I just noticed that active users on Lemmy got slashed, what happened?
References:
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Lemmy devs decided to exclude lemmy.world from the join-lemmy site because it’s too big. Obviously that removes a lot of active users.
That’s stupid.
The main problem with lemmy now is adoption, there isn’t a critical mass of users yet.
When users see the stats without lemmy.world, they’ll be discouraged from joining. Add to that the issues with federation and the few who join will leave because of the steep learning curve.
Way to alienate potential users.
Yeah. If they pushed it to the bottom of the list, or even removed them from the list but kept the user count, I could kind of understand it. But censoring them completely for being too successful seems like shooting yourself in the foot.
Lemmy.world is doing great and I’m happy for it and all that, but… 20 000 monthly active users does not exactly make them a tech giant that needs to be kept in check just yet. Ideally, instances of 20 000 active users should be quite normal at some point, and having stress tested the software before then should, one assumes, be a good thing.
You probably also have the friction been .world and the developers’ Lemmy.
There is also a problem that Lemmy seems to be having problems maintaining a good middle ground of Lemmy servers.
But censoring them completely for being too successful seems like shooting yourself in the foot.
It honestly has me considering leaving the Fediverse. If this place is so anti- normie, fuck em
Most people are fine. All social media has some bad eggs - admittedly FOSS/GNU/Linux communities are prone to attract a specific breed of them. But they can generally be ignored pretty easily.
Yeah but these bad eggs are in charge
Not of Lemmy.world, where you are writing from. And I’m not even writing you from Lemmy. :)
The developers of the platform are not in control over what it’s used for. Which is what’s neat about these place.
But the comment alleges the admins of .world removed it from sign up pages due to its popularity. That’s the kind of anti-newbie behavior that turns me off.
The decentralisation probably doesn’t help either. People coming to Lemmy from other places are coming from a centralised system. That takes some getting used to.
If you’re new to this, you can be forgiven by thinking that all the Lemmy instances are their own separate thing, like the forums of old, rather than that they’re all interconnected (excluding a whole bunch of stuff about defederation and all of that mess).
Nah we’ll keep dropping instances when they hit 20k users.
the few who join will leave because of the steep learning curve.
what steep learning curve? what’s so steep about thinking of social media like email?
Oh come on, let’s not pretend that the fediverse is just super intuitive and easy for regular users (i.e. non-techie people). Same ridiculous notion as when people say Linux is just as user-friendly as the more mainstream OSes. It’s sad and I wish it was better but it’s just not right now.
It might be a little more complicated than normal social media and email but it definitely is not that complex.
That “little more complicated” is asking for a lot, though.
Say you’re coming from Reddit, or Facebook, or something.
It would not be unreasonable to believe that, like Reddit, every single Lemmy instance is its own separate, self-contained site.
And that’s even before figuring out federation works, and how to access things from outside of your instance, or all the nuances that come with defederation and all of that. You made the mistake of joining beehaw? Whoops, all the other “subs” are now inaccessible, because beehaw is not connected to any of the others.
Central places like Reddit don’t have that complexity. Reddit communities are singular, and there’s no overarching layer to complicate things. A community that disagrees with another, and blocks them doesn’t affect your experience as an user.
People shouldn’t have suggested you Beehaw.
Nowadays, I just say
Lemm.ee is a Reddit alternative. There are apps you can use from https://www.lemmyapps.com/, just remember that your “instance” is lemm.ee. It works similar to Reddit".
That’s it. No federation explanation, no Fediverse jargon. Keep it simple. Also, see my other comment below about an active community of non tech users
Sorry, but the fact that you’re here means that you are probably in the top percentages of tech-literate people. Especially considering you’re on programming.dev.
You’re severely overestimating the technical literacy of regular people. For many people (maybe even the majority of people) even email is complex.
I never want to mention them explicitly to avoid them getting raided, but there is a community which came here after their sub got banned.
The sub was about an influencer, so definitely not the crowd you would expect on Lemmy.
They are doing just fine. We helped them a bit at first, showed them that there were apps, told them to remember the name of their “server” when logging in.
The community is quite active with over 150 monthly active users. They discuss their topic in their community, everything is going well.
Sometimes I feel like we overestimate the complexity of Lemmy.
If they can do it, everybody can do it.
That is a nice success story!
How does this argument apply to Lemmy? I get the number of instances could be confusing but you don’t have to know or care about any of that. If you don’t you just land on some registration page and do it. I honestly don’t see how that’s more technical than registering to Reddit, Facebook or Instagram.
The choice of instance is kind of a big barrier though. There’s also a lot of bad UX around discoverability.
There’s a reason why Brazilians went to threads and blue sky and not even considered mastodon.
Talking about Brazil, https://lemmy.eco.br/ is a nice Brazilian Lemmy instance
buT mUh DeCenTrAlIZatiOn!
It’s because the devs suck
The devs are working hard providing a public service that they make available for everyone. And the product they’ve developed is pretty impressive, in spite of its shortcomings.
They hold some opinions I disagree with pretty strongly, and I’m not a fan of every decision they make. But they’re creating a truly common good, and for that they deserve praise. From a technical perspective, they have created something completely new that serves thousands of users and constitutes a system of huge complexity. They very much do not suck.
Anyone who thinks any person maintaining an open source project “sucks” should feel free to fork the project, fix whatever they’re not happy with, and maintain the repository and handle commits and all the shit that goes down in managing a large open source project. After dedicating all this time to people, some random ingrate will inevitably disagree with some minor decision they’ve made and decide that they “suck”.
I mean. They’re torpedoing that open source project’s chances for growth because of their ideology. It’s pretty sucky.
I agree with the rest of your statement regarding the development of Lemmy.
Yeah, for sure. Doing something great doesn’t shield you from also making some really shitty decisions or holding some god-awful positions.
I just think it’s good to keep a nuance of language. Too many open source developers burn out, and a hostile community is listed as one of the reasons too often. There will always be disagreements, and there are valid ways of voicing it, but one should never forget that there is humans on the other side and remain kind. :)
also making some really shitty decisions or holding some god-awful positions
You have been banned from Lemmy.ml
They are okay as devs, not that good as admins, which is fine, it is known by now, and people can move easily.
To the people who are going to answer that they are bad devs too, which other devs are that much better than them at this moment for link aggregators in the Fediverse?
I like Piefed and Mbin as much as the next guy, but Lemmy is still the most polished software as of now. Maybe that will change in the future, but let’s face it: with the amount of pushback the Lemmy devs are getting regularly, the fact that most of the instances still use Lemmy is a sign that there the alternatives aren’t that much better.
As far as I’m concerned that’s a feature. If we let the normies in then it just turns into Reddit all over again. That slop pile can stay over there.
There’s still room to grow. We could still double the number of active people to 100k and have a wide margin compared to having millions of users
Holy shit, the most active instance right now on the website is LemmyNSFW.
🎵 the internet is for porn 🎵
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Rule 34 in action
Ahem maybe not the best choice of character there old chap
I missed when reddit had more porn so here I am
Welcome!
I’d shake your hand, but, well…
I want the biggest Lemmy you have.
No, that’s too big.
It’s a genuine concern though. If you want one centralised server hosting all the content, just use reddit.
reddit still has the problem of “getting worse”.
Right, I didn’t think how it would affect the total active user count. Will have to think of a solution for that.
I guess a new flag to only exclude it from the list but not exclude it from the stats 🤷
Or even some logic to automatically exclude from the list any instance with more than x% of active users.
so lemmy.world became too big to fail and the other instances decided didn’t want to risk a potential bail out?
This has nothing to do with other instances. The join-lemmy.org site is run by the Lemmy developers and they decide what happens with that site. They think it’s problematic that lemmy.world is as big as it is (as one of the points of the fediverse is decentralization). So they removed lemmy.world from the listing on join-lemmy.org.
Note that this is in no way a defederation or anything of that sort. The site just doesn’t show lemmy.world, that’s all.
my comment was mostly a joke, but it doesn’t contradict your point, lemmy.word got too big(relatively) so it got de-listed to flow new users to other instances
my comment was mostly a joke
Sorry for not getting it, it’s just that sometimes people (understandably) get very confused about the technicalities of the fediverse and mix up things like defederation and stuff like this. 😅
Consider a /s in the future :)
it’s ok, it was a reference to the 2008 finacial bubble, i knew there was the risk younger people wouldn’t get it
Why does removing them from the site also mean cutting their user count from Active Users though?
That’s just how it works at the moment. It only counts active users from the sites listed.
That is a very weird thing to do, unless they are looking to boost their own instance.
You can read their motivation in the linked pull request. FWIW I don’t think there’s any ill intent here and certainly not an attempt to boost their own instance. I think they just want Lemmy to be decentralized and lemmy.world being as big as it is kinda prevents that.
I’m not sure I would’ve done it that way personally but I can see the reasoning and it’s not entirely unreasonable.
In my humble opinion, join lemmy should only exclude the instances that is harmful.
They should not choose the instances to include for the users.
Lemmy.world becoming the default Lemmy instance, and it growing to outsize all other instances is a danger: it makes the Fediverse centralized, easy to take down and easy to take over.
The same applies to the mastodon . Social instance and the same applies really to every Fediverse software available, with the exception of pixelfed.
with the exception of pixelfed
Why not that one? I’m not familiar with pixelfed.
Pixelfed has a default limit to the number of users per instance.
I think I generally agree with you, but I don’t think this is a big grievance. Lemmy.world has enough traction as it is, they don’t really need the “publicity” from join-lemmy.org.
It would’ve been better if they had written this as some kind of policy beforehand. Like if they had written somewhere before this pull request something like “any instance with more than 40% of active users may be excluded from the join-lemmy.org listing”, then it would’ve been more reasonable too.
It would have been better if they communicated to us first. I don’t disagree that user signups should be spread over instances. We now have a link to https://lemmyverse.net on our signup page so people can check if another instance would fit them better.
I posted about this in the admin chat on matrix, but you’re right the pull request was merged very quickly.
The lemmyverse link is also a good idea, but users only see it after filling in their email and password. At that point it’s unlikely that they would cancel it and go to a different website.
Edit: I’m now thinking to change the joinlemmy code so that any instance with more than x% of active users will automatically be hidden.
@[email protected] falling asleep with a smile on their face tonight :)
Not really, pretending a third of the monthly active users do not exist isn’t really anything I’m happy about.
LW is still in these stats, so there’s that
Strange, I feel people are commenting more.
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But those metrics are incorrect, so their feeling is actually closer to reality
So, most user are passive user. Maybe they leave because nothing interesting.
One another hypothesis is that the stats is not count fully as some instance was not up to the task, slow, … So the now stat is under-count
So, most user are passive user.
Always has been: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
The actual reason is here: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/13842484
Second attempt, I removed lemmy.world from the blocklist and instead added some code to hide any instances with more than 30% of all active users.
https://join-lemmy.org/instances still shows 28k rather than 44?
Its not merged/deployed yet.
Makes sense!
Part of it is that people also moved on from Lemmy too. Lemmy is nice, but there also isn’t very much by way of activity on it, which feeds back into itself. No activity means there’s nothing to draw people into it, and not enough to keep them around when they are there.
One of the communities and (non-world) instances I frequented is all but dead these days.
44k is still the actual number compared to 28k.
Also, which are those dead communities?
The Star Trek ones over on startrek.website. They weren’t the most active to begin with, though their activity has dropped a bit more over time.
The memes moved to [email protected], but you might know that already
I didn’t, actually, but thank you.
I think because we have mostly memes and any discussion is just won by downvoting your opponent. :)
I’m half serious… The platform right now is lacking actual discussions. Everyone seems to just like memes.
The platform right now is lacking actual discussions.
I keep promoting the non-memes communities every time I can (usually on [email protected] ), after a while it just seems like most of the users do not actually even want to discuss that much, just look at memes (which is also fine)
Thank you!
Unfortunately, the Lemmy community copied opinion downvoting from Reddit.
There are good reasons to downvote, but a different opinion is not one of them. This just leads to echo chambers.
There are 3 options: upvote, downvote and the 3rd one is just not clicking anything.
Literally all my downvotes are from people with different options. This is a huge echo chamber. I rarely insult anyone and I’m always polite. I don’t believe vaccinations are safe for everyone since there are side effects, and I think each person should make their own decision about them. I don’t think gender issues are the most important thing in the world.
These are controversial opinions on this platform. :) And I get a lot of downvotes for those opinions when they show up. Not that I care, because I just ignore it. But in the larger picture, it makes people leave the platform.
Why should they stay? I think Lemmy needs to have a good reason to be used. Memes won’t be enough.
I still like the idea of a platform without big tech though. I just think most people don’t realize what makes people stay on a platform. It’s not memes.
I downvoted you
Alright. Want a reward? :)
Yeah :D
I think voting should be as what was originally set out by Reddit; I don’t know if it’s still in their guidelines. The voting system indicates the relevancy of the contribution and whether it adds to the discussion or not. Spam and off-topic contributions gets shoved to the bottom and everything else rises to the top.
Obviously most people on Reddit these days use it as a like/dislike, agree/disagree voting system as well.
Does Lemmy instance owners and community mods ban people for having a different opinion that’s so benign?
Some Reddit mods attempt to be authoritative and ban people who hold different opinions to themselves. I know I have and I stay out of subs that relate to politics, the news, and anything divisive really.
Memes and tech
Edit: and politics
The platform right now is lacking actual discussions. Everyone seems to just like memes.
Honestly I’ve just blocked most of the meme comms 😅. It’s easy to see memes when I want to anyway by just opening a private window where I’m not logged in and going to the all feed. It’s always mostly memes anyway. Then when I’m logged in, I can see some other stuff without all the memes clogging up my feed.
Did lemmy do something in the meantime to keep bots out?
If a lot of them can’t operate anymore like before they wouldn’t count as active users anymore either and would explain discrepancies, or not?
Not that I know anything about how bots or websites work tbh.
The reason is here: https://lemmy.world/comment/12280494
Idk if bots were ever that present on here, excluding the ones that basically scrape reddit for content
Lemmy pulled a CNN. Basically, all Trump news again.
Eh, i doubt it’s that. Every other website is doing the same shit.
Likely it’s just that Lemmy has a fraction of the content/activity that Reddit has, so people probably just came to Lemmy, got bored, and went back to Reddit, ha.
Numbers are the same, the actual reason is here: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/13842484
I don’t understand the logic to exclude it. That just makes the user count grossly inaccurate.
It has been fixed since then: https://eviltoast.org/post/8636588
Yes, those websites have Trump content as well but is it a majority of the front page?
School probably.
Honestly, what’s more surprising is the numbers are that drastic. I didn’t think we have that many Gen Z users here.
EDIT: Actual reason can be found here: https://feddit.dk/post/7667476/10289642
Thanks SorteKanin for providing the context.
I don’t get it. I work full time and have no problem wasting my
lifeI mean time here…The notion of “summer reddit” went hand in hand with notion of “mom’s basement” and even “touch grass” in a way.
Namely, all are dated ideas from millennials that are still thinking the person on the other end of the comment is sitting in front of a computer, as the default. It ignores the simple fact we all have the internet in our pockets and can be chronically online AND actually out in the world doing things at the same time.
Nah, having computers in our pockets just allows more advanced bedrotting and removes the requirement of leaving bed.
Hijacking top comment to give the actual answer: https://feddit.dk/post/7667476/10289642
i’m in school, still have to shit from time to time
What is your default sort set to?
I’m set to scaled and subscribed by default which mostly gets me posts from the last 0-6 hours. But for some reason Lemmy on FF keeps logging me out so I get to see the default all with active sort and it’s a wildly different user base.
There was a post the other day in like Linux memes about case sensitivity in the file system. Early on the post was mostly the Linux die hards who love their case sensitivity. After about 1.5 days it showed up in active and all of the newer comments were (probably normal people) bashing case sensitivity. It’s almost like R*ddit to a degree where the general consensus in the comments can change over time as different users start seeing the post.
huh, there’s a whole instance just for the Ascendance of a Bookworm anime/manga
Ya damn right! Probably would’ve been a lot more popular too if Lemmy had spoiler tag support (see discussion https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/317). But now that the LN is finished, it’ll probably be a lot harder to convince people to move over from the subreddit, even if spoiler tags were implemented. 😢 Maybe when the new season of the anime premiers it will pick up.
Wait, TF
How does the software pull the numbers? Maybe an instance got blocked 30 days ago?
We need @[email protected] to dive in and tell us how these numbers work!
Here you go: https://feddit.dk/post/7667476/10289642
Well, that was fast, lol.
Thanks!
The CIA got 'em
School started? 🤷🏼♂️
I’m still here most of my day.
Honestly, it’s a short-sighted move made with hubris by the developer’s personal ideology. Both @[email protected] and @[email protected] admit in the PR that it’s not a good solution, but yet they continue any way — probably because it’s an easy “solution”, despite alienating 41% of their active user base.
It’s a terrible trend in a lot of programming circles that programmers think because it is easy and it “works” (in that one circumstance) that it must be correct. This can be evidenced by browsing StackOverflow and reading the accepted answers for a lot of questions (SSL errors in software and disabling hostname verification or cert checks comes to mind).
In my 18+ years of experience, if I find an “easy” solution to a complex problem, I keep looking for the correct solution. What is “easy” now will most likely lead to more complex problems down the line. And as they say, “if you can’t find the time to fix it right the first time, where are you going to find the time to fix it again?”
Look, I get Lemmy is meant to be decentralized. Hiding away your biggest instance looks shady to outside users not in the know. The real solution is to “go door to door” to app makers and ask them to not default to any one instance of Lemmy (side note: randomizing a default server is not much better). If anything, add a link to join-lemmy where people can browse the list of ALL instances (yes, ALL of them) and let them make a genuinely-informed decision on their own. As a convenience, and API should be provided (assuming one does not already exist) so that apps can query a pageable/searchable list of existing/active instances (maybe also provide a link to their homepage too).
Hell, if it makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, the default sorting of returned values can be weighted by percentage of active users (i.e., higher percentages get lower weights to help promote smaller instances). This would help to round out the number of signups without excluding instances.
But whatever developers do (not just Lemmy devs), do NOT overly dictate how people use your software “because I don’t like it”; lest you piss your user base off.
/two-cents
Edit: clarified a few points.
alienating 41% of their active user base
Why would distributing users to smaller instances alienate Lemmy.world users?
If anything, distributing the load results in a better user experience, since the last Reddit exodus was taking down .world every few hours.
Because it’s not simply “distributing” the load; it’s actively hiding an instance as if it doesn’t exist. So what do they do when the next instance gets “too big” for their liking? Hide it, along side LW? And the next?
Re-read my comment — specifically the second half where I offer a potential solution that would actually distribute the load more fairly without having to hide anything.
it’s actively hiding an instance as if it doesn’t exist
For the purpose of directing new users, who tend to just pick the largest instance, sure. But if you and they are both federated, there’s no difference in the content.
So what do they do when the next instance gets “too big” for their liking? Hide it, along side LW? And the next?
Correct, because this increases the reliability of the average lemmy user’s experience as one point of failure affects fewer users.
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