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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s the Lemmy developers, who run Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad.ml, who decided not to promote Lemmy.world on their “about Lemmy” website. This is completely unrelated to the admins of Lemmy.world. :)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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”.
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. :)
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.
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
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. 😅
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/358
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.
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.
It’s the Lemmy developers, who run Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad.ml, who decided not to promote Lemmy.world on their “about Lemmy” website. This is completely unrelated to the admins of Lemmy.world. :)
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.
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
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. :)
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 🎵
p0rn p0rn p0000000000000000000rn
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
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.
Why not that one? I’m not familiar with pixelfed.
Pixelfed has a default limit to the number of users per instance.
But this is only a default right? Surely an admin can open registration anyway?
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