Is the number of Lemmy users increasing?
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Lemmy will never really grow beyond what it is now. Even if there was another influx of users, the retention rate is going to be low and the amount of active users is going to be even lower. It will forever remain a niche platform for 3 reasons:
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It's made by and for people on the far left, tech/privacy nerds, and people who have been kicked out of Reddit. Because of this, the actual active users on here tend to fall into of these 3 groups, and they define Lemmy's culture, and this includes the developers. Because of this, much of content on here revolve around niche topics and so there isn't much here to appeal to the mainstream.
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It is fundamentally flawed by design. There are bunch of different communities on different instances about the same topic, and there is no way to consolidate them. Because of this, you have a bunch of dead communities that operate as independent nodes, instead of having centralized communities that are big and active. This issue would've been solved if Lemmy was designed to have each instance be a community in of itself (AskLemmy has its own instance and so does tech, gaming, and so on), but instead we have the current implementation.
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Lemmy has many of the problems that drive people away from Reddit. Sure, Lemmy isn't a greedy corporation, which is nice, but it still has terminally online powermods with little to no accountability, a hostile and negative community, weird/extreme echo chambers that make most people cringe, and so on. If you sign up for Lemmy, you're going to get the same problems but with a worse experience because it's way smaller and has less content, so why would you come to Lemmy instead of making another Reddit account?
I just don't see Lemmy every becoming mainstream or overtaking Reddit. It's already been 6 years since the start of Lemmy's development, and 2 years since the big influx of users from Reddit's API fiasco, and it STILL has to rely on the same dozen or so people spamming the platform to keep it barely active. Lemmy won't collapse, but it also won't be more than what it is now, at least not any time soon.
About #2: you have any suggestion on how you could achieve that and still be federated?
It seem like you would need a central "oficial" instance that defines who is the "real" AskLemmy, etc...
But yeah, I really want to hear if you have ideas on how achieve this and maintain it as a federation.
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Welcome!
There are good Lemmy apps if you don't have one yet. You can search "for Lemmy" to see most of them (in the Android play store at least). I like Voyager for Lemmy.
but like cmon, can we have SOME days where we can escape and just enjoy the internet guys?
You might want to block some keywords then, as there's also a lot of American politics on Lemmy. You can filter most of it that way.
Thank you! I stumbled upon Voyager and it’s been giving me some major nostalgia for the Apollo Reddit app lol.
Yea filtering may be the way to go. The problem is like to stay in the loop and engage in SOME politics, just everything in moderation. Hate when my feed on Reddit for example, is ENTIRELY Trump-related or politicized news. It’s just a bit draining after a while. I appreciate the heads up! I’m glad that I can already tell the community is a bit better about it here because none of my fellow leftists have commented jumping down my throat saying “too bad”
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Well, I myself still use Reddit for my hobby since on lemmy there’s like 4 of us FPV pilots.
But generally: spread the word, if there’s a community you’d like that doesn’t exist - make it yourself
Yea, it seems for the more niche topics/interests/hobbies, Reddit may still be required.
It’s annoying because I’ve always been a lurker-commenter and don’t really post, but if I want to be the change I wanna see in the world — I’m going to have to start making posts here
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About #2: you have any suggestion on how you could achieve that and still be federated?
It seem like you would need a central "oficial" instance that defines who is the "real" AskLemmy, etc...
But yeah, I really want to hear if you have ideas on how achieve this and maintain it as a federation.
If I were to redesign Lemmy, I would design it be like Reddit, but without the corporate centralization, so basically each subreddit would be it's own instance, and they can federate or defedarate with other subreddits. I wouldn't design it to where each instance tries to be it's own full fledged Reddit alternative like right now. That's a much cleaner design, but the big issue with it is that hosting the instances is a pain and so most people can't do it.
Therefore, my much more realistic alternative, is to add tags. Each community would have a limited number of relevant tags (could be required to create a community), and users can view and follow these tags. These tags would help streamline all these different communities across Lemmy under one label, which is the result we're trying to achieve. I would also add another tab on the home feed called "tags" where users can view and filter all the posts from the all tags they follow.
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I feel like part of it also is that Lemmy isn't designed for anywhere near the traffic that Reddit gets. For instance, Lemmy maintained Reddit's mod power structure based on mod service length.
Also Lemmy hasn't really done a lot to build spam fighting measures. If the user base grows 10x the current size, I can see spam becoming a bigger problem which could affect usability.
While I agree with you that Lemmy is vulnerable to spam, I don't think it'll a problem any time soon. Even if the userbase grows ten fold, that would still only be around 350k users. That's not enough to attract any major attention. Any spam Lemmy would get would come internally from users feuding with the devs or each other.
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Welcome!
There are good Lemmy apps if you don't have one yet. You can search "for Lemmy" to see most of them (in the Android play store at least). I like Voyager for Lemmy.
but like cmon, can we have SOME days where we can escape and just enjoy the internet guys?
You might want to block some keywords then, as there's also a lot of American politics on Lemmy. You can filter most of it that way.
Holy shit there’s a lot of tankies on here lol
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Holy shit there’s a lot of tankies on here lol
Hey I just saw your conversation over on [email protected]. You'll want to stay well clear of both lemmy.ml and hexbear.net to avoid most of the stupid tanky shit. Most other instances seem pretty cool.
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Hey I just saw your conversation over on [email protected]. You'll want to stay well clear of both lemmy.ml and hexbear.net to avoid most of the stupid tanky shit. Most other instances seem pretty cool.
Lol thank you for the heads up. I’ve already made a new account on lemmy.world and immediately blocked the entire lemmy.ml instance loll. I’ll be adding hexbear now
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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.
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I couldn't possibly disagree with that, for obvious reasons. (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.)
Obama_awarding_Obama.gif
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How is Lemmy's code actually licensed? If it's GPL or somesuch, someone can just fork it and add the missing features. There's some amount of work needed for keeping up to changes in Lemmy's main branch, but it's still reasonably easy work. (Assuming you can code, of course
)EDIT: The licence is this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_License
That seems far too simplistic imho. Instance admins have done this for years and can tell you how quickly things fall behind: if you want to federate with any other instances (the entire point behind the federated model?), then you need to maintain compatibility. Fortunately Lemmy is fairly mature and far less likely to release groundbreaking changes than it did in the past.
But also, you have to learn to code in Rust, which even people who already know C++ seem to find very difficult, for a number of reasons including major lack of support by a standard library (such as C++ itself has in its STL), which in Rust is still fairly primitive iirc, forcing the user to build every tiny little thing from scratch, or use less well-written and tested code, possibly so poor as to negate the advantages of having chosen Rust over some other, more commonly useful language like C++.
And then you'd be doing all of that entirely on your own, and maintaining it in perpetuity. Don't get me wrong, several people have done exactly that (Admiral Patrick, developer of the Tesseract front-end, comes to mind).
But all of that seems like it would be even slower, compared to PieFed releasing new features practically weekly? And also it is Python, which is a much easier language. And also you could work along with others, fixing bugs in your code that you did not spot, and vice versa. I'm not seeing the advantages there to what you are proposing: I mean yes obviously there are "advantages", but relatively speaking I mean, they seem much smaller than if someone put the same amount of effort towards improving PieFed, which would then be shared and maintained world-wide even if you got sick or busy irl or something?
And even if you were right, that doing this with Lemmy would work out well, for how much longer would that remain true - six months? - before PieFed absolutely blows the set of features that Lemmy uses out of the water? Imagine social media that is actually fun to use, and where the computer automates the most common tasks so as to not require menial labor every hour of the day, as Lemmy does (I am speaking of the requirement for manual moderation efforts)? That much has already come to pass, to various degrees, in many ways on PieFed. e.g. in Lemmy you could search for every cross-posting across all instances wherever you can find them, then click on each one, and read through the comments, making sure to get the version of the community that is accessible from the instance you are on rather than follow a link taking you to a different one... but why do all that work, when PieFed provides it ready-made, instantly upon loading the post?
Starting with PieFed is starting ahead of Lemmy, in most ways (not all though: Lemmy's search functionality is still way better, and reportedly about to get even better still by allowing limiting of search terms specifically to post titles separately from message contents).
Unless you just want to learn Rust for other reasons.
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One of the main things that drove me away from Reddit was the sense that they're really pushing the buttons to hone it into a pure content creation service for AI bros and advertisers.
That is to say, most subs do not want you just hanging out and chatting to people like they're your friends. You have to generate content, and you have to do it in the approved sub format, and if you don't like it you can fuck off. So, I fucked off.
its also harder now, if your a new user, or inactive user who suddenly became active. so subreddits have cqs scores, karma,content history requirements. you can easily get shadowbanned if you somehow trigger the filters, also the fact that they do it so indiscriminately it catches innocent account. i was visiting the shadowban sub recently, and someone posted they were unbanned because reddits AI mistankengly shadowbanned them, for "assuming and misconstruing his posts, as offensive"
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its also harder now, if your a new user, or inactive user who suddenly became active. so subreddits have cqs scores, karma,content history requirements. you can easily get shadowbanned if you somehow trigger the filters, also the fact that they do it so indiscriminately it catches innocent account. i was visiting the shadowban sub recently, and someone posted they were unbanned because reddits AI mistankengly shadowbanned them, for "assuming and misconstruing his posts, as offensive"
wrote last edited by [email protected]yeah I don't know exactly how these things work, but I did notice that all my comments in one popular sub all had exactly 1 view and vanished if I logged out. And my post history there isn't much different from here, it's not like I've been going there to troll and spam. I guess the wrong mod (or bot) decided that they didn't like people objecting to genocide? My posts in other subs still appear as normal.
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yeah I don't know exactly how these things work, but I did notice that all my comments in one popular sub all had exactly 1 view and vanished if I logged out. And my post history there isn't much different from here, it's not like I've been going there to troll and spam. I guess the wrong mod (or bot) decided that they didn't like people objecting to genocide? My posts in other subs still appear as normal.
some subs might have filters on to automatically remove or hide comments its definitely more pervasive now.
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some subs might have filters on to automatically remove or hide comments its definitely more pervasive now.
What's disturbing about it is the effect it has on the actual dialog. The mods have basically zero public oversight, so you have no idea when you read a sub what kind of manipulation has happened to the conversation you're reading, both directly and indirectly (chilling effect).
It turns out that the Capitalism version of internet censorship is even more insidious and manipulated by shadowy forces, than even the Chinese government's version.
For added scarytimes, consider that all the LLMs are being trained on this shit.
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What's disturbing about it is the effect it has on the actual dialog. The mods have basically zero public oversight, so you have no idea when you read a sub what kind of manipulation has happened to the conversation you're reading, both directly and indirectly (chilling effect).
It turns out that the Capitalism version of internet censorship is even more insidious and manipulated by shadowy forces, than even the Chinese government's version.
For added scarytimes, consider that all the LLMs are being trained on this shit.
and reddit filters is seperate from the mod ones, so they can ovveride the sub filters and ban or remove your comment randomly too. im sure certain subs are protected as some mods are either power mods, or have connections with the admins.
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One thing I've noticed is that on reddit, if I post a comment it'll get either zero votes or a thousand, with next to no correlation between the number and how useful or well thought-out the comment was. On Lemmy it seems a lot more consistent, as though people here are actually paying attention? That and/or The Dreaded Algorithm hits a lot harder on Reddit.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yep, I agree… that was what I noticed too… plus, some did mention that it was the bots who upvoted/downvoted on Reddit posts and comments, so was there any real interaction, or? I was confused, really.
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That seems far too simplistic imho. Instance admins have done this for years and can tell you how quickly things fall behind: if you want to federate with any other instances (the entire point behind the federated model?), then you need to maintain compatibility. Fortunately Lemmy is fairly mature and far less likely to release groundbreaking changes than it did in the past.
But also, you have to learn to code in Rust, which even people who already know C++ seem to find very difficult, for a number of reasons including major lack of support by a standard library (such as C++ itself has in its STL), which in Rust is still fairly primitive iirc, forcing the user to build every tiny little thing from scratch, or use less well-written and tested code, possibly so poor as to negate the advantages of having chosen Rust over some other, more commonly useful language like C++.
And then you'd be doing all of that entirely on your own, and maintaining it in perpetuity. Don't get me wrong, several people have done exactly that (Admiral Patrick, developer of the Tesseract front-end, comes to mind).
But all of that seems like it would be even slower, compared to PieFed releasing new features practically weekly? And also it is Python, which is a much easier language. And also you could work along with others, fixing bugs in your code that you did not spot, and vice versa. I'm not seeing the advantages there to what you are proposing: I mean yes obviously there are "advantages", but relatively speaking I mean, they seem much smaller than if someone put the same amount of effort towards improving PieFed, which would then be shared and maintained world-wide even if you got sick or busy irl or something?
And even if you were right, that doing this with Lemmy would work out well, for how much longer would that remain true - six months? - before PieFed absolutely blows the set of features that Lemmy uses out of the water? Imagine social media that is actually fun to use, and where the computer automates the most common tasks so as to not require menial labor every hour of the day, as Lemmy does (I am speaking of the requirement for manual moderation efforts)? That much has already come to pass, to various degrees, in many ways on PieFed. e.g. in Lemmy you could search for every cross-posting across all instances wherever you can find them, then click on each one, and read through the comments, making sure to get the version of the community that is accessible from the instance you are on rather than follow a link taking you to a different one... but why do all that work, when PieFed provides it ready-made, instantly upon loading the post?
Starting with PieFed is starting ahead of Lemmy, in most ways (not all though: Lemmy's search functionality is still way better, and reportedly about to get even better still by allowing limiting of search terms specifically to post titles separately from message contents).
Unless you just want to learn Rust for other reasons.
I'll try to remember to address the rest of your comment later tonight, but one things I want to mention now: it's not really a competition. If one is better than the other, it's only a good thing for both.
And then, people don't really look very much at what is technically better than something else.
I'm on Lemmy and I've got stuff here. It's definitely good enough, so I'm not going to migrate anywhere. People land at whatever some they land at, and unless that one is actually bad, they are unlikely to change for something else.
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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.
I feel like we should keep those degenerates away from our society and replace them with people who know how to use technology.
We don't need more Amish like savages
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Lol thank you for the heads up. I’ve already made a new account on lemmy.world and immediately blocked the entire lemmy.ml instance loll. I’ll be adding hexbear now
I feel like lemmy.world is a bit shielded from tankies in general. I see some posts from lemmy.ml from time to time but rarely insane tankie posts. Engaging with political posts from there might not be the best idea indeed, maybe there should be warnings for those who are not aware lol
