Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
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Slowly going down. The learning curve is too steep for the general population (personal opinion, happy to debate).
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I wonder how much of that decrease is a result of instances shutting down and their users migrating off of Lemmy to platforms like PieFed and others. The users may not be completely gone, just not on Lemmy.
Piefed helped a number of communities reparent to their homeserver as-is when lemm.ee closed down, definitely a valid theory. meta@lemm.ee community final posts if you're keen to farm data.
I have enough projects already lol.
PieFed MAUs increased by 400%.
Any ideas what difference that make sto the total activity stats throughout the fediverse?
At a rough glance, it looks like PieFed's active users went up by roughly the same number as Lemmy's went down!
Although that's just the last couple of months - on top of that, the "Threadiverse" (including Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, and flarum, though the wider "Fediverse" also includes Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other stuff that isn't based on community forums like we do here; note from here on I'll focus exclusively on Lemmy) activity has been going down for quite awhile now, basically since the Rexodus.
According to people talking on r/Redditalternatives, Lemmy just isn't interesting enough. Before Blaze's (and others) heroic efforts to counteract it, previously the other top reason was that it was too confusing to have to pick an instance first before signing up (which is a legitimate thing for Mastodon even if not so much for Lemmy).
I get it: not everyone uses Arch Linux and hates Windows hard enough for this audience. Purity beatings will continue until morale improves.
Also Lemmy can be so incredibly toxic - sharing any kind of nuance will almost certainly be lost in the flood of people piling on not even for what someone says but if it sounds vaguely like something else that is popular to hate on. Argumentative people are just looking for excuses to argue, period. You personally have helped with that a ton, thank you so much for caring and sharing positivity vibes π½β£οΈ!! You are helping people not want to leave and go back to Reddit (which sounds odd I know, but remember that the tiny niche subs there really are different than the larger ones, and people can be much kinder in them than the more popular subs there, or the more popular communities here).
Sharing this feeling as well, thank you so much @LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone for all your posts and comments on the platform!
Right back at you bro! β€οΈ
Thanks so much for taking the time to write that out! It is a lot of work, but I love seeing people hanging out happily chatting in a nice thread. π
I love it too, but it is something that does not happen "naturally". A lot of people feel intimidated by e.g. someone spinning up a bot that will send 20-100 identical messages at someone (yes that's a real story that I was reading about earlier today), and while that one is on the extreme side, more mundane methods of trolling work almost as well for a fraction of the effort.
So thank you for your efforts to resist the trend and create a space where people can actually enjoy things:-).
That's really nice of you thanks. You really are welcome π
Iβm curious what you think makes email easy enough to understand for the general population, but lemmy to hard.
If a 'professional' can't even find a file in a computer, should we really allow them to be a part of our society? They could be a danger for us all.
Good question! I say yes, because a functioning society is formed from the combined knowledge, skills, and efforts of it's unique and diverse constituents, each of whom have strengths and weaknesses. However, if one does not have technical aptitude, then they should not be in a position that decides or controls technology - there are plenty of other non-techy jobs they could do, like farming or fishing.
It took me a while to get my head round, but I'm in my 40s and shit with tech
What harms people is not the lack of knowledge but unwillingness to learn.
That said, there is only so much attention span to go around:-).
That email comparison annoys the fuck out of me. How is any of this like email?
Wow, calm down. It was just a question. The core difference between Reddit and lemmy is in my mind like the core difference between something like whatsapp and email.
Wasn't directed at you personally, sorry. I've seen that comparison before and it makes me doubt my sanity.
The comparisons could go on. Iβm sure there are contrasts too. But email is a point of reference most people know about. Unless they donβt have an email address. I guess.
And you think the average user thinks of ANY of this when they're using Lemmy for the first time so they must conclude "oh it's just like email"? This has absolutely nothing to do with using the platform.
I answered your question about the similarities man. Settle down. You asked any and I gave you it. You didnβt ask for how itβs exactly like email.
Also, I think tech nerds tend to look down on others in this topic. βItβs too difficult, itβs too much to learn.β β- and thus it wonβt be profitable? What are we worried about?
Activity pub and related networks didnβt just shrivel up and die right away due to this problem. Iβm arguing with a stranger on the internet via a newer activity pub platform, in fact.
You're right about tech nerds - I'm pretty sure most are borderline autistic, with a common trait of being far too literal in casual conversation. I (on the spectrum) spent a lot of time and effort conditioning myself to be more chill with neuro-norms. And it worked! I don't get bent out of shape anymore discussing techy things with non-techy people, not do I correct them, because they are going to forget the technical details the second I turn away, but they will definitely remember (and dislike) the nerd who starting arguing over some trivial detail.
Email and Lemmy are both digital communication systems where people use personal computers connected to the internet to socialize across the world. To you, they are completely different. To my parents and most of my clients (boomers), they are one and the same. Is the Nintendo Switch the same as the Steam Deck? Hell no, I don't even game, but I can rattle off a dozen differences between the two platforms. Yet, to those who are technologically illiterate (which is most Americans), they are one and the same. But I can understand your frustration, I had a Sega Genesis growing up, and my parents always called it a Nintendo, to which I would autistically shout "Moooom, it's a Seg-AH GEN-esis, it's totally different!"
Very relatable, of course, and triggering a bunch of that type of memory, thanks for that. But bizarrely, it's the opposite. The first thing I read about the Fediverse is how if I can understand email, I can understand the Fediverse. This was people who are way more geeky (and presumably autistic) than I am. I've seen that comparison several times since then and I still struggle to understand what the fuck they meant by that, other than "your username is username@hostname.suffix which looks like an email address" which is so fucking surface level it makes my head spin and has fuck-all to do with how you use the various platforms.
I think you and I are in that sweet sweet band of The Spectrumβ’ where we have heightened senses, intelligence, thirst for knowledge, ability to see things from unique perspectives, but without all the autistic screeching π
I couldn't possibly disagree with that, for obvious reasons. (. β α΄ β.)
I believe that is more valid for Mastodon instances than for Lemmy ones.
Except that you are still correct in the operational sense that most will not bother. See e.g. the migration to BlueSky rather than Mastodon.
PieFed really might make for a qualitative shift though, in offering so many options such as categories of communities (akin to multi-Reddits), and polling, and flairs (both user and post) that Reddit users were used to and it makes them feel really like they are "slumming it" coming over to Lemmy that lacks all of that. The categories of communities and user-customizable and shareable feeds in particular really help with "content discovery", as too does PieFed's wizard that walks a first-time user through the process of setting up and joining what the user indicates that they are interested in.
In contrast, Lemmy users are supposed to go... (somewhere? but where? where are these "somewhere"s ever mentioned? on a side-bar somewhere? extremely rarely I would believe they might be, but the vast majority of the time usually not) to find the content that they want to see. Often they end up browsing All rather than Subscribed, and get so frustrated with that that they simply leave Lemmy altogether, and then report their complaints over in r/RedditAlternatives. PieFed solved that particular problem though, as well as several others, so at this point I think any discussion about "the learning curve" needs to be split into one for Lemmy, where it really does remain too complicated for the average Reddit non-technical normie, vs. PieFed where it does not anymore.
And I need to be careful or else this will turn into a HUGE tangent, but also the political extremism and bOtH sIdEs SaMe-ism on "Lemmy" is an enormous turn-off for people as well. Yes they can block each troll on an individual basis, or the same with communities, no they can't TRULY block an entire instance (that horribly mis-named function would have been better termed a "community muting" rather than "instance blocking", which still allows comments from users on that instance to appear everywhere else, plus able to reply and even trigger notifications, etc. - IT IS NOT A BLOCK). Anyway, how this relates is that mainstream non-technical normies just get overwhelmed, and don't enjoy the political extremism having to be an opt-out rather than opt-in feature, with most of the ways presented by the software to opt-out not TRULY opting "out" rather than merely claiming to do so. In contrast, one of the first things that PieFed does is to set up a block-list of keywords, offering the options All, None, and even a third one Some to allow the content at a lower frequency. I have never put any words into it... but I appreciate that the feature exists, for the sake of those who want / need it to be able to enjoy their social media of choice.
I predict that for all these reasons plus a few others, Lemmy will continue to die off. The die-hard userbase seems not to care actually, even being oddly proud of this? While PieFed - which just increased its userbase +400% - will continue to grow, and maybe PieFed will actually be the thing that captures more of the Reddit users. Lemmy certainly will not be, nor Mbin, and I cannot say for certain that PieFed will, just that it seems to me to be the only thing that possibly could (Sublinks seems dead in the water atm, due to the primary - only? - dev having a baby).