I don’t know if others are experiencing a similar situation. My all feed is very sparse with engagement. If I sort top six hours or by top 12 most posts have between 5-10 comments. I feel like there was more in the past? Is engagement dropping off? I’m on lemmy.world as my instance.
Wouldn’t surprise me. If you’re not into ragebait, tankieism, linux smugness, the painful minutiae of corporations fucking everyone, US bullshit, or all of the above… this place is really pretty slow.
I only really browse “all” on this site and it does seem like fresh content trickles in at a fairly slow rate. At least part of that is that it needs to squeeze by what is now pages and pages of blocked communities just trying to avoid the doomposting.
Have you ever considered lowering the amount of doom in the world to post about?
Ooooh! No, my bad, I’ll have that fixed in a jiff now that you’ve pointed it out. Thanks!
It’s so obvious!
When it warms up I tend to spend less time on my devices. This is the case where I live and will be for the next 3-4 months.
Probably a good suggestion it’s time to go out and touch some grass. 🥲
Damn, missed my toxic comment opportunity 🙂↔️
Here in the Southwest US, when it warms up I spend more time on my devices 🫠
I’d agree. Also Lemmy is too much just dropping news articles and discussing world politics for my taste. Maybe being just another comment feed underneath a news article isn’t that engaging and interesting. I’d like to see more about hobbies and meaningful, sustainable talk about specific topics.
The niche communities are missing. It’s a bit of a wasteland. What is holding people from migrating over I wonder?
Lemmy has way, way too much dross. Any user that pops in to check it out finds a billion foreign language posts, a billion weirdo anime shitposts and a billion Linux posts. It’s a massive turnoff. I spent 6 months blocking communities that had zero interest to me and I’m left with news and Star Trek posts. I don’t even like Star Trek but it’s the only OC in this place.
I love star trek but 10 forward generates so much content that it becomes noise on the main feed. I’m also guilty of not contributing much though.
You could just follow the communities you are actually interested in.
“All” was shit on reddit so it’s going to be shit on any reddit replacement.
That’s precisely their point: once you filter out all of the noise, you are left with very, very, little substance. And the communities with any substance are active at a ratio that makes them flood your feed with ONLY those one or two topics.
IIRC: Devs added the new filter, “Scaled” for this exact reason. Gives newer and smaller communities a chance in the sun.
Nice tip! I didn’t know about that. Thanks.
My subscribed list has, like, 4 posts a day. I browse all in a hope to see new communities I might like.
I’ve found more communities that I like by browsing “Hot” and near the end of “top 6 hours” for what it’s worth.
It would be interesting to compare Lemmy to the community on Tildes. What do you think of Tildes?
I don’t know Tildes. Never been there.
I think it’s a combination of several factors. First of all there is the network effect. A social media platform gets interesting once there are enough people and we’re just about 50.000 active users. Which isn’t much compared to other forums, discord servers and fanbases of single individuals (streamers, …)
Next there needs to be some motivation to join or some attention. We had that for a moment when the Reddit API thing happened. But I don’t see that as of now. We need interesting content. And a nice and welcoming community. Or something that motivates people to come here.
And there is the technical issues. We’ve had lots of them. Federation broke for some time. There are still some bugs and user interface issues. Moderation tools still are an issue. Onboarding (choosing an instance, finding a good app) is a bit complicated. And I don’t see big leaps in software development, things that are visible/obvious to the user.
Setup was a pain in the ass for me, but I was determined not to return to reddit after the API changes. I’m tech-savvy enough to build a PC, format/partition disks, and provide tech support for my extremely confused mother, but Mastadon was so off-putting that I jumped ship during setup, and Lemmy had a learning curve that the average person may not be willing to figure out.
Even my brother who is familiar with using Tor and such couldn’t quite figure out Lemmy. He wound up joining (what I assume was) one of the shitty instances right after the first large migration, and it must have been defederated for one reason or other because he denounced the rampant censorship and went back to reddit. If he were right wing or a Nazi I could probably connect the dots there, but my brother is even further left than I am. He actually got me into politics while he was campaigning for Bernie Sanders. So I’m not exactly sure what soured his experience more-so than the initial setup (which he also struggled to wrap his head around).
I suspect he didn’t understand why his instance was defederated, and just saw the people around him complaining that it had happened. Kind of a bummer because he introduced me to Sync and would fit in really well here, but something went awry.
I found set up to be a little involved as well. Was there any particular aspect about it that you recall being unnecessarily complicated?
I don’t know if it’s still this way, but at the time I felt as though I had joined an empty cell on reddit and had to go through pages upon pages of potential subs/interests, many of which were vastly under-populated or duplicates from various other instances. It felt a bit like using a radio dial to find stations out in the static, and most of them weren’t interesting. I was using Jerboa and didn’t care much for it, but after Sync arrived my experience became nearly indistinguishable from reddit… except I’m not always stressed out and constantly dealing with inflammatory assholes and social confrontation.
Lemmy has definitely grown a lot since I arrived, though. I do miss niche communities, especially for old PC games that are no longer mainstream… But I haven’t been back to reddit since before the blackouts. It wasn’t good for my mental health.
Defederation is the biggest issue holding lemmy back IMO. If we could honestly say you can join any instance and it doesn’t matter it would make onboarding a lot easier.
Exactly how I feel. I’ve unsubscribed to the politics ones but kept at least one or two news ones because I’d like to see a little bit of news, but it seems like that’s too big a chunk of what I get. I wonder if the experience would be different on a different instance but if I’m subscribed to communities across different instances I’m not sure how it would differ
It’s the same as long as you watch your subscribed communities. Lemmy is federated and that means generally you have the same access to content regardless of which unstance you chose. I mean we also have individual moderation and “local” and “all” feeds. But I don’t use them. It’s just too random and uninteresting to scroll through everything.
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How is it that I never see any of this nsfw anime everyone keeps complaining about
I just want to know where it is so I can make sure to avoid it.
Some instances are pretty bad. I did some early blocking and don’t see it anymore.
** Tips Fedora ** I agree though. The linux glazing is unending. It’s a sea of penguin glaze as far as the eye can see
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I agree…I’m just comparing to previous months.
Yes, it’s gone down a lot. Most people went back to Reddit with the, “but my niche community!” As an excuse then just main-lined the enshitification.
The problem with getting niche communities started here is the average user doesn’t want to be a mod.
Honestly, lemmy isn’t that welcoming. Read through comments and you’ll notice most of them are kinda snarky and rude. Look at no stupid questions (idk the name of “subreddits”) you ask a serious questions and almost none of them are on topic just people giving you shit for asking. If you have tech problems it’s “install linux,degoogle,stay away from that brand” for someone new reading through them they’ll probably leave because of the toxic community.
I agree about the tone of most responses on Lemmy being rude.
I want to be nice. 🙏
Yea, I try to be as nice as I can on the internet. There’s no reason to be an ass other than you’re miserable and want other people to be as well.
It’s a mixed bag though, I’ve had some people be assholes but I ignore them if they have nothing of substance to say and focus on the positive communications.
Also, blocking the Linux communities really helped my feed. Idk what it is about the Linux superiority complex. Although I feel like most of it comes from a good place, the delivery of the information usually isn’t the best.
I’m fairly new. Finding it hard to get truly into the experience given some of the more extreme takes that Lemmy seems to allow (or at least some federated servers)
Seems like Lemmee is sadly becoming a fairly isolated echo chamber for certain opinions only.
edit: An example of “Extreme takes”. Not linking the post. it’s been upvoted 17 times, and online for 18 hours unmoderated: in the post, the user encourages execution. Murder and destruction of property:
so, as an actual radical:
yeah pretty spot on with healthcare. this is basic ‘having a society’ shit.
I don’t want a job that pays so much as an actual society I can contribute to and nurture and be a fucking part of that will take care of me some noticeable fraction of how I take care of it. I’d rather not have money involved, if its all the same to you.
I do actually want a free place to live. I’ll help build it or whatever, but I’m fucking done compromising with landlord parasites; watched too many of their victims die.
I do not want corporations to be unprofitable; I want them dismantled and their boards executed. worker co-ops are cool. individual enterprise is cool. no more exploitation, no more not having a voice.
I think the entire concept we have of ‘democracy’ is absolutely cucked. I could write some essays on what real democracy looks like, but the short version is: fuck your bourgoise elections.
kill the billionaires; tjwyre literal monsters who drink children’s blood steal and transfuse the blood of the young to grasp vainly at eternal youth while burning our futures. no problem with your party yacht if its green and you built it with your friends, but I think we need a reset on ‘wealth’.
Reading shit like that a LOT on this site is a massive turn off to the average user, and why I have a hard time truly diving in and giving a shit about it.
Edited once more: Bolded the problem points I have with above. My issue is not the message itself, but the words and what this user encourages. Don’t gaslight that the language used in that post was beyond reasonable and encourages violence
Most of that shouldn’t be considered extreme. Yeah “eat the rich” style rhetoric is inflammatory, but the rest is just pretty bog standard leftist stuff. There’s far more extreme stuff on Reddit, on all the political fringes.
You’re literally proving their point. You’re saying “I don’t see anything wrong with this, it’s perfectly normal to me and I’m fine if this kind of thing dominates my feed”. Their entire complaint is how normalized this kind of rhetoric has become and how pervasive it is and your response is basically “this is fine” dog.
They believe in the q-anon child blood theft thing. It’s not rhetoric or hyperbole, they literally want to murder people. The ‘eat the rich’ rhetoric isn’t just inflamatory, it encourages people to actually commit violence, whether that’s what you really want them to do or not.
I’m not familiar with the q-anon blood theft thing, so I’ll take your word on that one
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#Child_sex_trafficking_and_satanic_sacrifice
Added to this is the belief that politicians and Hollywood elites engage in “adrenochrome harvesting”, in which adrenalin is extracted from children’s blood to produce the psychoactive drug adrenochrome.
One version of the QAnon theory posits that the child abusers use adrenochrome as an elixir to remain young.
That’s what they’re referencing when they mention drinking children’s blood.
You sure? They specifically mention blood transfusion, which is obviously an actual real transfer of blood from the young/healthy(/poor?) to the old/sick(/wealthy?). It’s not clear to me whether “children” is hyperbole or conspiracy.
You also see this sort of thing about cops. I just learned ACAB, all cops are bastards, today. Which I’m getting increasingly tired of. When you try having a discussion with people they are just as stuck in their ways as the right and don’t realize it.
Do i think all cops are saints no. But demonizing entire jobs/professions/whatever right wrong or indifferent is the same reason i stopped watching some news. All doom and gloom.
I’ve been saying this for quite a while. It’s impossibly to get people on lemmy to understand nuance. I was the same way when I was young which is why I really feel like the average age of a lemmy user has got to be around 16-17 years old.
That last paragraph dips into q-anon stuff, too, despite otherwise being extreme left.
I find it impossible for me to take people like that seriously at all. I keep picturing them as 16 year old kids that recently read an op-ed piece and now thinks they should whine about it to anyone that will listen.
That’s interesting. I came to Lemmy because I want open debate and not moderation which I view as a form of censorship. Interesting to know that not everyone shares that view!
I don’t get it, can’t people just join a instance that best reflects their values?
nice attempted rage bate
There’s a massive difference between sharing views, IE: “I don’t like billionaires”, and Making threatening remarks, or calling to violence (not ok).
trying to frame me pointing out that calls to violence are NOT a good look for Lemmy, is not me calling out censorship. That’s you trying to rage bate the conversation into some argument about your rights (which ends where my nose begins)
In a favourable reading, “killing” a billionaire is as easy as taking their money away.
That said, I think the biggest catch-all instances of Lemmy should be defederated from Lemmy.ml and hexbear. The users of these sites just ruin the experience for anyone with half a brain and a less than spectacular appetite for bullshit.
I do not want corporations to be unprofitable; I want them dismantled and their boards executed
Favourable reading my ass.
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All is not a “for you” feed, it contains posts from the whole fediverse. You are supposed to add the filter yourself. Find the communities you are interested in, subscribe and then browse that.
A lack of engagement is a solvable problem. Become the engagement you want to see.
No
Gotem.
Understandable.
“Be the change you see you want” - Abraham Lincoln
“Do not blindly trust quotes from the internet” -Aristotle
That’s actually a misreferenced quote by Genghis Khan, my great great great great great great grand uncle.
He’s everyone’s great great great great great great grand uncle.
Even his own.
A part of me feels like the .ml instance is working on behalf of meta and reddit to drive people away.
Obviously that isn’t what is happening, but when one of the largest instances’ user bases is turning every post into Palestine debates and allowing coordinated harassment against anybody who disagrees with them, clearly people are going to leave.
Sir, but have you heard about the Peele commission? Allow me to introduce you to 150 years of Palestine -Israel historical context before we can move on with this discussion about user engagement on Lemmy…
It is really unfair of you to call us abti-semites when we purposefully aren’t using the word Jew when we call for death to Israel.
/s
Over the past two months, I’ve noticed a drop in engagement on Lemmy. Communities that used to have a decent amount of new content posted over a week, are now lacking or nonexistent. I’ve noticed this to be highly true with all communities with less than 3k subscribers. I don’t recall the name of the theory, but it was something like ‘community content theory.’ It goes something like this:
‘Around 1% of people in an online community will share content and/or try to provide original content. To have this number grow, you have to provide a way for the content posters to continue to post.’
https://www.psychreg.org/psychology-content-creating-why-we-share-what-we-share/
- Self-expression and presenting one’s identity/ideal self
- Seeking social validation through likes, comments, shares
- Connecting with communities of shared interests
- Educating others and providing helpful resources
- The “helper’s high” of gratification from assisting people
In my experience, the third one rings true most often with people.
That being said, we should take a look at the kind of communities that are not getting much engagement.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active
Here we can see the stats for all of the communities across hundreds of instances. (Filters can be applied.)
What’s surprising to me, is the ratio of subs to active users there are. After a two minute look, I believe I see that there are a few outliers where they have nearly all of the subs active and fewer that have more actives to subs. Most of what I’m seeing is around 1/3 ratio of subs to active users per week, of the best performers. Definitely not the norm.
I have a few theories as to why this is, but would love to hear from others.
People are running out of memes to repost from reddit
I enjoyed your analysis! I think you meant
Most of what I’m seeing is around
1/3[3:1] ratio of subs to active users per week, of the best performersSubs being subscribers, and these data possibly providing evidence of there being less engagement of late, per OP’s point
Ooh nice.
I don’t pay super close attention to the numbers, but I glance at the daily users and subs now and then in the comm where I’m pretty much the only poster. I feel I’m down about 25% in daily users and new subs have felt slower.
I’ve tried posting a second or third post a day to try to catch anyone in a drastically different time zone, but the second post gets less likes than the first. Comments feel down, and more importantly, I don’t see near as much growth of “regulars” who comment. I got used to seeing a few names every day or 2 in the comments, but many of them I don’t hear from anymore. I do have a few new regulars, but most seem to comment less frequently, and if I’m not holding onto them long term, activity is never going to snowball.
It seems consistent with what I see when I browse All, Top 6 Hours. I’m always worried it’s something I’m doing wrong, but I seem to trend pretty consistent with what I see of Lemmy as a whole. I do block essentially all meme communities, so I don’t know how their popularity is holding up. I keep Science Memes unblocked for now, because some are actually funny or educational, but somedays they hog up too much of the top posts.
I try to keep posting more in depth and original things, but it demotivates me as a poster to keep working hard and putting in hours when the audience seems like it’s shrinking. I try to post more than just cute pics, I try to share news, research, and facts, and I’ll do reports on research papers or books so everyone else doesn’t have to dig through all the dry stuff. That stuff takes up a good bit of time. I’m trying to keep a popular niche comm alive, and I think it’s fun as it’s typically positive stories and non-political 99% of the time, so it’s what eeeeeeveryone says they want here, but how long are posters supposed to post to what looks like an empty room?
I still try to comment back to anyone who leaves a comment, so they know I’m seeing it and that I really appreciate it. But I can only do so much. I’m really holding out, but I start to wonder what Lemmy will be like at the end of this year.
With a project like this, I think it’s important to take a long-term view, and not burn yourself out too early by putting too much early-term effort in.
I think the expectation some people may have had that the Fediverse was going to take off like a rocket and become the “next big thing” was a little bit of wishful thinking. The real process will take years imo, and we’re just keeping the lights on in the meantime.
Development continues. That’s the important part to remember.
I agree. It seems to go through spells were people just want this to be Reddit with a different page banner and they expect it to be or try to make it more like Reddit, but I thought we were here to move on?
I’d be cool with less comments overall if they are solid anyway. I don’t care about “first” posts, the “i also choose this guy’s wife,” or people fighting with each other or spouting nonsense (looking at you, current state of news/politics subs).
I go back down to a single daily post when it starts to get to me. I’ve thought about taking breaks, but I still like learning the things I post for myself and for the joy it brings to the people that do check in every day. I’ll still take what we have now over Reddit any day. I wouldn’t be posting at all if I was there.
This
Sorry!!! Couldn’t help it. But I agree. There is s something to be said about not reducing to the median
Smarty-pants 😜
I loved the quality of posts and comments we had around Sep-Dec as the fellow Reddit migrants got the swing of how it worked here and could make awesome contributions. It was a really good signal to noise ratio and everyone was getting along and posts and comments were helpful and supportive.
Starting this year, I feel the part of Reddit we enjoyed being away from crept in along with enough angry far-left that they could regularly get in the top of All. When we started to see all the “why is no one swearing in here” threads and when the anti-work and anti-Trump groups made it over here.
I think these things should be talked about, but these groups just feel like rage bait to me, designed to get people worked up. They’re all going to either end up either echo chambers or full of gatekeeping and downvoting. It isn’t the bonding experience that was being built before that.
I’m an adult, and don’t want to be lectured to by any militant conservative, leftist, evangelist, vegan, Linux fanboy, or whatever. I want cordial discussion, and if I’d walk in to what All is now, I probably wouldn’t have hung around as long as I have.
But there’s still a good number of people trying to make this place inviting and fun. If this just turns into liberal Parler, I’ll probably just quit social media altogether. I don’t know what’s really left to go to after this that hasn’t been absorbed by a big company or a political movement.
I think the advantage of larger user bases (not always) is that the more nuanced discussions often bubble to the top. That is impossible here because the user base is so small. That’s why it’s a flatline of ACAB, extreme leftie eat the rich, etc. There is a big void in the middle left by that in-depth conversation: Nothing seems to get past that surface layer analysis. If we want to talk about Oct 7 well be prepared to hear about the Peele commission and apartheid state. On and on. Unless of course maybe I’m getting old and all social media is converging into vacuous and hollow content. Were da 30+ at??
Lol, Lemmy Silver, for the old lemmings. I suppose it’s part of getting older. We’ve all had these high level conversations for decades and anything we’re still interested in, we’ve had decades to get really granular on them. But the young ones are learning this guy Reagan did some shit once upon a time or there was a guy named Lenin that said regular people are important, etc for the first time, and I’m glad for them, but the access to data we have I’d hope you’d do a little more reading before shouting the same crap over and over. “Doing your own research” once and then never exploring any further or checking out other sides makes you just as annoying as that anti-vaxer.
Now I sound too damn old! 😧
Welcome friend! Your AARP subscription is being processed and bingo is at 7:30. 🥲
I hear you though.
I try to keep posting more in depth and original things, but it demotivates me as a poster to keep working hard and putting in hours when the audience seems like it’s shrinking.
I am really sympathetic to this. I have only posted OC for months now, with some posts taking a week or more worth of free time only to get virtually no eyes on it. I admit that timing posts poorly probably has a lot to do with it, but man does it suck to see something you’ve put quite a bit of time into (whether that seems obvious or not) get 10 upvotes and 3 down with no comments etc.
I try not to think about the cumulative time I’ve spent posting! 😆
It does truly suck though when you think you’ve done your best work and it falls flat. Then when I’m sulking afterwards, I’ll post something real low effort and it will be the top post of the month, never fails.
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My feed is full too. That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s the engagement. Each post typically has about 5-12 comments now.
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To be fair, what do you expect people to talk about?
5-12 comments covers most topics for a given article/meme. Any more than that, and it starts to just become a repeat of what someone else said.
Do you want to read 10 copies of “lol that meme is so me!”
I always thought it was wild that your average thread on Reddit could garner thousands upon thousands of comments, with the vast majority of them being repeats of something someone already said.
Then factor in that those same comments are in the next thread, and the next one. That’s not engagement, that’s insane!
The comments here are far more sparse, but they still cover all your bases. You still get the interesting info dump from some expert or hyperfocused individual who’s done a bunch of reading, you still get a humorous pun or joke, and you still get the “well, actually, this is wrong because…” just, now, it’s like 1 of each type instead of a thousand people all trying to crack the same joke in one thread.
Edit: to clarify, I mean 5-12 top level comments
Sometimes. I see a lot more monological thinking here because the average Lemmy user skews extensively towards one side. I don’t mind the lack of comments but they don’t seem to crack more nuanced layers that I used to see on Reddit (by the way: not necessarily layers that I agreed with). It could also be a consequence of me getting old and starting to outgrow this category of social media. I don’t know.
Maybe you blocked all the trolls
The Lemmy universe is a cold and lonely place without the trolls…🙁
I’ve noticed a downward trend, not necessarily “dropped off suddenly”. One of the most notable signs I’ve seen is from the new comments sort.
When I’m interested in seeing what’s actually active and where the action is at, one of the things I will do is click to sort by “New Comments” and change my view to Comments. Typically I go to that page, see if any of the headlines or comments catch my attention, then go read or reply.
In the past couple of months, I’m seeing more and more new comments on that first page of results that are 5+ minutes old. When I get to the bottom of the page and click to refresh the results, there are times now when I don’t even get a full new set of comments because there haven’t been enough new ones to bump the prior comments off the first page.
That didn’t used to happen much at all, it was rare enough that it really sticks out when it does happen. Typically, the comments on that first page would be anywhere from seconds to maybe 2 or 3 minutes old and every time I hit refresh (I wasn’t spamming the button), I’d have a completely new set of comments to peruse (other than a bug in older versions of Lemmy that would cause some comments to get stuck at the top of that page even when they were significantly older than anything else).
My overall interpretation of this is that it appears there’s less commenting, at least during the times of day that I tend to be most active on here. Of course that’s not the only possibility. But like OP, I’m noticing a lot fewer posts in those top 6, top 12 filters with lots of comments than I used to see. So, those types of observations do have me thinking things are on a bit of a down trend. It could be a seasonal thing, perhaps a temporary lull.
Yeah. Hard to say. It’s interesting to see other perspectives. Thanks.
I’m still here!
Ok that’s 1, anyone else still here?
Negative. I am a meat popsicle.
Yep
I’ve noticed that some instances, including lemmy.world, are getting more aggressive with blocking other instances (also due to assumed “spam”). At the same time, the /all/ feed is only populated by the communities that other users of your instance are subscribing to. I’d look in some newcommunities communities to subscribe to more interesting communities so that they pop up in your /all/ feed. Another reason is probably also that many people are moving away from lemmy.world to smaller instances.
This is how I see things as well. I moved away from lemmy.world because one of their updates completely fucked my account, and since then I’ve noticed more people doing the same, or complaining about issues with federation.
Anyone who expects Lemmy to become the new reddit is both setting themselves up for disappointment and missing out on the enjoyment of a smaller community imo. People can use reddit/facebook/twitter for doom scrolling if that’s their thing.
When people say they want Lemmy to become the new reddit, they are not talking about the reddit of today, more like the one from <2015.
I miss the crazy shit that there used to be on reddit. Not that I liked or agreed with all the subs at the time but it really did feel at the time that there was a sub for everything. Now reddit feels stale and sanitized which makes me feel bored when scrolling through or searching for random subs.
Reddit just feels like Facebook these days. Niche subs are not affected as much, but the vast majority is just low quality trash, gossip, selfies and unhinged political discussion.
Some people probably mean that, while others want a literal transplant or reddit without spez pulling the strings. Part of the challenge of new communities is figuring out what you are, and I think Lemmy is still deep in that stage.
I am enjoying the slower pace of posts, and higher level of quality engagement. I also enjoy zero ads, far less toxic behavior and general niceness on Lemmy compared to Reddit.
I like this. Quality > Quantity.
