So much this^. No where else did have I gotten more thoughtful and well written responses to my few questions I have raised on askelectronics@discuss.tchncs.de. It “only” has 3.88k subscribers but those who are there are really cool. ~Wish I could be of more help there as well.~ In times where most of search results on the web are AI generated it really is worth a lot. Wouldn’t want it any other way and think that having more might actually be counter productive.
I might be in the minority but I’m entirely comfortable with moderate explosive growth, it hasn’t hurt bluesky one bit. Especially since explosive growth here implies reddit is dying.
i do agree with the sentiment, but i think we’re largely okay on that front:
among the big problems with reddit for the past, say, 10-ish years, was the consolidation of subreddit moderation in relatively few, extremely influential mods. some of which where widely known to be assholes of one kind or another…
the very design of lemmy provides a kind of natural resistance to this phenomenon by spreading communities over many distinct servers, with distinct admins and moderation teams.
it’s by no means perfect, but the simple fact that communities can choose to leave servers that have become unsuitable to hosting them (like we’ve already seen with some of the star trek comms leaving .world…i think that’s the server they left?), it becomes more difficult for power tripping admins or mods to utterly ruin communities. it still causes major disruptions, of course, but i think it’s a decent trade-off!
having already seen that part of the design in action; I’m really not that worried about lemmy turning into reddit.
what’s much more concerning is eventually being overrun by sophisticated, hostile discourse manipulators like bot and troll farms. (if we ever get big enough to attract those…)
while decentralization provides resilience against enemies within, I’m not so sure it does the same for enemies without:
coordinating bot defense and using proper authentication for end-users to ensure that the people talking are actually, you know, people, is probably going to be extremely challenging… eventually, at least…
This doesn’t seem to be hoping for unlimited growth but rather that is has stagnated and is even falling. That can kill a community especially when it is as small as it is
I agree except it feels like people are way more active here than on reddit, me personally I never commented but I comment all the time on here. Lemmy feels really active even without a ton of users (especially discussion threads)
That is true because the individual engagement is much higher in a smaller community. On reddit you’d just be one of thousands shouting into the void. It also helps that Lemmy pushes new comments to the top.
That said, it is unfortunate that this only applies to very general spaces or some specific communities. If your interest is even a little too niche, the dedicated communities often feel like a graveyard unfortunately.
its probably due to self-censorship because subs, and reddit is ready to ban you at the moments notice for saying something they think its violating the rules(misconstruing) and not do actually violating by being vitrolitic, or bigotic. you have to be careful what you say on reddit.
Anecdotally, it doesn’t feel like the experience is contracting, or part of a shrinking community. It’s worth asking what the data means, and whether it’s bad, but there are definitely other reasonable factors too. Users from interoperable platforms like mastodon and piefed, individual people using fewer accounts, or even fewer lurkers, could be responsible for a good chunk of the data.
Nah its basically stable. Green is monthly which fluctuates with seasons (more people in northern hemisphere and spend more time online in winter months). The blue line is yearly rolling average and the initial spike takes a long time to work though giving impression of gradual decline.
PieFed and Mbin are both different implementations of the ActivityPub Protocol just like Lemmy. Although I doubt this graph includes either of them, despite how many left Lemmy for Piefed when Lemm.ee went down.
I looked and PieFed adds another ~1600 monthly active users and Mbin a further ~700 to the mix. PieFed starts out its chart with single digit user counts and ends with three orders of magnitude growth, so definitely not flat at all, though stable over the last few months.
Unlimited growth is capitalist mindset. Stability and community are what we value here.
So much this^. No where else did have I gotten more thoughtful and well written responses to my few questions I have raised on askelectronics@discuss.tchncs.de. It “only” has 3.88k subscribers but those who are there are really cool. ~Wish I could be of more help there as well.~ In times where most of search results on the web are AI generated it really is worth a lot. Wouldn’t want it any other way and think that having more might actually be counter productive.
Well, this is really going to tank our quarterly report. What do you think the shareholders are going to say?!
The fediverse has been feeling really good lately. It’s actually getting hard to scroll to the end of the frontpage.
Yeah. And we don’t need to attract the MOST people, just the BEST people
Rare user from feddit.it 🇮🇹
feels like there was a missed opportunity there
Could be fedd.it was already taken
Seems like it is… by feddit.it.
To late now though as federation doesnt like domain changes i believe. Even though feddit.de > feddit.org migration seemed pretty seamless.
I might be in the minority but I’m entirely comfortable with moderate explosive growth, it hasn’t hurt bluesky one bit. Especially since explosive growth here implies reddit is dying.
Personally I’d prefer to avoid reddit-ification, it had become very bad in the last few years
i do agree with the sentiment, but i think we’re largely okay on that front:
among the big problems with reddit for the past, say, 10-ish years, was the consolidation of subreddit moderation in relatively few, extremely influential mods. some of which where widely known to be assholes of one kind or another…
the very design of lemmy provides a kind of natural resistance to this phenomenon by spreading communities over many distinct servers, with distinct admins and moderation teams.
it’s by no means perfect, but the simple fact that communities can choose to leave servers that have become unsuitable to hosting them (like we’ve already seen with some of the star trek comms leaving .world…i think that’s the server they left?), it becomes more difficult for power tripping admins or mods to utterly ruin communities. it still causes major disruptions, of course, but i think it’s a decent trade-off!
having already seen that part of the design in action; I’m really not that worried about lemmy turning into reddit.
what’s much more concerning is eventually being overrun by sophisticated, hostile discourse manipulators like bot and troll farms. (if we ever get big enough to attract those…)
while decentralization provides resilience against enemies within, I’m not so sure it does the same for enemies without: coordinating bot defense and using proper authentication for end-users to ensure that the people talking are actually, you know, people, is probably going to be extremely challenging… eventually, at least…
This doesn’t seem to be hoping for unlimited growth but rather that is has stagnated and is even falling. That can kill a community especially when it is as small as it is
You see decline. What I see is that a remarkable number of users have remained.
Agreed, so much is stacked against us, these numbers show we are serious about making alternative communities.
I agree except it feels like people are way more active here than on reddit, me personally I never commented but I comment all the time on here. Lemmy feels really active even without a ton of users (especially discussion threads)
That is true because the individual engagement is much higher in a smaller community. On reddit you’d just be one of thousands shouting into the void. It also helps that Lemmy pushes new comments to the top.
That said, it is unfortunate that this only applies to very general spaces or some specific communities. If your interest is even a little too niche, the dedicated communities often feel like a graveyard unfortunately.
its probably due to self-censorship because subs, and reddit is ready to ban you at the moments notice for saying something they think its violating the rules(misconstruing) and not do actually violating by being vitrolitic, or bigotic. you have to be careful what you say on reddit.
Anecdotally, it doesn’t feel like the experience is contracting, or part of a shrinking community. It’s worth asking what the data means, and whether it’s bad, but there are definitely other reasonable factors too. Users from interoperable platforms like mastodon and piefed, individual people using fewer accounts, or even fewer lurkers, could be responsible for a good chunk of the data.
it kinda shrank after lemmy.ee went down, because they moved scattered to piefed,etc. and also blocking people too.
probably went back the mainstream ones like reddit, and the others, assuming you wernt banned in any of those platforms permananetly.
And yet the graph is going down…
Nah its basically stable. Green is monthly which fluctuates with seasons (more people in northern hemisphere and spend more time online in winter months). The blue line is yearly rolling average and the initial spike takes a long time to work though giving impression of gradual decline.
People have started using Piefed insted of Lemmy, but I’m not sure we should throw away hope for the fediverse because of that.
Poefed is part of the Fediverse so surely it’s still a good thing overall?
PieFed and Mbin are both different implementations of the ActivityPub Protocol just like Lemmy. Although I doubt this graph includes either of them, despite how many left Lemmy for Piefed when Lemm.ee went down.
I looked and PieFed adds another ~1600 monthly active users and Mbin a further ~700 to the mix. PieFed starts out its chart with single digit user counts and ends with three orders of magnitude growth, so definitely not flat at all, though stable over the last few months.
I think Piefed has mostly been migrations from Lemmy (especially from lemm.ee), that’s why it had a big jump and then seems to have stabilised.
It’s all or nothing baby! Let’s burn it down if something isn’t perfect from day one.
People will come in waves, some will share the same mindset and others will seek out more dopamine centric engagement.