A post from 2 days ago presented a graph that showed an important variation in the active userbase: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/52565659
Using the daily rather than monthly view on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120 shows a much stable line (especially if you take into account Piefed’s growth: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120 )
Going through the comments in the other posts, a few recommendations that can help with the overall experience
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use different feeds: either using different Lemmy/Mbin accounts (one account per type of content), or Piefed personal feeds, but being able to browse different feeds such as “Good news”, “Hobbies”, “Art”, “Life advice” help to see more content than politics and tech
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discover communities: subscribe to !communitypromo@lemmy.ca, !fedigrow@lemmy.zip and !newcommunities@lemmy.world to add active communities to your feeds
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go to general communities rather than specific ones: the current user base only allows so much specialization. Your favorite city builder community may not exist, but !citybuilders@sh.itjust.works does. !stationery@lemmy.world and !pen_and_paper@lemmy.world may be inactive, but !journaling@sh.itjust.works is not.
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use a client that allows for comments consolidation: I don’t remember which mobile apps does it (Sync, I think?), Piefed has that feature built-in too. It allows to see all comments on a cross-post in the same view: https://piefed.zip/c/privacy/p/928874/worst-in-show-ces-products-include-ai-refrigerators-ai-companions-and-ai-doorbells#post_replies
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report toxic users and avoid communities that do not handle your reports: quite a few comments mentioned that issue in the other thread. Mods can’t see everything, reporting helps to keep the atmosphere of a community enjoyable.
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use a client that implements keyword filters: quite a few mobile apps and alternative Lemmy front-ends do, Piefed has it built in. It can really help avoid the “doom and gloom” overwhelming your feed.
Finally, a few communities recommendations for lighthearted communities
Who is being driven off lemmy by who and why?
Oh people making the claim that Lemmy being too political or too hard-left drives users off and is responsible for the user malaise. I’m sure that’s true, but not to an appreciable level.
Lemmy is being too political. We don’t like it.
Meanwhile Reddit:
The difference, one would assume, is that on the whole, Reddit’s political biases influence more what is not shown (much like lemmy.ml banning people for any criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea, or the echo chamber in hexbear), whereas Lemmy’s tankie issue also manifests as people actively sea-lioning (e.g. Cowbee) and (especially from hexbear) overt trolling, which shows up more in people’s faces. Both are issues, neither are good.
Your Don Quixote RP in this thread is going really well, congrats!
Always claims of sea-lioning, but never any evidence. You’ve had me blocked for over a year now, why continue this crusade?
I’ve come across some people who have no idea what “sealioning” even means. There used to be a hb user “Ulysses” or something, like three years ago, who accused me of doing it after I replied to their reply to my reply, and that’s the only conversation we’d ever had. I pulled up the definition of sealioning and the comic which the word originated from, and they just say “no that’s not true, stop sealioning”.
I feel like some people just think sealioning means “this person keeps replying to my posts”, as if conversations on a public forum are somehow uncalled for, or unusual.
It’s a real thing, for sure, but more often than not is used as a conversation terminator.
The sealion in the original comic is completely correct, which makes me very suspicious of anyone who dismisses someone for “sealioning” and as you say, it usually is just used as an excuse not to engage with what someone is saying.
The sealion in the comic overheard someone being racist against them, and stepped in to say, “Hey, why are you being racist?” And for some reason is wrong because… they’re persistent? Or because they’re annoying? How is that not literally just every “anti-woke” argument?
Agreed! They take issue more with the argument style to dismiss the substance.
By my experience, Reddit has some influence from government that they unofficially confirmed. And Reddit admins(not even talking about moderators) are actively promoting some political ideas in their actions. Like, protecting ICE and mass murders in Gaza. The most interesting thing is that this mostly works in large comunities, because of in small ones you will not see such thing except for rare occasions. This also affects their filters. In one subreddit your comment will trigger ban, while in some others the same quote will have no effect at all. This is really annoying.
I could criticize China right now, here in this community on Lemmy.world, but if I did so in a community on Lemmy.ml I would get banned from not only the entire instance but from communities that I’ve never so much as heard of. We have censorship here too.
And we have toxicity here as well. As too does Reddit. It is a little odd to hear Redditors of all people complain about toxicity:-). Maybe they were used to smaller communities on Reddit, avoiding the big ones, but then here with far less content you pretty much have to subscribe to the large communities (like is there another one talking about the Fediverse besides this one that is more worthwhile?), where the toxicity is more visible?
I don’t know, I haven’t wanted to actually talk to people on Reddit for several years now:-).
That’s not how it works. You get banned from the instance and all communities you have commented or posted in. And it wouldn’t be any different if it were to happen on .world or .zip.
(I know OpenStars and piefed.social users cannot see this, however I wanted everyone else to at least understand how bans work)
Well, I agree that there are some specialized comunities for people that want to believe in 1 idea. Like Lemmy.ml. And if you don’t want to be the part of a brainwashed herd, you either leave by yourself or get banned. This is normal. I am talking about the active platform wide banning regardless of comunity. I don’t see such thing on Lemmy unless you are really harming the platform like mass spamming or sharing dangerous software. On Reddit you no longer can have a normal conversation, since you can get banned not only by a toxic mod but also by shitty AI system. And then you cannot even expect for the appeal to be normally processed by a human, since either they are also being reviewed by AI or the workers are too lazy to properly work(which is quite relatable since there are thousands of appeals and not enough workers because of a greedy management).
Due to the decentralization on Lemmy, even if you get banned from even 2 or 3 instances, you still have a lot of parts of platform available for you. While on Reddit your ban affects you and your account dramatically. Especially, if you are not paying them for the pro version.
Reddit is worse both overall and on average, agreed. I will say that Lemmy.ml is extremely well-known for mass banning people even from communities that they’ve never heard of, so it’s more than a little bit like Reddit, though as you say with the federated model someone can always go elsewhere, and still see the same content.
There are some slight ways in which the Lemmy implementation of federation is very authoritarian, like how it does not send you any kind of notification that your content has been removed, or even that you have been banned - people simply have to discover that on their own (and oftentimes never!), months to years later. And there’s no modmail to be able to ask questions why, plus the modlog most often obscures the name of the mod anyway, so you can’t even DM them, nor, as you could on Reddit, can you ask them in the same post that has been removed from the community yet still exists for those who have the URL, since Lemmy not only deletes the post in that case but offers a confusing generic error message as if the post never existed in the first place.
So believe it or not, Reddit actually offers some (very few but somewhat foundational) more rights to people there than Lemmy does here!!! Lemmy offers supreme rights to someone wanting to spin up their own instance and be an admin (though CSAM brigading is a constant threat), and also offers special privileges to mods as well, but normal everyday users have far less protections. It is up to each person to decide which “rights” they value most - there is no right here to not have your content deleted by a bot btw, though it is far less common on the Threadiverse than on Reddit, I hear.
Overall I think it’s better here than there, though as the OP graph shows that seems to not be an opinion shared universally by all people looking for a threaded conversational platform, since we are losing slightly more people than we gain, slowly getting smaller over time (now at ~35k active users, down from the peak of ~55k at the time of the first major Rexodus).
Mods on Reddit can ban you and ignore anyway. But, agree. Some functionality on Lemmy still needs to be. I hope that developers add it within few years.
To be honest the tankies made my transition to lemmy a bit smoother, since they fill the same niche as the idiots of t_d, so it made lemmy kinda familiar.
Here is one such very relevant post: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/16hkxua/why_im_giving_up_on_lemmyfediverse/
A really interesting discussion in particular is below the reply saying:
Other replies included “I did end up shutting down my instance.”, which continued on with “But, for me, seeing people blindly bash the USA every chance they get, It’s a turn off.” - like, I get that the USA is unpopular (especially now), and also I am okay with the Threadiverse remaining small, but I did want to push back against this magical type of thinking that we can both have our cake and eat it to, in the form of both bashing people from it and also reaching out to invite people on Reddit (who are primarily from the USA) to join us here. Maybe Lemmy will have more success by marketing itself as more “European” (or at least “non-USA”, so maybe European + Global South)? Whatever goal we want to aim for, we should keep our eyes open as we aim directly at it, imho.
I do not think that all or even most Threadiverse instances should defederate from lemmy.ml, but on the other hand it would be extremely nice if just ONE instance would do so, which we could then share to people on Reddit as a nicer entry point for those more centrist-leaning users who are primarily people from the USA. Or else decide that that goal is (collectively) not what we all want. The latter being what ended up happening, whether intentionally or no.
Fwiw, Lemmy has gotten much better over the years in this respect, imho, with many more instances having banned lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net specifically.
Like, look at those contortionist comment replies trying to state that, e.g.:
This topic is a MAJOR, oft-repeated reason why people on Reddit refuse to come here and check us out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1jjl8g5/i_tried_lemmy_again_after_a_year_long_hiatus_and/ (the title there gets cut off but continues with “it’s still beyond terrible”), and here is that post’s concluding paragraph:
Note that I do not agree, just stating how these people said that they felt, if that is helpful for a diagnosis of the state of affairs and what we could potentially do to help mitigate those concerns. e.g. I successfully petitioned for discuss.online to defederate from hexbear.net, thinking that could help make Redditors feel more welcomed here. Although now I am placing my hope more in PieFed (which e.g. allows users to perform their own personalized defederations without needing admin approval to block all users from any specific instance), while giving up much hope for Lemmy to keep up with its wondrous pace of adding new features.
Those two links are 2 years and 9 months old.
The Threadiverse gets regularly okay feedback on Reddit, as show the several posts on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Ah, searching is super difficult on Bluesky but I finally managed to find something relevant using Google and the site: function. Here is what it had to say in https://bsky.app/profile/lagotrasimeno.bsky.social/post/3lzwma6eg7k2l:
(Bold emphasis added)
I am not trying to be negative, at least not for its own sake. This is legitimately what I see that people are saying about us here. Certainly not all of them to be fair - some people on other platforms love us here - but from the perspective of diagnosing why are many people leaving, and what do they say about us when they do, this is the top #1 cited reason that I have seen: our toxicity. And I cannot think of any better example of that than hexbear.net, which is why I am such a fan of either outright defederation if that is the only option, or at least making that instance opt-in rather than force it to be opt-out, which apparently seems to cause many people to flee us and go either back to Reddit or to Bluesky or whatever, hence opting out of the entire Threadiverse. Basically: either hexbear goes, or the newbie users do. And even that is only a start to reducing our overall toxicity level as presented to newbie users, though PieFed at least has several wonderful tools to help with that built-in already:-).
Has anything changed since a year ago in this regard though? Tankies are still here, lemmy.ml not defederated from anywhere, hexbear almost disappeared but managed to come back. We made discuss.online a better landing space for newbies, but now the shift is more towards PieFed, which I mentioned several thoughts about in a separate thread.
Not only on Reddit, even on Lemmy there are a bunch of people bashing on the tankies being present on Lemmy, in that community e.g. in the recent discussion at https://piefed.zip/c/fedibridge/p/795307/r-redditalternatives-comments-ask-for-alternatives-piefed-and-lemmy-are-mentioned-a-few-ti, like this comment:
We can say all we like how we wish that it were not a problem, but people on Reddit seem to disagree and not want to join regardless. Though I have noticed that either positive or negative opinions are very rarely delivered these days in r/RedditAlternatives. I wonder if people are simply tired of the subject and now just tune it out like noise. If so, then we missed a major opportunity to offer a true alternative to Reddit. Hopefully there will be more, and I am not suggesting to give up, only trying to highlight a major issue of concern so that we can move forward.
Chiefly imho, by recommending PieFed rather than Lemmy instances (and strongly preferably one that defederates from hexbear).
!meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works is a very toxic community as well, you don’t see SJW defederated from most instances.
Lemmy.ml is defederated from infosec.pub and lemmy.cafe.
Piefed having actual instance blocking at the user level make defederation less of an issue.
Excellent point and example, I agree.
MwoG and !Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net have every right to exist, just like 4chan, just like NSFW content, just like bots - my beef has always been that they should all be labeled. Properly labeled NSFW can be blurred, filtered out, now a new feature on PieFed allows it to be specifically searched for even, bots likewise can be blured, filtered out, or at least you see a visual indicator that replying to it will not yield a conversation.
In fairness to CTH, the community sidebar does accurately describe what it does. Unfortunately, Lemmy’s UX workflow does not show the sidebar text when browsing by All, and some apps seem to go very very very much out of their way to hide every sidebar - burying it behind 5+ clicks and also a deep scroll required. For someone who already knows what CTP is all about that’s perfectly fine - you only need such text once, or perhaps in communities like YPTB rarely (for the acronyms) - but for a newbie to stumble across CTP unawares can be… well… devastating, quite frankly.
So I do not begrudge its existence, only it being so readily accessible the same as any other community, even though it is NOT just like any normal community. But, like a bot, like NSFW, if someone wanted to opt-in to it, that should be their decision. i.e. by making an account on an instance that federates with hexbear and joining that community.
Separately, but not unrelated, hexbears are known trolls. It’s fine to troll in the community specifically created for trolling, but to do it all across the entire Threadiverse, especially in flagrant violation of the rules for other communities… that’s not ideal. Hexbear should be defederated from because Hexbear consistently violates the rules that others set for themselves, and because consent should matter.
But if a space like PieFed.zip wants to federate with hexbear… that’s its business, fine. Though WITH NO LABEL on CTP, I strongly think that it makes that instance less “Newbie-friendly”. Wouldn’t an instance that does not label bots or NSFW be the same? Also, note that PieFed currently has no capability (iirc?) to label all users from an instance. So when someone comes over from Reddit, makes let’s say a comment in an innocuous community such as memes@lemmy.world, and gets trolled by a hexbear user, and then again by other users in other communities, over and over and over and over again, why should we be surprised when they nope right back to Reddit?
Perhaps goat should have a label as well. Perhaps I should myself? I agree that I write long messages, so if I had a label that said “writes long messages”, why should I even be offended? It would help warn people away, if they did not want to receive such? Though for others of us, that’s what we came here for - not just a hundred or so characters that would fit within Twitter’s old restrictions, but LONG-form content, chock full of facts and detailed analyses - I change my opinions over time in response to such, when presented with such details and logic (e.g. I used to argue that while hexbear was a troll instance that lemmy.ml was not, though I now have a much more nuanced take on the subject). Choice is a beautiful thing :-).
So I am not opposed in the least to someone seeing CTP, I am slightly more opposed to federating the hexbear instance (but whatever, to each their own), and what I am mainly opposed to is that Newbies in particular can be exposed to hexbear’s trolling even/especially outside of their communities without any kind of warning whatsoever - as if their trolling was the same type as any other content here. Their trolling is their decision, while our decisions to allow their trolling is on us, and all the more so to validate it when a label could be applied but we choose not to. Which makes us a Nazi bar - not that we are Nazis ourselves (or in this case, we are not hexbear trolls), but if we accept them here as if they were any other user, with zero distinction between them and us, then that makes us only one step removed from them. Especially in the eyes of someone noping out of our content because we look superficially similar to them.
We cannot force others to join here, only become as enticing as possible so that if they don’t join us, that’s their loss:-).
Meanwhileongrad is only a toxic community if you go into the community to argue in favour of tankie talking points or otherwise defend them.
If you believe that violence and bigotry isn’t okay then you won’t encounter toxicity.
I just had a look to find an old thread to show to @openstars@piefed.social : https://lazysoci.al/post/39100205/20292399
But I just noticed you banned me 5 days ago for “brigading”? What evidence do you have for that claim?
Edit: just found this thread: https://lazysoci.al/post/39736457/20699113
Well, I’ll let openstars decide what to do.
You regularly post threads you comment on to YPTB’s chatroom so others get involved. YPTB and other such Tankie places also regularly use alts, and as soon as you posted the thread, a few alt accounts popped up arguing with Tankie talking points. That’s brigading, and I’m not going to allow it in my community.
Trying to prove you don’t brigade by posting to a brigade community is certainly a move. Why should I unban you when you continue to manipulate threads and engage in snark communities?
Fwiw whenever I tell my friends about us, I point them to my feeds of lemmy communities with less politics and tech:
That is a superb idea. Plus PieFed.social defederates from hexbear, so there’s no chance of them accidentally wandering into let’s say !Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net and get dunked on without understanding why. That community has a right to exist, but it most definitely should be properly labelled so that users are forewarned - unlike how Lemmy handles it where you can get into a post via All without ever once seeing its sidebar text.
Idk this left and right directionalism is worthless online, where half of users are fake influence agents with bots and mechanized troll legions.
Now with chatbots, certain parties have the better ones, to flood social media, pretending to be all rypes. I imagine are a factor.
I saw this post on lemmy.ml just prior to the USA election, seemingly portraying the bOtH sIdEs myth that helped encourage people to not vote and thereby get Donald Trump elected:
Make of that what you will.