I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
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While (I think) I totally understand what you are saying here…
… Yeah I’m honestly fine with lemmy just being more or less a tiny cluster of neo forums.
I like the cozy.
At the same time… from I guess a less selfish perspective… yeah, this is the exact time an alternative to Reddit and other corpo social media needs to be popularized.
But, somewhat alleviating myself from that… I don’t really know anybody that I could ‘word of mouth’ spread lemmy to, that I haven’t already.
And I’m too crippled to put stickers on really anything outside my own apartment, lol.
The source data shows that while active users are down, the number of posts and comments are near all-time highs. While you need new users to help counteract churn, I think the higher post/comments count points to what I think a lot of people feel here: that quality seems to keep getting better and better.
Regarding how to bring more people in, I personally like how different lemmy servers have slightly different characteristics but each seems to appeal to larger groups. I see a future where there’s probably a small-ish number of large servers that cover broad groups of people.
It’s the porn. And comments like “those colors are really a bad choice, they make the graph very difficult to read”.
But seriously, the quality content in Reddit is not the reason it’s big. It’s a corporate. It’s a massive echo chamber destined to shame people under insufficiently explained contexts. I see it like a virtual mob with pitchforks on steroids (bots).
…I am drifting away from Lemmy myself.
Political communities are echo chambers like Reddit, in a different color. Discussing tech or helping others is better, but still feels like talking in circles.
Wholesome subs like /c/SuperBowl are sublime, but I mostly lurk there.
Information hygiene is awful. Big subs upvote tabloids and Tweets to the sky, as long as they align with their beliefs. I just saw a discussion on a not-obviously AI generated photo with the community sentiment of “misinformation? Who cares. It’s a pro-lefty meme, so spread it.”
Anyway, all this scrolling and impulse commenting eats time. I get the same feeling of shouting into a black hole that I get on corporate social media.
Much of this is my fault, though.
I have several niches I intend to make original posts for, but never do.
It’s somewhere in the giant pile of my IRL executive dysfunction :’(
I think you’re right
This site is seemingly for hardcore left-leaning people. Center and right wing are censored, banned, without violating rules, just like reddit mods. So it’s no wonder people are leaving.
Removed by mod
I came here looking for something different than Reddit but I’m actually pretty done. I try to post, start threads and conversations but the ones that don’t get deleted because of some vague rule get questioned to hell as to why it exists that it makes me wish I hadn’t posted at all.
I’m happy to promote it. I tried to get a few non-technical people to check it out. They felt it was too complicated. I’ve shared it with tech friends and coworkers who use Reddit. They’re aware of Lemmy to varying degrees, and are not enthused about moving to another platform despite hating Reddit.
I think it’s because despite Lemmy being a great alternative, it is more complicated and lacks the user base that users of other social media platforms have.
Bluesky is marginally more complicated than Twitter, but compared to Mastodon it is user friendly. Bluesky worked to create a dedicated, easy to use app that most users use.
Bluesky existed for a while before experiencing explosive growth. This occurred during moments of controversy with X. Bluesky capitalized on these moments, with champions on both platforms that led their followers to change, and there were mechanisms in place to bootstrap a user’s feed with the followers and topics that they had in the other place.
I think Lemmy needs to follow this model. There needs to be a Lemmy app that has a user experience as similar as possible with the Reddit app. It also needs champions that have main stream recognition (George Takei, Mark Hamill, etc.) that can be willing to make noise about switching from Reddit to Lemmy when the next controversy occurs. Repeat with more and more promotion by this evangelists, and Lemmy could grow.
too complicated
This is an Us problem. Download jerboa. Create an account on world. Done. Simple as Reddit. We make it complicated by explaining federation, options, different instances, etc. None of that matters to the masses.
I could not find Jerboa in the App Store. I use Voyager. We need Lemmy.
This is such an underrated point. If we want people to join Lemmy, we need an app called Lemmy, on every platform. And if we want to steal users from Reddit, make the UI a clone of the reddit app but better. And allow people to join via the app, not some separate website.
Or maybe people just need to stop saying “Lemmy” and instead say “Voyager”, or “Boost for Lemmy” or whatever app they would suggest to use?
It’s like Linux, I don’t suggest people to install Linux because that’s not a thing, I suggest they install Bazzite or Fedora KDE, or whatever I think will suit them best
Most people would see “use Voyager or boost” to be akin to “use Reddit or Instagram”. Because why would there be more than one app to connect to the app.
It’s wrong, but any time you break from a standard assumption you require thinking. Once you require thinking, you lose anyone who isn’t otherwise motivated.
Yea true.
I didn’t mean you should tell people “use Voyager or Boost for Lemmy”
I meant you should tell people “use Voyager” or “use Boost for Lemmy” or whatever app you think they would like, but just 1
We can make our decentralised network more popular by centralising it feels like an own goal…
It depends what you want. If you want lots of people to join, you need to make it easy to join.
That doesn’t mean we need to get rid of decentralization. You could have a federated joining mechanism that assigned people randomly to any willing instance. Forcing the user to pick is the problem.
The trouble is a random joining procedure will absolutely launch users into unsuitable instances for their personality, political positions.
If you’re suggesting to your friends you can pick whichever instance you want, but the point is you should choose for them and don’t even tell them that there is a choice
I mean, that is how I recommend linux distros to people :)
Also SSO should be released with Lemmy 1.0. Then you can just login with your Google account
Yeah, we need defaults to get people signed up. When it’s too difficult for the average user, they’ll go where it’s easier.
This. So much of this.
I see the same with any federated platform. People are excited to explain how complicated and clever and different services and integrations and… Shut the fuck up.
App, sign-up, post, like, subscribe. Done.
People will learn the rest if it is important enough to them to master
I followed the directions my instance of choice had posted, also use jerboa. It was a few steps, but the directions given were simple. It didn’t take me long at all to sign up.
I still don’t fully understand federation, but I knew even less when I began here a few years ago. I do like using jerboa
George Takei, Mark Hamill, …
If someone were to create a Markhamill@lemmy.world account, someone else can simply spin up a Markhamill@lemmings.world, and a Markhamill@Markhamilllemmy.world, and so on. Nobody is ever going to believe that any of those are actually Mark Hamill (especially since none are:-).
Doesn’t Lemmy have any sort of profile cross-identification like Mastodon has?
Absolutely none. Some users do things like list their own alts, though these can fall out of date, and are entirely optional.
Lemmy (and PieFed) allows you to migrate your blocklists and community subscriptions, and PieFed will even pull in all old posts from a community to help migrate it over, though there is still a disconnection point between the new PieFed account for people vs. their old Lemmy account, which are separated.
Some people, like Blaze, create alts all across the Threadiverse for unrelated reasons - primarily since Lemmy reports do not actually federate (though PieFed ones do, see report) - while other people specifically grab other people’s account names just to troll them (or at least some of those alts claim that much:-P), leading to all manner of confusion as to who is then trolling who.
I was mostly using alts to federate communities before Lemmy-federate got created.
Nowadays thanks to Piefed personal feeds I mostly only use this one’
But then how do you mod communities, specifically Lemmy ones, when those reports do not federate (though PieFed ones reportedly do)?
Those are not “Blaze” alts, I have specific alts for that, but they aren’t recognizable
Thanks for the explanation!:-)
too complicated
Nani? It’s 2026, getting an account on some lemmy and start posting is nearly two orders of magnitude easier than trying to sign up to an email account!
That people are brainrotten due to excessive Fortnite and Instagram is,
unfortunately, not our problem. At some point, the answer is “just get better users”.And answers like this are exactly why non techies don’t join and we get posts like this. You’re the problem
Singing up for a Google account is such a pain, they’ve gotten worse over time
The difference is people think they NEED a Google account, but not a Lemmy account
Can I ask a different, more difficult question?
Where are people going?
Lemmy Isn’t Quite It? Mastodon is too formal. Blusky is too political.
Lemmy was a clone of Reddit. Not an improvement on it.
I’ve been here a few years now and I can say Lemmy’s got issues. You can’t come on here and have a good time anymore when all it’s about is trump trump trump and Linux Linux Linux it gets old. I wanna escape from reality a bit sometimes and there’s few areas to subscribe to that gives any joy anymore.
It seems strange that these two curves so closely match eachother in shape.
When 6month active users drop that means 6 months ago a user stopped using the platform.
When monthly active users drop that means a month ago a user stopped using the platform.
So this would suggest that there is a correlation between user attrition 6 months ago and last month.The more niche communities really suffer I feel from the decentralized pattern. Tv shows, movies, video games, etc. you have everyone trying to be the “de-facto” instance and none of them really get traffic.
Really, Lemmy is just a US political platform with some weak notions of being anything else. And if it wants to survive, it needs more people, with more interesting topic. To many subs are just ghost towns.
Wait till Reddit fucks up again, there will be an influx of users.
What is that spike in activity in December, I wonder? I see a similar increase in December of 2024 as well, although there it remained sustained instead of dropping.
I hate that it’s true but the people on the Threadiverse are toxic as fuck. I have almost universally always regretted making posts here, so I primarily stick to comments.
This in turn is due to the fact that the moderation tools suck ass - I hope PieFed will offer some strong hope for that, but as it is only a small percentage of the Threadiverse uses it.
PieFed also offers some hopes in other ways too - e.g. highly contentious users (who let’s say receive 10x more downvotes than upvotes) have labels attached to their username. It doesn’t block any content, but it helps new users from other platforms realize what they are getting into, if e.g. they engage with a known sea-lion.
And PieFed helps in so many other ways besides - e.g. a recent addition will automatically convert URLs pointing to other instances into one that will work on your home instance, where you are currently logged in and so can vote, reply, bookmark, or whatever. Lemmy will probably never add all the various features that PieFed even already offers - like post and user flairs, polls, combining comments across all cross-posts, and things like that that even Reddit does not offer. I don’t mean to be annoying about all this but I said it to help illustrate: look at all that PieFed offers, and yet how many people remain on Lemmy? Now you understand a tiny bit better why someone remains on Reddit.
Plus Reddit is where the content is, and the user base too, so why would content creators want to post their stuff here, only to get trolled in the comment section? The Left always eats its own - and it rejects even more all the centrists and even ring-wingers, i.e. mainstream non-technical normie users i.e. the vast majority of content creators, who don’t like to visit a Nazi bar (even a leftist tankie flavored one) and be told how they didn’t vote properly or hard enough.
You said it yourself: you were one of those very people who did not want others to come. What could you possibly have said to your past self to have changed your mind earlier?
