It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.

Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren’t attracted enough to become regular visitors.

Curious to see at which number we’ll stabilize.

Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)

Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

  • @WoodenBleachers
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    1689 months ago

    Maybe it’s because the content here just isn’t as vast. I’m nkt going back to reddit for awhile, but there’s so little to see on lemmy to me. Despite numerous subscriptions, I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same. Sometimes this place feels like a hive-mind. Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale

    • Hot Saucerman
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      1279 months ago

      I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same.

      That’s funny because the meme subs still far outpace posting from politics subs for me, and I mostly see memes.

      In fact, a few weeks ago, there were lots of complaints in meme comments of how the only thing they saw on the site was memes.

      • @TwilightVulpine
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        239 months ago

        Memes may be thriving but niche interest communities can’t even get off the ground.

        • Hot Saucerman
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          9 months ago

          So just like reddit 14 years ago when I first left Digg for greener pastures. When I joined, it was years before my local city subreddit sprang to life, and for years, it had around 1000 active accounts and only now has over 10k accounts.

          Man, if the people on reddit back in the day had sat around complaining about lack of content like this, the site would have died. Instead they started making fucking content.

          It takes time for communities to grow, and it feels like a lot of the folks who left reddit only ever knew reddit as a ready-made-community filled with thousands of people already. As in, they were latecomers and missed all the slow growth.

          • @TwilightVulpine
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            19 months ago

            Well, considering we are in a post about the userbase shrinking maybe the situation is not quite the same.

            I also don’t have that kind of time and energy to get a whole community running just for the kicks anymore, and I definitely do not appreciate to have the deficiencies of this place thrown on my face as if that’s my responsibility. It’s not exactly welcoming or motivating.

            • Hot Saucerman
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              9 months ago

              Well, considering we are in a post about the userbase shrinking maybe the situation is not quite the same.

              Reddit admins literally ran bot accounts to fill content on reddit and make it seem more active at first. The users who came from Digg had similar complaints, and reddit userbase fluctuated at lot in the first few years. It’s actually exactly the same (minus the admins using bots to make it seem more active).

              I also don’t have that kind of time and energy to get a whole community running just for the kicks anymore

              No one is asking you, specifically, to do it.

              • Malta Soron
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                39 months ago

                Maybe we should ask spez to come over and help generate engagement :P

              • @TwilightVulpine
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                19 months ago

                Eh, remains to be seen. The pacing of the internet today is very different.

                No one is asking you, specifically, to do it.

                Then don’t get on my case for not liking the lack of content, geez!

                • Hot Saucerman
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                  9 months ago

                  Sorry, I just think it’s a dumb, entitled complaint. I’m not asking you to do anything other than stop whinging.

                  • @TwilightVulpine
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                    19 months ago

                    Redditor-level rudeness sure showed up quickly though

      • @WoodenBleachers
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        139 months ago

        Maybe I need to be on ml then. I feel like world is just full of the same.

        • Hot Saucerman
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          9 months ago

          I quite like beehaw and their communities, and yeah, you’re missing out on those if you’re on world, from what I understand. (Fairly sure they’re still defederated.)

          I personally like lemmy.ml, but I know it’s not for everyone, and the admins would prefer to keep it a smaller instance, I think. I’m only here because there weren’t as many federated servers three years ago when I made an account.

          You also might check out [email protected], they flood my feed with good memes.

        • atocci
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          Kbin is a nice alternative. Content cycles out of Hot a lot faster on here.

          You also get microblogging support on here, so you have access to the Mastodon side of the fediverse as well without having to copy and paste links.

        • pgetsos
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          59 months ago

          Try out Kbin, as well. Personally I have none of the usual Lemmy complaints

          • @[email protected]
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            49 months ago

            Are there any decent iOS apps for kbin yet? I almost never browse these sites on desktop (hence why I have completely left Reddit since Apollo died).

            Currently using Memmy on iOS which is great.

            • jwr1
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              59 months ago

              Kbin doesn’t have an api yet, so apps aren’t supported (there are some in the works though for when the api goes public). In the meantime, you can install the pwa through a browser.

            • pgetsos
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              29 months ago

              The PWA is very decent for a basic browsing experience. There are a few in the works, most notable being Artemis which is now in public beta I think. It uses the new Kbin API which is also in beta.

              For now, the app can only be used with the artemis.camp instance, but soon Kbin.social and the rest Kbin instances will use the API and be usable with the app as well. It is inspired by Apollo btw

      • @[email protected]
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        79 months ago

        Even the memes are pretty stale, definitely not dank. Many of these memes are reposts of stuff I saw years ago on Reddit.

    • Kichae
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      429 months ago

      I see very few memes and far too much political content

      Where are you even looking? My timeline is flooded with memes all the damn time. They’re practically drowning out any posts of value at this point.

      • oce 🐆
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        29 months ago

        You should block the meme communities if you dislike it, keep the communities with contributions you like.

    • deweydecibel
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      9 months ago

      Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale

      Been saying this for months. No one seems to understand what made reddit grow, and it is ironically very much like /r/place when you get down to it:

      Reddit was a singular canvas that all users worked on together. Posts, comments, and voting shaped the site as a whole. The front page of Reddit was the result of it’s userbase, and it’s userbase was diverse. Because Reddit forced all users, of all backgrounds and ideologies, to exist together in the same space, and work on the same canvas, it created something living and varied.

      You may not have ever gotten along with people from a certain subreddit in th comments, but I promise, the two of you worked together at one point to get a post to the front page or a comment to the top, and you didn’t even know it. Thos little moments where diametrically opposed people shared a liking of something by how they voted. On the surface, everyone bickered. Under the hood, they were all unknowingly agreeing and cooperating all the time, and that was what powered reddit’s engine: it’s diverse userbase’s activity.

      That’s why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.

      • ShittyKopper [they/them]
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        69 months ago

        That’s why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.

        The phrasing here kinda implies this is a bad thing and everyone should be focused on 🚀 constant growth 🚀.

        Tildes in particular has an extreme focus on quality over quantity and has some really interesting ideas on moderation (that haven’t been implemented due to lack of time on Deimos’ part). The site is still considered an alpha after all this time.

    • @buzziebee
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      129 months ago

      I think the default activity sort is part of the problem. Sorting by activity means everyone is just looking at and engaging with the same topics for 24 hours or so. There needs to be some “hot” category or something so that new stuff gets churned through a bit more regularly. New is too new, top is even more stale, activity causes things with high activity to stay high. It makes for very samey content.

        • @[email protected]
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          149 months ago

          In my experience, Active and Hot have been opposite extremes of freshness. Active shows posts that are more than a day old, and Hot shows posts that have no comments and are just a couple of minutes old.

          Not to say it’s all bad. Your post was just a couple of scrolls down on my feed.

        • D2L
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          89 months ago

          Have they finally fixed this to not show old posts out of nowhere in the “Hot” feed? I’ve been avoiding this sorting because of that and hadn’t read anything about it being corrected… yet.

          • @[email protected]OP
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            69 months ago

            I don’t remember if it was fixed in 18.3 or 18.4, but it has been for a while.

            Worth giving it a try, even if your instance is still 18.3

    • @[email protected]
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      I see very few memes and far too much political content.

      This is what is turning me off from lemmy, worst of it I see a lot of shitty political memes, it wasn’t this bad at the beginning of the reddit exodus.

      And then there isn’t seem to be a neutral instance, I was in world and then they banned the piracy community, I moved to lemm.ee and all I see is stupid hexbear posts, I appreciate that they don’t defederate willy nilly but Lemmy urgently needs the block instance feature from user level.

      • @lagomorphlecture
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        29 months ago

        In the meantime there are some apps that “block” instances. Connect has it, but it doesn’t fully block the instance, more like it shows up in the feed with a content warning that the message is from a blocked instance and you can choose to view it if you want. I also do think lemm.ee will defederate from hexbear pretty soon. The admin has had personally horrendous experiences with their users and that meta thread about it was a dumpster fire of hexbear users making unrelated political comments and blocking the actual instance users from having a discussion. It got locked at almost 2000 comments so I’m sure he’s still digging through that toxic waste to make his decision.

    • @ChocoboRocket
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      29 months ago

      Id love more science, technology, and history posts - but ones that are informative and not exclusively about how global warming will end us all

      I’m still not very learned on the fediverse yet, but lemmy is definitely taking up nearly all of my reddit time. Aside from local stuff anything of interest on Reddit (which I check on via browser without signing in) I’ve seen here first

      The less reddit I visit the easier it is to see/feel the bot content they have. I’d rather have 5 real Lemmy comments than the forum sliding formula that makes up 95% of reddit comments.

    • Dandroid
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      19 months ago

      Every time I peek into reddit, it’s just a dumpster fire of toxic comments screaming at each other with strawman arguments and reeing that videos are fake. It’s exhausting.

    • @TBi
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      19 months ago

      Every week I see more engagement. It’s great to see the communities grow and to be part of them.