this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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That kills the less active ones and achieves the opposite of what Lemmy wants to do.
A lot of the "less active ones" are completely dead. Many mid-tier topics (not niche, but not "meme shitpost") have a sea of dead communities and 1-2 active ones and it's difficult to find them without actually clicking through the full list of results.
Tbh, and I plan to do this for piefed.social soon (and rimu has given me the go-ahead) - abandoned discarded communities with literally zero posts need to be purged by instances. It's just clutter.
If a community was active and then isn't, that's fine, but a lot of communities are made and then never used.
Cool, it's a good idea. But there are also other instances.
Then there is the issue of communities with a large number of subs but where the last post was 7 months ago and they have 0 MAUs. While a community with a lot less subs can have several posts per week and at least some MAUs (couple of hundred).
Yeah, I know. That's why I think other instances should also do it lol
And that's exactly what the blogpost is trying to solve.
I think this could also be improved with a better search page, which shows how active the communities are in the search results so you don't have to click through them all, I think v1.0 is getting that
what's a higher priority: be usable enough to attract users from other platforms or be so decentralised you can't tell which community to post in?
Communities are organised by activity on Piefed, so you can see what people are using.
False dichotomy. Lemmy is already usable, and the decentralization is not that high that you can't tell where to post. But if you were posting a more proper form of the question that is not trolling, maintaining a decent level of decentralization is higher priority, as it is one of the foundationally selling attributes of the Fediverse. You can add connecting tissues and UX improvements over that, but if you abandon that you are not too different from Mozilla, and become not too different from the anti-social networks this was born to serve as an alternative to.
By whose standard?
If Lemmy is usable why is it dying?
It's slowly declining. I don't think it has anything to do with usability, or lack of - but simply that these platforms usually get boosted by Reddit doing a scandal rather than anything else.
Then the question is, why is it when users come from reddit they don't hang around? they don't tell their friends, hey this is a place that's awesome!
Every bit of decentralised user friction is friction that centralised platforms don't have
I'm very happy piefed is tackling some of these bits of friction but more is needed.
Some do. I would argue that most social media websites sign-ups become dormant accounts very quickly. Whether its Reddit, a large Discord server, a reddit alternative etc. The retainment rate of most social media sites is and has always been quite bad. People are fickle, or not as interested as they thought, or just sign up to have a better look. I don't think there's anything special about Lemmy or Piefed here, and advertising it isn't exactly easy nor even welcome.
Does Lemmy/Piefed have the best design? No. Is it uniquely bad? Not at all. I think Reddits is pretty poor in areas, but that doesn't seem to be an encumbrance to it.
[citation needed]
just look at the stats ??
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48 The monthly stats don't look too bad to me. The yearly stats are meaningless.
It would force you to write a more descriptive name. Maybe we want to hide by community title and not the handle though.
Say you want to have a community for memes. It is terrible UX if you just see seven different "memes@domainname.ending" in the result. So with an opinionated search, you instead name your community Sopuli Memes, Solarpunk Memes, Programming Memes etc., or just Funny Memes Archive, and they would not be hidden.