention of it is being scrubbed for that reason. The second problem is the smaller size but see reason 1 for that.
Third problem is the sign up process being so excruciating. I understand it’s to prevent bots but for every 2 bots it’s preventing it’s probably also preventing 1 actual user from signing up. I love this place despite the small size, because I can just sequester off all the tankies entirely on Connect, but if the creators don’t realize they’re actively standing in the way of growth by the actions they’re taking and step away from all their moderation actions to focus on administration and development instead the outlook doesn’t look too great.
The tankies
Smaller user base. It is both good and bad but the community for my city is dead (probably there were only like 8 of us on here).
Am old enough to know from experience that the early people on any platform are the computer geeks so expect the tech communities to thrive first - but as someone else said, music communities die, sports, arts, things that are pretty widely popular. Honestly happy with the slow and steady growth of the !cocktails@lemmy.world so if it’s an indicator, the general interest people are joining just not quickly but some must be sticking. I would guess at some point it will be perfect then too big but who knows?
Personally I also miss the nonsexual nudes threads like nakedprogress and normalnudes. Again that’s a lack of users issue, you need a lot of people willing to post, to have even a few willing to post nude.
I have trouble finding um what are they called here… Communities?.. for the subjects I’m interested in. When I search, all I find is old posts or unrelated posts.
That’s my biggest problem
FYI, your instance is shuttting down soon: https://lemm.ee/post/67603898
To find communities, !communitypromo@lemmy.ca is usually a good place
My first try at the Fediverse, I didn’t know how important it is to instance-hop so when mine was down a lot more often than it was up, I temporarily went back to Reddit.
Oh, brilliant. Thanks.
Duplicated fragmentation
Piefed solves that issue: https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few options
- https://piefed.social/ - flagship instance
- https://piefed.zip/ - lemmy.zip team
- https://piefed.ca/ - lemmy.ca team
- https://feddit.online/
Not enough people for even slightly niche communities. Wanna talk about smash brothers ? 732 people, only 2 posts in the last month.
This is why people still use reddit on the side.
This is exactly why I don’t use Reddit on the side. When I run out of content on Lemmy, there’s no choice but to do something productive instead. Had to go 100% cold turkey on Reddit to make that work though.
Exactly. I have a 1.5 hour daily time limit on Voyager, my Lemmy client, and I hit it every day, no problem. I do miss some of the niche subs but, every time I go back to ask a quick question, so many people are just so goddamned mean that I’m still very happy I left.
Oh yeah the community is 1000% better and healthier, I don’t miss Reddit at all. Plus I’m a child of the 70s, I grew up with limited content. It’s good for you.
Summer was not meant for being productive.
slightly niche
Sports is like the most mainstream of interests, and lemmy still doesn’t have a critical mass of sports discussion in general, much less specific sports/leagues, specific teams, specific games/matches, or specific players.
So I keep my reddit sports account.
I also keep an account for my local city subreddit, and one for my career field, because Lemmy doesn’t have those either.
I’m the main poster on !football@sopuli.xyz. Most popular post on the planet.
I guess people on Lemmy just don’t like sports.
I’ll subscribe, since it’s about the real kind of football (the one that’s played with your feet, and a ball. Not an egg, and your hands)
I’ve been trying to get into sports. Always enjoyed parricipating sports, never tried watching.
Welcome!
Hell even !music@lemmy.world (as far as I can tell, the biggest one on the platform) only has like 10k subs, like a dozen posts today, and basically all of the posts were people just advertising music. Zero discussion.
Even for things i would think are big, the communities here are still vanishingly small. I joined reddit in like 2014 and even back then it was more popular than Lemmy is now
I see good discussions on
Not really into music myself, I guess the issue might be that it’s too generic? Even on Reddit I don’t think /r/music was that busy, too many different genres
!television@lemmy.world only has 11 posts in the last 24 hrs and !movies@lemmy.world only has 7…
Not sure why you referenced the LW version when I mentioned the piefed.social ones, but
- 50 comments in this post: https://lemmy.world/post/31721709
- 12 in this one: https://lemmy.world/post/31849186?
- 28 here: https://lemmy.world/post/31826379
- 12 here: https://lemmy.world/post/31718582
Number of posts themselves isn’t really that relevant, comments are usually a more interesting metric.
As everyone has pointed out, people and content. Its good in some ways since not every post is drowned out with one thousand replies nobody will ever see, but at the same time, you’re not getting much of anything at all sometimes. Not even very niche ones either. Even groups that represent entire states has limited info or replies still. If it can grow to that size and see some more unique and local content more I think even that would be a much better place for it to be.
Yeah this is my issue with it. I can find all the arts, Linux, and political stuff just fine. Sports, music, and places communities are seriously lacking. They exist, but are a shell of what you’d hope they’d be. Engagement is so low, it’s not worth bothering. The sports and music communities being so small and sparse is a real bummer.
Yeah the North Carolina community has 383 subscribers and the last post was 9 days ago.
Surprisingly better than I would have expected for a community about a state.
Duplicate communities posting the same content over and over again.
Communities are tied to an instance. How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down? There is a slightly mad rush to migrate communities already.
Lemmy should have used usent style naming for communities.
the architecture of lemmy, both socially and technically, is not working as hoped and it’s likely it will suffer an effective death before it evolves sufficiently to enable distributed communities
the federated model is too lumpy and fragmented at the same time
I think there is a feature request to allow communities to subscribe to other communities so that their posts and comments are synced.
Great, so the duplication happens automatically! This is solving the wrong problem, IMHO…
Duplicate communities posting the same content over and over again.
Piefed solves that issue: https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few options
- https://piefed.social/ - flagship instance
- https://piefed.zip/ - lemmy.zip team
- https://piefed.ca/ - lemmy.ca team
- https://feddit.online/
How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down?
Active communities have moved elsewhere:
Inactive communities weren’t active in the first place.
Lemmy uses ActivityPub, so that can’t really be done in line with the spec.
The negatives of a social site combined with the negatives of an unpopular social site.
Same as with every other social media … the people.
I’m not your friend, buddy!
I’m not your buddy, guy!
Im not your guy, pal!
I’ll be your pal
lemmy.ml and its admins being the developers at the same time.
I don’t think that in itself if the problem. anyone can host an instance. The problem is lemmy.ml being the apparent default instance, advertising itself as an instance for privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, and not mentioning seemingly anywhere in the description/rules that only red flavour authoritarian dogma is allowed in political discussion.
“America bad, therefore former ‘communist’ russia and current ‘communist’ china good.”
Edit: it’s not featured as prominently as it used to be on join-lemmy.org so things may be improving. they should still mention in the description that western viewpoints on many issues are not allowed due to “rule 1”
I realized .ml was fucking insane and delusional when they glorified Stalin and refused to recognize the atrocities he committed.
No matter what your political stance is, as soon as you deny negative facts and exclusively push the “positives” it becomes a problem and may radicalize you (if that isn’t already the case).
What happened to nuanced moderate politics? It seems people unconditionally put the “left” or “right” label on themselves. And ironically these blind followers will have the audacity to call anyone close to the political center, or people who are honest with themselves, cowards.
Yeah, well the guy who runs it is a notorious tankie.
You either tow the pro stalinist line or you are punished
I was on .ml first after leaving reddit, because I didn’t know this was the case, until I called out straight up state propaganda and defended capitalism with social and ethical policies once. You can imagine how they responded to that.
Huh, just checked out the ranking on join-lemmy.org. The default setting is “random”, which might be why it’s not featured up top.
But what’s weird is that lemmy.world isn’t in the ranking at all.
If you sort by active, the top two are lemmynsfw.com, followed by lemmy.ml.
well tbf they are the two most active servers there though. not sure why .world isnt on there though. maybe removed temporarily so that newbies filter out to smaller instances
IIRC it is intentional that world isn’t there to help spread out users to other instances.
im glad i blocked that instance, i was accidentally engaging into too many .ml posts there were mirror image of how conservatives posts, just whining and chastising opinions.
They certainly mislead me. My first year or so was on lemmy.ml @PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@lemmy.ml
After repeated bans i decided to move to a more relaxed instance. i still interact with lemmy.ml because some of the bigger open source communities are there, but .ml admins now cannot block me from accessing the full lemmyverse, only their diminishing corner of it
Lemmy.ml needs to be defederated from all other instances. It’s literally an extremist instance of hate and bigotry.
Tankies on their way to hate private ownership and dictatorship of the bourgeoisie so much that they begin to love state ownership and dictatorship of the bureacracy
The lemmy.ml instance not being treated the same as the rest of the Triad in regards to defederation
Some highlights from the link:
"Don’t worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/30580167
“See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn’t count!!” ~ Davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/30673342
.ml admin, Nutomics continued transphobia https://lemmy.world/post/29222558
CW: Original transphobic Comment from Nutomic
“NK is actually good and anything counter to that is Western propaganda!” ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/31595035
General negative sentiment to other instances who haven’t “seen the way” yet ~davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/27426510
“If you don’t support Russia then you just don’t understand geopolitics” ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/27352415
And a long list of bans/censorship and allowing the proliferation of known propaganda and misinformation outlets clearly demonstrating use of their instance and recognition to force a political narrative
i block the whole instance, so i dont have to deal with any of those posts, but the single .ml accounts can still be problematic.
I am currently working on a report on vote manipulation and the early results are showing clear signs of the some most prolific .ml accounts participating in brigading and vote manipulation.
that was so pervasive on reddit, you either get banned, or ended up arguing more and then get banned.
I can’t count the number of times I made a comment way deep in a chain that conflicts with .ml dogma, and after the first downvote, there are suddenly 5 more within minutes
PieFed doesn’t have any of these issues
It does, since it still federates with lemmy.ml…
I think the parent comment is talking about piefed the software, compared to Lemmy the software, not the specific
piefed.social
instance they’re posting from.That would explain. But that comment is in answer to the top-level comment about the lemmy.ml instance.
The developers of the Lemmy software are the admins of the lemmy.ml instance and are problematic. The complaint is that the software itself can’t be separated from the priorities of the .ml instance.
Piefed doesn’t have the same issue, even if the flagship instance federates with .ml
Niche communities. Large spaces are built of small niche interest groups. The tooling around small spaces needs to be first class if we want the larger space to be healthy
same, certain things location based subs are not found on lemmy, and youtuber channel based discussions also not found here. plus things like like health, medical,etc. movies/entertainment has enough to satisfy people, but not to the extent as on reddit.
Issues that would be solved by time/gaining more users
- Not nearly enough people to cover all the niche interest communities that Reddit does. At Reddit you find an expert on almost any topic to help you with your problems and you’ll find information on pretty much anything. Lemmy isn’t there yet.
- Not nearly enough history. A lot of content is still good and informative after many years. Lemmy doesn’t have a library of old-but-still-relevant content to search.
Issues independent of user count
- Search sucks. Reddit’s search does too, but reddit is easily searchable via Google. Lemmy isn’t.
- Onboarding is difficult, because you have to choose an instance, which is hugely important, but a newcomer has no idea what makes/is a good community to join
Issues that get worse with more users (aka, the potentially deal-breaking issues)
- Lemmy scales terribly. Every larger instance needs to retain a copy of pretty much all other content out there, and each comment/like/delete/update/… needs to be propagated to every other major instance out there. Adding more instances thus increases complexity and cost instead of decreasing it. Running a major lemmy instance is already prohibitively expensive now, with just about 50k monthly active users. If Lemmy was to scale to Reddit numbers (1.1 billion monthly active users, roughly 22 000x the number of users), everything would just break down.
- Moderation work scales just as terribly. Not only does an admin need to make sure the communities on their instance are moderated, but they also need to moderate all other communities on all other instances.
- Related to the last point, there’s some legal issues as well if an admin doesn’t moderate all other instances. Since content is copied from other instances to your instance, illegal content (e.g. illegal pornography, copyrighted works, …) are also copied to your own server without your active participation. That makes it legally mandatory to moderate all other communities.
- Legal pitfalls in general. If lemmy becomes sizeable enough, all sorts of laws in regards to social media platforms will apply. That’s one thing if the social media platform is run by a huge corporation with a legal department, but it’s an entirely different story for a tiny group of non-profit idealists running the social media platform.
Onboarding is difficult, because you have to choose an instance, which is hugely important, but a newcomer has no idea what makes/is a good community to join
That’s honestly not very helpful.
- It’s not exactly at a place where someone joins lemmy. Most people likely join via downloading an app, and if they are lucky that app links them to join-lemmy.org, and more often than not, it doesn’t link them anywhere and just asks them to either select an instance from a dropdown without further information or it asks them to enter an instance name from memory.
- The advice is very questionable and not really helpful without context.
- Lemmy.world is too big
There are Lemmy-reasons for why that’s a problem, but in any other context, the biggest is the best. And even in regards to lemmy, bigger instances have a higher chance to remain, to be decently moderated and to be decently stable. Before joining Lemmy.world, I was on Feddit.de, and we all know how that ended. And even before they vanished without a warning or an explanation, Feddit.de servers were always outdated, slow and unreliable, and moderation was arbitrary at best and non-existent at worst.
Lemmy.world is stable and works just as expected.
- Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )
That’s a somewhat decent reasoning, though not immediately understandable as a new user. And not relevant anymore because Lemm.ee will shutdown within a week or so from now.
- sh.itjust.works names contains “shit”, which can deter users
Thanks, I’m adult enough to know whether I’m offended by the word “shit”.
lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric feddit.org, is German-centric, but technically English speaking too programming.dev is topic-centric blahaj is queer-focused infosec.pub is topic-centric aussie.zone is country-centric midwest.social is region-centric
None of that really matters thanks to federation.
dbzer0 federates hexbear
Like Lemm.ee, apart from the fact that it still exists
beehaw is way outdated
That’s some relevant reasoning.
sopuli.xyz (neutral name
See also:
discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
Sopuli.xyz isn’t any easier than discuss.tchnics.de, and jet discuss.tchnics.de was excluded for the name only.
While down in the comments it says
Sopuli doesn’t support gifs
Which is a really hard reason to avoid that instance, much more so than “has a difficult name”. That’s got much more practical implications.
But what’s left regardless is: Even that link that is supposed to make instance selection easier isn’t exactly easy to understand for a newcomer.
ut what’s left regardless is: Even that link that is supposed to make instance selection easier isn’t exactly easy to understand for a newcomer.
Newcomers are supposed to just read
" Lemmy has 47k monthly active users
https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency) https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU https://vger.app/settings/install if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions "
The rest was up for debate, feel free to copy paste your comment in that thread so that other people can see it as well