Total monthly posts exploded after Spez enshitified Reddit, and is still growing steadily month over month.
That suggests that the current decline in monthly active users is primarily because lurkers who only came to lemmy after initially hearing about it on Reddit, went back to lurking Reddit.
The number of users that are contributors is still growing, and that’s what’s important.
Thanks for the positive news!!
There’s also folks like me who came, 15 years on Reddit and I haven’t been back.
Those of us who actually interacted with the platform and left aren’t going back.
Yep, arrived during the initial digg exodus, had tens of thousands of posts at Reddit, modded two subreddits. Closed my account the day during the protests and haven’t been back.
I’m not as active here, mostly due to a busier life but found a new home anyway.
I’m close to that too, but I think mine was 13 years. The weird thing that I’ve noticed is that most of the time I was on Reddit, almost no one I talked to in real life used Reddit. I struggled for years to try to get people to check the site out. Now that I left, I swear I hear someone I know mention Reddit exponentially more often. The average person doesn’t give a damn about how shitty the platform has become, because they weren’t around to see what it used to be. The average person WANTS to see ads interspersed with their cookie cutter content with stupid ass features like chat and followers. Good riddance.
Same, 13 years redditor here. And since I came to Lemmy in June, I posted over 1k posts because I love this platform and want it to grow. Fuck reddit.
Yup, that’s me, too.
Agreed. First they killed RedditGifts, then AMAs, then the up vote/down vote debacle, and when they took away my ability to use Relay is when I left. Screw them.
My Reddit account was 12 years old. I’m staying on Lemmy forever, monthly active users be damned.
I’m a counter example. I contributed on Reddit, moderated my own subreddit with a couple of thousand viewers; couple of tens of contributors
I haven’t been back to that sub, haven’t appointed any other mods. If automod can’t handle shit, shit isn’t being handled
I have been back to other subs. There are small inoffensive places on Reddit that simply haven’t moved
I still visit those subs, still write on them, just not nearly as often
Edit to add: checking today, those subs are becoming less good. With no good app, so many of the prolific commenters don’t comment much now. I also had a reply to a 2015 comment I made. I thought stuff was auto-archived much quicker than that
I’m yet to encounter the majority of issues I hear Lemmings griping about. Everyone has been pretty civil toward me. Every time my inbox blows up I feel dread, only to open it and find zero confrontation or vitriol. I’m not running into any racists, sexists, bigots, etc., and I certainly haven’t noticed a decline in content (I browse Top ~6 Hours).
I realize my personal experience doesn’t equate to these problems not existing, but I do get the strong impression that people are exaggerating greatly.
Exactly my experience as well. Sure, I don’t have infinite scroll, but I also don’t feel like an algorithm is trying to make me angry. When I get responses, they’re typically thoughtful or on topic.
infinite scroll
Depends on the client you are using.
For phone or tablets try using the Voyager native app.
For browser try m.lemmy.world which is just the web version of Voyager.
There are other clients like old.lemmy.world for that “authentic” feel.
I’ve been active for a month and in my opinion too many users have radicalised and extremist mindsets, but other than that it’s alright.
Going back to reddit would mean to install that unbearable app they have and having to deal with incompetent admins, so I will stay here for some time.
I can see why it’s off-putting for a lot of people though.
many users have radicalised and extremist mindsets,
I think thats the whole internet nowdays, unless you decide to exclusivelly consume cat content (and even then theres gonna be a way to jam in extremist political views by some nutter somehow).
Although i have to admit that the ones here are of a diferent breed than most, mainly tankies and people on that side of the compass (and yes they are very annoying about it).
One upside to lemmy is that ,at least up untill now, the mods and admins are very neutral and i rarelly see deleted comments (or maybe they are hidden… i dunno) and that theres genuine free speech in here, i mean if you whant you can look at my comment history, i get downvoted to oblivion most of the time but my comments are still up and not censored.
Although there is this weird thing on other instances (im in sh.itjust.works and they dont do this i know i tryied it) that delete words on peoples comments and posts, mainly slurs and politically incorrect words. Really, i seen that some months before, dont know if it still like that now with the world users, but if you type something like fa***t in .world you will get “deleted” in that word specifically irc
Do I understand it correct that the comment would stay but the word would get censored?
Yes, try it if you whant, my instance does allow that type of words.
Dont know about yours though.
You can always delete it after the fact if it makes you uncomfortable having it in your comment history
I don’t know how to feel about it, gives me some “spez editing the database to change comments” vibes.
I guess I would feel better to just get notified that my comment got removed.
Or is it just a displaying option based on the instance you logged in with and it gets filtered on the display side and a different instance user would still see the original?
Indeed it does, thats why i shit so much on political extremeism, it inevitably ends in censorship.
My advice would be that if it makes you feel uncomfortable (and you still whant to use lemmy), change instances, like i said, shit.just.works doesnt do that, dont know which other instances do and doesnt. I think lemmy.ml absolutelly does.
My only issue is the lack of small communities that get posts frequently, and yeah, duh, I should contribute, but theres only so much I can say about my transness.
One thing I miss about reddit is just being able to endlessly read about peoples experiences and stupid shitty trans memes, thats just missing here right now
Exactly this. My small Reddit communities had a few posts per day. The equivalent on Lemmy have a few per year. Still, I don’t miss them enough to go back.
If you share a thought on a Biden/Trump thread, an Israel/Palestine thread, or another topic that attracts strong views, and your opinion is different than the hive, expect some vitriol and confrontation.
I’ve run into it while seriously looking for debate or productive conversation.
The same thing happens on Reddit, though. I think that’s kind of just the internet from now on. /r/worldnews is literally just a pro-Israel, anti-Palestine echo chamber so it’s nice to see another perspective on here. (I only browse Reddit at work not logged in for the record.) Over here, the hive mind on that seems to change thread to thread.
You mean pro Palestine? You literally can’t say “hey Hamas should be considered at fault too for using hospitals in the first place” without someone telling you that it’s 11101010% Israel’s fault for ever defending themselves when any civilian could get hurt.
And we’re off!..
I’m still seeing so much growth in new content and communities, idk if the raw number of users is the metric we even should care about. Is it the best measure of quality?
I also think a big part of it is how active users are counted. Saw in a different thread that it only counts accounts who have commented or posted in the last month. Well… I browse and vote on probably an average of 30-50 posts and many of their comments every single day, but the last comment I left was over a month ago.
I also wonder if the active user count is counting people who made multiple accounts across different instances and was therefore always massively overinflated to begin with. I have 5 lemmy accounts - one on lemmy.world when I first joined, one on lemmynsfw for happy fun times, and 3 more trying to find a different instance with the de federation policy and hoster that I wanted after lemmy.world was going through their ddos downtime issue.
I mostly lurk or comment like this but I’ve found the community to be much better over here. I can’t see myself going back.
I mostly lurk, too, but enjoy being around my fellow Lemmings.
The only decline I have seen as someone who mostly lurks is in conservatives who thought this was the next Voat. After the surge I saw an uptick in all kinds of people, and a lot of them I don’t mind seeing leave.
You don’t need this lil slice of the internet to be the “next big thing”, you just need a place to go to see the stuff you like.
Ya ever since everyone defederated from exploding heads there’s definitely less of them. Maybe one day they’ll create another instance. I hope they do, maybe a less transphobic conservative instance, just for the variety of people.
Long time lurker here, 99% of the time I go to post a comment I delete it before posting like ah fuck it. I’m trying to engage a bit more now there are more users.
So, following the 90/9/1 rule, 90% lurk, 9% comment, 1% create content, we are primarily losing from the 90%? That seems to be a good thing for the long-term. As long as we aren’t losing from the 1% I’d say we’re good
I feel like content is always getting better too
I feel I have better engagement here. It is still missing some more niche communities that Reddit had, and I’m trying to be active to grow them, but it has been slow.
lurkers are also not counted in this statistics. ifaik only active users who are posting or commenting are counted. so there might be more users out there who are active and just lurking and they are not counted.
Are active users classified as posting or does just logging in count?
Yeah, it’s plain to see that engagement is steadily climbing. The top posts keep getting higher and higher numbers and new, interesting communities keep popping up.
I’m still lurking here!
Smaller communities aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Compared to reddit I rarely feel like I’m commenting into the void.
Or into the thunderdome where no matter what you say, someone will fight you for it
Them’s fightin’ words, pal!
Don’t you call me pal, buddy!
Don’t call me buddy, guy!
I’m not your guy, friend!
I’m not your friend, my enemy!
I’m not your enemy, darling !
im no buddy of yours bucko
I disagree!
No you don’t
Actually, he does, and you look really stupid right now for thinking otherwise.
Here’s a link I haven’t researched to prove it.
That disagrees with my worldview and despite being definite proof I refuse to acknowledge it, stupid head
I choose to misrepresent your argument, attack it, and then declare myself the winner. I also refer to you as “slick” throughout and finish every sentence with :-)
I disagree with your statement that claims that @killeronthecorner doesn’t disagree with @damage.
Exactly, lemmy needs to grow but if it just continues to grow and grow eventually it will just turn into what reddit is now. I’m happy to have something small to be a part of for now… i don’t think you needed me to tell you this but they say commenting is good for lemmy, so here i am
Ive seen that in reddit shadowbanning is rampant on new accounts, so mayve that has to do with something. Specially if you have been banned before.
What’s the easiest way to find communities across different instances? If I could figure that out, I would just forget about reddit.
There’s hundreds of us! Hundreds!
But hey, apparently that’s enough, I haven’t been bored on Lemmy yet. And as the enshittification of Reddit continues there might well be some other exodus.
Honestly there are enough quality posts and comments here that keep me engaged. It feels like a lot of creative people made the move.
Every time I go to check out reddit, I am shocked by how many right-wing psychos there are. I don’t bother commenting anymore because there’s so much vitriol there.
Reddit is like that ex the whole lemmy isn’t over yet while loudly drunkenly screaming “I’m so over them!”.
Advice: focus on yourself and your content.
me unloading every meme I’ve ever stolen because it drives engagement
o7
Also: focus on yourself and you’re content 👍
Also: focus on yourself and you’re incontinent
Also: focus on your shelf in another continent
Also: it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople, man.
Oh, it changed?
Also: get an oil change, it’s due soon.
This is exactly right, I even find myself wanting to check my GME DRS subs but knowing I shouldn’t and feeling bad about it and blocking it for myself until the next week when I unblock and check my subs again in shame. But I’ll never return for real because I know she’s bad for me, wait we’re still talking about Reddit right?
Bruh you’ve only ever posted once, you should focus on trying to make content and posting it on lemmy, instead of criticizing those of us who are.
I mean, would you call this post ‘content’? It’s just low-effort, non-discussion-provoking, nothingness about a platform that nobody around here cares about anymore (except you apparently?)
Says the user with zero posts. And all the people upvoting it apparently do. Bahahaha
What can we do to get you to go back to Reddit?
Not a damn thing. Zero posts not surprised. Reddit definitely doesnt miss you.
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with a smoother brain. Congrats, your trophy will arrive by mail in about 3-5 business days.
Dont worry, I’ll keep posting content for you to engage with.
Most of the stuff you post is low quality shite mate not “content” it’s mainly 99% vague political memes. this shite makes up 90% of lemmy
You literally repost AI generated images, you dont even possess the originality to come up with your own prompt Lmao and you’ve never even made a post with over 1k upvotes. Git gud
cringe af
Dont care, dude implied nonone cares about my posts, thousands of upvotes beg to differ. Cringe or notz i post shit people engage with.
honestly it’s replaced reddit for me in a good way, because it has just enough new content that I can check it before bed every day and scroll for a bit, but not enough to where I spend entire lunch breaks on it. sometimes I go days without even checking it. if anything it’s made my relationship with my browser / phone healthier than reddit.
Exactly. Lemmy is an anti-doomscrolling platform and that’s very healthy and amazing.
Horseshit. Lemmy is plastered in content about climate change, the Middle East, and other depressing shit.
I think they mean doom scrolling as in algorithmic dopamine loops
Exactly, and that the content eventually just ends. I didn’t mean that every post is positive news.
Doomscrolling does not literally mean your feed is full of negative content lol, it’s just mindless scrolling
I somehow replaced reddit with instagram reels and youtube shorts.
Ah, they got ya by the dopamine balls
Yeah they do. Would you believe me if i said giving up social media is harder than giving up nicotine?
Give yourself some grace, yes corporate social media is addictive and yes it is easy to get lost mindlessly scrolling but the important question to ask is why is your brain so exhausted and stressed that mindlessly scrolling is the only thing you really have the mental energy to do so much of the time?
Western society repeatedly slams through the narrative that social media addiction is the reason people are miserable and it is all a pathetic attempt to distract us from the fact that our lives suck because of actual horrible things like not being able to afford rent, being in endless debt, not being able to afford healthcare and any number of other awful stresses.
If you need to blob out and scroll after getting out of your shitty job that pays shit where you are treated like shit and sitting in shitty traffic on the way home for who knows how long that’s on society for only providing predatory options that abuse you.
For a lot of people the only thing they actually have the energy to do after work every night is mindlessly scroll, it is a grace that people at least have that to turn to even if it is predatory. It is a symptom not the core issue.
Also true. And there are plenty of worthwhile/educational things to be found on the apps that can help a bit more than they harm. But yeah, it being a symptom is spot on.
100%, all I really want is something I can look at and perhaps sensibly chuckle at when I have a few minutes… Not a pasasitic brain worm that really wants me to pay attention to it.
The only problem I have, is that I can’t seem to find the porn.
There’s an entire instance dedicated to it: lemmynsfw.com
I tried, but they never approved my account. I know they do it in waves, but I applied a month ago
a lot of servers are really weird about porn, ngl. its not that they just don’t allow it on their server (which, cool, thats fine), its that they go out of their way to block it. its a new wave of puritanism and i don’t really like it. although porn isn’t that hard to find if you are on a good server.
Do you know of a good server for that? Because I tried to sign up with Lemmy n sfw they never activated my account, and it was like a month ago.
And yeah, I’m not sure why the sex positivity movement seems to have completely reversed itself. There is this idea that the idea of sexuality of any kind is somehow inherently wrong. Which is stupid. I need all the fetishes
Just make sure you put a good human text in the prompt when you sign up. Otherwise they think you’re a bot.
Also check if your username already exists there because the form doesn’t seem to do that.
PS: Fetishes FTW <3 Though of course fetlife rules for that.
Yeah it’s one of the thing I liked about Reddit. This everything goes mentality.
I think the problem is that many lemmy servers are based in Germany and despite their open reputation they do have some sub-communities that are very regimental and strict due to their calvinist heritage. We have the same stuff in Holland unfortunately. Some people are super open, but other communities are extremely strict and religious.
The way they deal with it is different though. Germans try to pave over these differences by blocking anything anyone could find offensive. I think this is what promts these blocks. In Holland we just don’t care and are more belligerent against the more conservative groups. Which I like.
Being on Lemmy make me realise I was addicted to the front page of r*ddit having something new everytime I refreshed
Now I sort by top/6hours - reduced my screen time and see more quality things
It will be sad if peoples leave but if the top stay It is enough
This is exactly what I do! And I’ve also noticed how much more time I’ve spent doing other things as opposed to doomscrolling.
Yes. I feel like I’m finally sorting between the addiction I developed to “content” on Reddit and the interaction that makes sites like this great.
Lemmy is the Nicolette of reddit
Lurker here. This is my first post. I ain’t leaving either.
I saw a discussion the other day that may have been part of it. They were pointing out that many users when first joining lemmy created accounts on multiple instances. Whether they needed to find a community they preferred or do to ddos attacks and other issues causing outages a lot of those accounts have likely become inactive more as time went by. So the numbers may not be decreasing so much as been inflated by individuals coming up as multiple active users early on. I haven’t looked into how they are verifying what users are active though, so it could be wrong. If someone knows more please respond.
As far as I have heard, “activeness” is measured by whether a user posted a comment/post the past month, so lurkers/voters are not being counted. This does likely skew the numbers quite a bit.
EDIT: Found this nice answer from ~5 months ago. Yup, it appears to only count post+comment and leaves out voters and lurkers. :(
Yeah, my first account on Lemmy was actually on Beehive, but I was confused by their sign up process (there wasn’t a page update telling me I had to verify my email, it just happened in the background and didn’t appear to do anything when I clicked sign up). I sorted it out when I checked my email an hour later, but that killed the vibe for me. So then I made this account, but jerboa didn’t support Aussie zone at the time so I made a shitjustworks account and used that for a while until I started becoming more active in the Aussie zone communities and tried to jump ship just for the ease
But yeah, I saw quite a few people who were very confused about the whole instances thing and a few others that have jumped ship a few times because of it. And as I mainly browse local top day, then all top day once that runs out of content, and my instance federates with all the instances I want to interact with, I don’t see a reason to use either of those other accounts I created
I was on this really great cyberpunk / LGBT instance called DATATERM.digital. It was even advertised on the joinlemmy page. However it disappeared without a trace and there is no word on it ever coming back :( I haven’t found another one where I felt at home.
Honestly, good. The Internet was better when people were spread out across many small message board and chat rooms. The golden age of the Internet was when you’d do a search for something and 500 different forms and little websites would pop up.
Now’s it’s all reddit, “X,” and shitty corporate owned nonsense. We turned 2020 Internet into 90’s cable TV.
Gonna add a comment to my upvote: I agree with this so fucking much. I look back at the joyous days when I had… fuck if I know how many websites, each dedicated to its own thing, most with its own userbase, so unique and so defined. The only good thing about Reddit for me was gaming communities that, unfortunately, replaced actual forums that once allowed me to engage with passionate people and look for relevant info, even if it’s been years since its creation.
It’s probably just me being unaware, but gaming communities these days feel dead outside their respective subreddits and some Discord servers - and the latter is an even worse experience because the form factor of an endless IRC-clone that actually seems to save chat history is pretty fucking dumb more than it is convenient. If anyone has any suggestions there, shoot.
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Lemmy much more than I did Reddit. I find it’s overall less toxic and I’m therefore engaging more instead of just lurking.
One criticism, though: I really do not like the communities that use bots to copy over posts and comments from Reddit. I see no value in commenting or engaging on those posts as the original poster is not present for discussion. It’s also kind of weird that the original posters are most likely not aware their post and its comments have been copied elsewhere and may be having further engagement.
Let’s be honest it works for memes. Memes are 99% of the time just reposted garbage anyways.
For everything else though, I agree. Bots shouldn’t be used
Yes – I agree, it does work for memes.
I’m fine with the post especially in niche communities just to keep them alive. But yeah comments seem useless.
One of the best things I’ve done is to uncheck “show bot accounts” in settings.
On Reddit it got so bad I stopped responding to replies entirely. I’m still not very regular about that, but whenever I check now, I’m shocked to find I’m not just getting blindly downvoted for potentially contraversial statements. It feels like a really good sign to me - progress in an era of downward spirals as low effort people all over the world spew their nonsense on everything.
I treat Reddit like I treat twitter. When something happens, I look at it to get a read on the situation, or what people are saying or whatever. But I otherwise totally ignore it now.
A year ago, I couldn’t go an hour without looking at Reddit.
Lemmy is losing users, but Reddit is using losers.
deleted by creator
To be honest I kind of like it here.
I’ve been here for like 6 months now, maybe more. Posts SEEM to be getting more engagement than when I started. It definitely doesn’t seem like there are fewer users.
My mental health is so much better than when i scrolled reddit. Everyone here is so nice and doesn’t talk like 14 year olds with an ego. Also theres front page furry porn
I also find the limited number of posts and comments keep me at a healthy level of browsing. On Reddit I could get sucked down the rabbit hole of even one post, reading comments and replying to stuff for hours. There’s really very little of value that can ever be accomplished at that depth.
Me too man. I had a really unhealthy Reddit problem.
Theses days, after about an hour of scrolling I’m out of content, which feels sensible.
I agree with this, and on top of that the lack of infinite scroll is a feature to me because it requires me to deliberately consider each post before the next page rather than just spamming downward looking for that next dopamine hit.
Everyone here is so nice
Until you mention Windows.
Even then, they’re trying to help you.
Rarely. Mostly it’s just anger, which is the reason why some people don’t move to it.
Did you find this out by asking them?
This
Mostly it’s just anger
Or this
which is the reason why some people don’t move to it.
If the first, there are other bad/tracking/adware things that people use and the people that try to help have a helpful tone. But for windows, people that ‘try to help’ always talk in a blaming tone and act like “I’m superior than you bc i use linux”
Or if the second
Bc you need some help to figure out Linux but if the community that is supposed to help act like that would people move?
I have never hated Linux more than now
I use arch, btw
I don’t think they criticize people for using Windows. I bet that no one wanted to offend you.
People do criticize Windows itself and I think it’s okay.
Idk people criticize most of the bad things. but when it is windows, things change a bit.
I think you can find some jerks in any community, it’s people. But I doubt that GNU/Linux enthusiasts hate people for using Windows in general. I personally a GNU/Linux user and I never hate people for using Windows.
It’s just like Reddit - they have more content, but we prefer Lemmy because of freedom. And we hate Reddit (and spez), not it’s users.
Agreed, I went on reddit recently and realized how much anxiety it used to cause me. Fuck that place. There is definitely something to their algorithm meant to make you feel that way.
The front page furry porn is going to turn me into a furry one day…
Sadly I can’t share this experience, my instance is non-nsfw
Maybe it’s time to set up an account in another instance
Not really if you get into political talk, you will be shit talked into oblivion, and in the subject of pornography, i find the one here on lemmynsfw bland af, its mostly tje same chicks posting over and over again. But other than that I have seen before complaints from people on the lemmy.nsfw community that they are surprisingly puritan with the nsfw content allowed, and if you look for that type of content you will realize that its true, like i can think of various extreme fetishes that are banned that i rather not type here in public, but some that are more perplexing are like csncs, which its just a type of roleplay between 2 consenting adults and thats banned for some reason, and rape hentai, while i understeand while that would be controversial, its still a fetish sone people would have and its in draw form so no harm done to anyone, also some other gross stuff that nobody likes like scat or guro (drawn ofc)
Which like i said nobody whants to watch those last 2 except for the people that do and there even are comunities of those in reddit, so its very weird that there arent any equivalents here.
(Btw when i say banned i mean that they dont allow comunities that post that type of content.)
(And before you ask no im not into any of that type of the aformentioned shit)
Now you could say “well change instances”, but i heard bad things from the other ones here that do allow some of that stuff, specially the hentai focused ones, which i heard are mainly legally dubius shit and a little dangerous to go there so i rather look for porn/hentai somewhere els
I still love Lemmy. It’s nice to be able to post or comment without getting an automated response telling you you’re doing 15 things wrongs for trying to participate like happens on schmeddit.
Was there some stat released somewhere showing lemmy “losing users”? I’m pretty new and plan on sticking around, the quality here is infinitely better than reddit.
I feel the communities that I’m part of here have decent engagement. Even if it’s losing users, I feel it’s still high quality.
Yeah. I’m more concerned with quality than raw numbers.
I love how so many of us former reddit lurkers found a home on Lemmy/the fediverse. I have absolutely loved being a part of the greater community here, I don’t know how else to describe it but it feels like my Internet home. I love all you fellow nerds. Obligatory fuck spez.
