• @[email protected]
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    366 months ago

    I think the extremist politics on here drive people away. I don’t even tell anyone I use Lemmy because of that.

    Hexbear is obviously the worst, but Lemmy.ml is also openly spreading propaganda.

    • smoothbrain coldtakes
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      146 months ago

      This is pretty much my beef with Lemmy.

      The fact that the development team is also the ownership and administration of the instance spreading propaganda is just absolutely insane to me.

      Vote logs just show them supporting the extremist behavior.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      136 months ago

      I see where you come from, my usual advice to new joiners is to block hexbear and to avoid news and political communities

      • @[email protected]
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        86 months ago

        It’s hard… when a user blocks an instance, the propaganda still shows up when the offending users comment on other instances.

          • smoothbrain coldtakes
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            66 months ago

            A mute is not the same as an outright block.

            Muting effectively just means you don’t see the instances posts, but you can see the users comments if they are federated with your instance. For example, I have kbin blocked, but I can still interact with kbin users - when they reply to my comments or posts, which they can still do, I simply just don’t get a notification for it.

            Dessalines doesn’t care about stuff like this. Beehaw has been asking for proper moderation tools forever and effectively just told to get fucked every time.

            • @[email protected]
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              76 months ago

              Beehaw is still using version 0.18.4 which will soon celebrate its first birthday. We made countless moderation improvements since then, but of course Beehaw won’t get those if they refuse to upgrade.

              • smoothbrain coldtakes
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                6 months ago

                .ml is basically just as bad.

                Most instances are totally defederated from Hexbear. They’re not my problem at all. My problem is literally the development team and their willingness to not only accept but further the cause of propaganda through their instance’s curated biases.

    • anon6789
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      136 months ago

      Not just the politics, but the news threads I feel have degenerated into ragebait topics with shallow conversation. I used to find a conversation or 2 a day to participate in, but now I don’t want to touch many news or politics threads.

    • DefederateLemmyMl
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      96 months ago

      Not just spreading propaganda, actively censoring anything critical of their Chinese overlords as well.

  • @[email protected]
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    196 months ago

    The constant spam of murica politics, linux evangelists and the lack of niche communities have almost made me stop using lemmy. Almost because there just isn’t any alternatives.

  • MentalEdge
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    6 months ago

    People who don’t want to be here, leaving, isn’t necessarily a problem until their absence begins affecting the level of activity.

    As long as the total user count keeps growing, that means new people are trying out Lemmy, which should mean new people who actually want to use it, are finding it.

    That that is currently happening more slowly than the rate at which people are leaving the platform, isn’t cause for alarm IMO.

    Lemmy doesn’t need a billion users, it needs enough to be worth using if it’s something you want to be using, and it does.

    Stuff like the Reddit API drama put it in front of a lot of new people, and I think even brought it up to critical mass in terms of user activity. But except for something like that happening again, the only “fixes” I can think of are small and slow ones.

    Stuff like spreading knowledge of the fediverse through word of mouth. Or purchasing ads for it with your own money.

    I’ve also been playing around with the idea of creating activist stickers that “advertise” federated social media, to place in public around my city.

    • @[email protected]
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      56 months ago

      I’ve thought about doing stickers too but I’m not sure if I’d want to do it for a local community rather than a specific instance.

  • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]
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    146 months ago

    Overall since November, its been trending upwards. Given the big spike in March, I think its only natural some people realize they didn’t want to be here in the couple months that follow.

    Also there’s bit of a controversial topic lately that has made a certain demographic feel like this place is about as unwelcoming to them as much of the internet.

  • @[email protected]
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    116 months ago

    Natural growth is better than surge. Lemmy will eventually be the defacto. Reddit will do something stupid and people will star pouring in.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      106 months ago

      I’m usually on that side, but I’m afraid we might just go down to 30k, 20k then snowballing to a very small number that would just kill the platform

      • anon6789
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        96 months ago

        I’ve been a bit concerned as well. I had gotten to know a fair number of regular commenters, but I haven’t seen probably half of them recently.

        New subs are still joining the community, but it’s still low participation. The big communities still seem to be growing steadily, but it’s not necessarily bringing the positive attitude that initially won me over to Lemmy.

  • Blaster M
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    106 months ago

    Maybe fix the problem where a lot of users can’t post half the time they’re on

    • @CoffeeJunkie
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      76 months ago

      OKAY I didn’t think this was unique to me. I seem to have been muted for pretty innocent stuff? I have been muted at least 6 times. The posting bans have lasted anywhere from a couple days to a couple weeks. It’s very frustrating when you type out a well thought-out comment, click to submit, and it never posts. 😑 I try to select all & copy my comment before I submit.

      If I know some mod has muted me, I just comment ‘A’ on random posts to see if I’m allowed to speak again. If it doesn’t post successfully, ban remains in effect. 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

      It almost has to be a muting ban of sorts, because I can’t post on my main but on a secondary I can post just fine. I haven’t left Lemmy (yet…) because I’m not going back to Reddit & aside from this, Lemmy is a decent substitute. Lemmy has been really frustrating, trying to be a member of the community. Forced into being a lurker six different times by some anonymous coward(s). Not knowing when your ban will be lifted.

      If my theories are correct, I’d like a little more transparency in the process. Who issues the muting bans, WHY, and when the talking ban will expire. It can be a simple, private direct message. “Butthurt Bob has muted you for: hurting his fee-fees. Butthurt Bob’s ban will last 6 days.”

      • @[email protected]OP
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        106 months ago

        Both of you seem to be on Lemmy world, is there a technical issue on their side?

        About your last point, you should be able to see exactly that in the modlog (orange button in community sidebars)

        • @CoffeeJunkie
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          36 months ago

          That is potentially an excellent point I haven’t considered; my alt was on Lemmy.zip . Idk.

        • @CoffeeJunkie
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          16 months ago

          I am a Sync user, idk, if it happens again (which it probably will!) I will do some digging.

      • MentalEdge
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        86 months ago

        All instances and communities have public modlogs, that display all moderator actions, the mod that did them, and why, if they provided a reason (I always do).

        Thunder recently got support for accessing them, but you can always find them in the webUI in a browser.

  • @BradleyUffner
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    106 months ago

    We could stop implying that everyone who uses Windows is a moron…

  • @Asidonhopo
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    106 months ago

    Some of the dropoff is likely due to college being out for the northern hemisphere summer, and just less people online due to the nice weather. Reddit sees a similar seasonal change I believe

  • Frisbeedude
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    86 months ago

    There is also a problem with feddit.de for a couple of months now, one of the bigger instances on the fediverse. People are leaving, some are opening accounts on other servers. That didn’t help at all…

      • Frisbeedude
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        6 months ago

        It’s a flaw in the fediverse concept. Federation is great, but if you have a big server run by a freelance admin who decides to take some time off without notifying anyone people will search for a more reliable solution. Or just go back to reddit.

        • @[email protected]OP
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          46 months ago

          That’s why reliable servers have more than one single admin.

          I guess we should educate more about that, actually I was surprised that feddit.de was run by a single person

        • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]
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          26 months ago

          Otoh, if one server is having issues, it’s pretty trivial to swap to another. Whereas if reddit is down, it’s down. No getting around that. If Lemmy.today is down, I can just swap to another server without issue (except being treated as a sus person just because my account says it’s new).

          • Frisbeedude
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            46 months ago

            Except the communities created on that instances all suffer. There were some popular ommunities on feddit.de that are now wastelands.

            • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]
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              16 months ago

              How are communities affected by such outages? Do they stop federating, but people can still see what other people from their own instance post?

              • Frisbeedude
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                36 months ago

                You can’t upload pictures and the web interface stopped working weeks ago. You can only make text posts via apps. Why would anyone make a post on that instance?

                • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]
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                  16 months ago

                  If you can at least post text, you can at least tell people where to migrate to. Doesn’t seem like that big of an issue, but not being able to migrate all of the post history (AFAIK) is unfortunate (hopefully something is done to fix that shortcoming).

                  I can see at least one feddit.de community via web browser, so do you meant just the feddit.de web interface stopped working, but people on other instances still can see it? Or is it broken in ways other than simply being able to see the posts?

  • @Butterpaderp
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    76 months ago

    Wait until reddit shoots itself in the foot some more.

    The Valve strategy.

    • smoothbrain coldtakes
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      36 months ago

      The problem is that the average user on Reddit doesn’t give a fuck about the ways the platform is shooting itself in the foot, because it’s still functional, has a critical mass of users, and is still the de facto online global discussion forum.

      Lemmy doesn’t serve the function well enough because there are not enough of a variety of users driving niche topics. It’s the same dozen topics I see every day. Star Trek memes, Linux discourse, data breach reports, stupid bullshit about Musk, incredibly biased political content and straight up propaganda; it gets extremely tiring to see the same stuff over and over knowing that’s just what the current userbase enjoys discussing. It also doesn’t help that the development team tacitly endorses the extremist propaganda spreading behavior on their server. You can go check mod and vote logs and see the development team actively encouraging all of this destructive behavior across the fediverse.

      • @[email protected]OP
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        26 months ago

        Star Trek memes, Linux discourse, data breach reports, stupid bullshit about Musk, incredibly biased political content and straight up propaganda; it gets extremely tiring to see the same stuff over and over

        Agreed, it’s tiring, that’s why I recommend blocking all of these.

        Then stuff like [email protected] or [email protected] starts to show up

        • smoothbrain coldtakes
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          16 months ago

          Okay but the thing is, I like most of the Star Trek memes, Linux discourse, and data breach reports, as well as tech and environmental news.

          Unfortunately, all of that stuff is literally inherently political, so you end up with massive biases depending on who is posting. We can’t just divorce the concept of data breaches being carried out by state actors. We can’t divorce Musk from the tech world (or the world in general) no matter how much we want to. We can’t divorce the intersect between the trade and manufacturing conditions of China with the impact it has on the transition to renewable resources and electric vehicles.

          If I start blocking everybody with a political bias I will have blocked literally all the major contributors on the platform. Everybody posting en masse has some kind of agenda, and that’s usually fine. I enjoy seeing most of schizoidman’s posts, but I know his bias is clearly towards the Chinese, as the majority of his posts clearly frame them in a positive light, with some of the content literally just being propaganda. If I block him, I block a considerable amount of EV news coming into the site, biased or not.

          It’s just not feasible to avoid politics here, unless you basically don’t want to use the platform.

  • @[email protected]
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    66 months ago

    A lot of users being centralized on Lemmy.ml doesn’t help, lot of toxicity comes from there and you can’t just block the instance unless you also want to lose a lot of content in your feed

    • @[email protected]OP
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      76 months ago

      Most of the .ml communities have a .world equivalent that is usually more active, but I see your point

  • Mr.Mofu
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    46 months ago

    This is definetly something to keep an eye on, for now I wouldn’t say this means much

  • @[email protected]
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    16 months ago

    Stop harassing and brigading people who support Israel.

    Stop turning every thread into discussion of how much liberals are genocidal fascists.

    • @[email protected]
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      66 months ago

      I am of the opinion that we should not, in fact, welcome genocidal fascists.

      If you disagree with the majority opinion on this matter, you may create or join an instance which does not federate with the majority.