Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
I'd love to see some stats on reddit engagement now. Anecdotally, I logged in just to look at my usual subreddits (the ones that are open) and they seem dead.
I use RSS to get feeds for subs that are not active in lemmy.
Many posts are dog shit level now. Either looking for help or just garbage.
Check out r/lemmino lol.
Yep. I feel like all of the high-value like high-quality posters are now here or elsewhere and are done with reddit. I used to post a ton on reddit, even across multiple accounts. Now I just post here. lol
Oh RSS feed is a good idea. The only sub I still check is r/Genshin_Impact_Leaks xd
Edit: Anyone knows a better free web-based RSS reader than Feedly? It kept sending me to its paid service for trying to sub to a Reddit feed, until I subbed to it via SiftRSS D:
Ive been using FreshRSS for years. You can either selfhost it or use one of the public instances.
The bots won't stop. And probably have increased. So it'll be tough to see without slices we'll never get
That's the punchline that makes me chuckle when I read how "little impact" the protests and migration have had.
Here's a little secret: Reddit mods can't know for sure which accounts are bots. They can suspect, but they're no easy, reliable proof. Reddit admins, though, know exactly which accounts are bots — they just prefer keeping that info to themselves.
For me, that triggers a great big "Hmmmm".
And they'll never differentiate them. If their investors know how much of their traffic was just bots they'd divest immediately
I checked a few days ago, and almost all subs I frequented look as before. Maybe a little less content than before, but even midsized ones have more engagement than my whole Lemmy feed.
So I saw this on mastodon ... and it's a little weird, perhaps not unlike the cultures that migrants develop in their new homes.
There's a tendency, I think, to overestimate how bad the "old" platform has become since "we" left. In reality, it's not nearly that bad, if any different at all, and those of us not inclined toward this overestimation go and check the old platform from time to time and get confused as to where all of this "hellscape deadness" is.
I think we can all imagine to some extent why this might happen. But I'm writing this just in case it's healthy to point out that it need not happen, and that the thing that's actually changed, though you might not know if you've arrived here recently, is this place, which is a whole new thing!
A story I think of along these lines is what Steve Jobs did when he went back to Apple in the late 90s. Back then Apple thought they had to beat Microsoft to win. Thing is the company was close to dying with huge debts etc and were never going to do that (still haven't come close today). But they were so enamoured with their past to the point of having a museum of all of their old products. Jobs had the museum removed, told everyone that for Apple to win it has to stop thinking about Microsoft because they'll never be destroyed, instead Apple had to win by doing its own thing, and then, super contraversially for the time, had Bill Gates invest a bunch of money into Apple and appear on the big screen during a keynote to rather audible "boos".
It doesn't matter what Reddit's doing or whether they're doing well. It matters if we're doing well ... as cheesy as that might sound.
It matters, because smaller communities don’t exist here. I try my best to fill !folkmetal@discuss.tchncs.de and !crpg@discuss.tchncs.de, and I simply gave up on /r/malazan, but those communities (and others) are already small on Reddit.
Medium, tech-affine subs like homeassistant and selfhosted were fine to move. Game-specific (outside of AAA) subs and niche-subs are simply dead, the average gamer won’t use something as complicated as Lemmy, and niche-subs are too small. Hell, not even the 4X community exists here, leave alone a sub for any specific 4X. There’s a Strategy community for stuff including 4X: No posts in weeks. It’s sad.
It’s also why I will stay on Reddit for the forseeable future. Lemmy will be my main home, but the users are on Reddit.
It’s sad.
I get where you're coming from ... but I'm inclined to push back on this. I don't think it's sad. Reddit has many users on it and lemmy has substantially fewer. Not every interest is going to be covered by the amount of people here. It's just a reality right now.
However convenient it is to have everything on one platform or one place, I think it's important to recognise how much of a weapon or shield that is for big-social monopoly companies. A fractured and more open or diverse internet is, IMO, a good thing. It's also less convenient and staying in contact with people only on reddit makes sense. But that drop in convenience is worth it, IMO, and I don't think it's sad.
Just do what you can on Lemmy for now and wait for the users to make their way over. It will take a couple years but as long as the quality here is better, people will slowly but steadily make the transition. And it won't be hard to beat out reddit in user experience, we all know how far they have fallen and it's only getting worse after they IPO.
Love the pep talk, and the sentiment behind it.
I loved Reddit, spent at least an hour a day there and often much more, but I'm loving the Lemmy too. In many ways it's better, and one of those ways is that it's so much smaller — a much higher ratio of thought vs tired memes and dumb jokes and slick burns.
I'm wondering how much of that is bots.
Reddit is trying to build up to an IPO, so it's not far-fetched to think that Steve Huffman would have seen the exodus coming, and supplemented traffic with bots so the drop in engagement didn't seem so precipitous.
I think the thing that is going to suffer most is comment quality. Unfortunately (or for Huffman, fortunately), it's not really something that can be quantified.
I think we will see a slow decline until the platform is basically walking dead. It'll function, and maybe there will even be apparent engagement, but the quality will be nothing like it was before this whole debacle.
I made the mistake of reading comments on one thread (I moved here full time) on r/Iamatotalpieceofshit about landlords.
It's turned into a capitalistic hell hole, not only some of the horrible comments you read but also just need to look at the way the votes go, I felt disgusted tbh.
I doubt it made a dent. 250k doesn't even register on the map of 100m active users.
It does if those 250k are the ones submitting/creating content.
Are they though? I didn't submit posts on reddit. Looking at the front page of lemmy it's missing a lot of the topics and subjects reddit posts about.
I'm not trying to be a downer, I think 250k is great and it's enough to make lemmy 100% replace reddit for me. But I don't think it dents reddit. I talked to my friends and they barely noticed anything except the blackout. I go on reddit all the same communities are still posting and commenting as normal. But saying that when I looked at reddit I realized how much garbage is posted there compared to lemmy.
Wish someone would create a bot to copy r/HyruleEngineering to the community here.
I think having a link aggregator is going to be so great for the fediverse. It allows us to gather content from all over the internet and bring to to the often secluded fediverse.
It also means we can post links to fediverse discussions and draw people in.
So far, all the lemmy apps I've used are in very early stages and quite buggy. Currently enjoying WefWef (PWA / web-based app) which I like the best.
Looking forward to Sync, though!
They’ve progressed very rapidly. Personally I don’t think we’re still in the “very buggy” era. I’m participating daily without major issues. There’s just a lot left to build.
Not sure when you last tried Jerboa. It really shit the bed during the Lemmy 0.18 transition period but it's been working a lot better since Jerboa v38 and is quite smooth.
I just wished the Lemmy API docs were better lol.
Yeah, that's a problem with a lot of FOSS passion projects. We devs kinda like writting code, but not really documenting it. Hopefully with the influx of devs helping that will improve
I just wished the Lemmy API docs were better lol.
Finnegans Wake makes more sense than Lemmy API docs. Even calling it "documentation" is a stretch.
I literally had to clone the Lemmy git repo and read the source code to find the implementation of an API endpoint and see how it worked for a script that I was writing.
Should be interesting to see how the fediverse in general handles more traffic, as we’ve seen with kbin and lemmy over the last month or so there are certainly some growing pains
at least we are making the most of our new space here, we all seem to be building something fun here 
I don't think lemmy is still growing. I might be wrong but this graph https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
is trending down and i've seen a lot of smaller magazines/communities that haven't had any posts for 1-2weeks by now.
I try to help that problem at little but i doubt lemmy&kbin has >100k active users right now.
Lemmy will still be receiving stragglers. E.g. I only signed up yesterday! I only went on Reddit once every few weeks or so, and thus only just found out where my communities had migrated to. I’m sure there are many users like me who haven’t yet followed their communities to their new homes.
They might be using some smoothing, because all lines are noise-free. and the last point might just be an artifact. It looks like a constant growth
I think it is currently growing, as in more people will visit tomorrow than did today, but also it has shrank since a couple weeks ago when everyone was hyping it up as a reddit alternative and trying it out. Not everyone who came to try it has stayed.
A lot of people just want the endless scroll. No need to comment or post, just consume the posts. They would go back to Reddit for now because Lemmy is not a decade old content machine.
The dip is attributable to kbin which has some weirdness around active user counts, largely because they don't keep track of them, so I'm not surprised that their numbers might vary somewhat over time.
Otherwise, yea, it'd be accurate to say that the migration wave has come to an end. Mastodon went through multiple waves over the years so we'll see what happens from here. I for one am rather happy with how lemmy (and kbin) have turned out and am not desperate that a hole bunch more people come over.
My biggest concern is that there isn't more cross talk between lemmy and mastodon, and that's because the fediverse is yet to actually do a good job of making the boundaries between platforms thinner. There are many conversations going on in parallel that would be happy to connect but can't because the fediverse hasn't worked out a way to make that work well (yet).
EDIT:
My biggest concern is~~n't~~ that there isn't
A one-day minor downtick isn't a trend when it's been up day-over-day for a while now. I'm sure the user counts will ebb and flow over time, but as long as the community stays healthy and the big social media companies keep being greedy, I think this platform has a good shot at long-term viability.
I think that's normal. People will try out Lemmy but if they notice that the communities they frequent doesn't have a lot of content they'll just leave back to reddit.
We can hope for organic growth but it'll take a long time (especially with how big reddit is)
As I type, it says 130k active users (updated hourly)
I’ve been using the Memmy app and it does a decent job of improving the experience for an Apollo refugee, makes the transition away from Reddit much easier