A post from 2 days ago presented a graph that showed an important variation in the active userbase: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/52565659

Using the daily rather than monthly view on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120 shows a much stable line (especially if you take into account Piefed’s growth: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120 )

Going through the comments in the other posts, a few recommendations that can help with the overall experience

  • use different feeds: either using different Lemmy/Mbin accounts (one account per type of content), or Piefed personal feeds, but being able to browse different feeds such as “Good news”, “Hobbies”, “Art”, “Life advice” help to see more content than politics and tech

  • discover communities: subscribe to [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] to add active communities to your feeds

  • go to general communities rather than specific ones: the current user base only allows so much specialization. Your favorite city builder community may not exist, but [email protected] does. [email protected] and [email protected] may be inactive, but [email protected] is not.

  • use a client that allows for comments consolidation: I don’t remember which mobile apps does it (Sync, I think?), Piefed has that feature built-in too. It allows to see all comments on a cross-post in the same view: https://piefed.zip/c/privacy/p/928874/worst-in-show-ces-products-include-ai-refrigerators-ai-companions-and-ai-doorbells#post_replies

  • report toxic users and avoid communities that do not handle your reports: quite a few comments mentioned that issue in the other thread. Mods can’t see everything, reporting helps to keep the atmosphere of a community enjoyable.

  • use a client that implements keyword filters: quite a few mobile apps and alternative Lemmy front-ends do, Piefed has it built in. It can really help avoid the “doom and gloom” overwhelming your feed.

Finally, a few communities recommendations for lighthearted communities

  • DimiK@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    4 hours ago

    I’m completely new to Lemmy and fediverse in general. I wonder if there have been any initiatives to promote Lemmy more and help it attain the critical mass of people.

    For exampe, having a Lemmy or Fediverse month, when the community attempts to advertise to friends that don’t know about it yet. If a few of the main instances participate in this, I’m sure the community could come up with some great ideas for spreading the word.

  • Zink@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    3 hours ago

    So are we living in some kind of Bizarro Eternal September?

    Where instead of being flooded with normies, a few dozen thousand of us are walled in behind barriers to entry that the greybeards of old could only imagine.

    It’s like a social experiment that would be unethical if we weren’t all self-selected to be here. Will we flourish or will we go mad?!?

    Given my experiences so far, I’m gonna ride this thing as far as it takes me. Just today I was inspired by a fellow lemming to format my entire hard drive just to switch to a slightly different Linux distro. On my work laptop! :>

  • daannii@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    8 hours ago

    Any spike or steady sharp increase would just be a sign of bot infiltration.

    So steady numbers are better.

  • shiroininja@lemmy.worldEnglish
    36·
    17 hours ago

    Lemmy is the only Corporate social media replacement I’ve stuck to for years. I’ve never gone back to reddit. I don’t need it. I like the vibes here and it’s just busy enough to suit my needs without allowing me to doomscroll nonstop new content.

    • 7101334@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      8 hours ago

      I like Pixelfed too, for all its bugs. I would like to drop Instagram for it, but I’ve managed to convince exactly zero of my friends to join PF lol

  • katy ✨@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    11·
    15 hours ago

    need to include places like piefed and mbin in this too; reddit is just reddit but here you can be either lemmy, piefed, or mbin and talk to one another.

  • termaxima@slrpnk.netEnglish
    81·
    16 hours ago

    Personally I still relate to the other graph. Lemmy posts can sometimes be much too focused on negative things, so I sometimes take pretty long breaks before coming back when it gets too depressing.

    • 7101334@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      8 hours ago

      I think it’s kind of the inverse of what you see on platforms like TruthSocial or such. Everyone goes to those to be racist assholes. Similarly, many people go to Lemmy to escape racist/capitalist/etc assholes, and because they’ve been effected by racist/capitalist/etc assholes or their policies, they spend a lot of time discussing them.

      You almost need a population of normies (sorry) to act as a ‘buffer’, maybe? Idk, thinking out loud.

      Pixelfed is really quite positive despite the similar context, but it’s a little… “cocktail party” vibes sometimes. Not enough weird people for me, but that’s why I try being weird there.

  • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    15 hours ago

    A statistician explain to me why these graphs seem correlated beyond general trend? They both seem to have localized events on the same day, but given their different timescales that doesn’t seem like it should be possible.

    I raised the same concern on the other post too, but idk enough about statistics to for sure say something seems fishy.

    • Die4Ever@retrolemmy.comEnglish
      3·
      8 hours ago

      (not a statistician) The events that WOULD be synchronized are: instances going down, users being deleted, and new user signups.

      Maybe this is enough to make them look like this. Those are the events that cause jumps, whereas users hitting the 6 months of inactive time would just be a steady, stable, gentle slope.

  • Vegan_Joe@piefed.worldEnglish
    1094·
    2 days ago

    I honestly like the small, eclectic vibe better.

    I don’t know what the number is, but I’ll arbitrarily say, anywhere under a quarter million is perfect.

    I know the federation model provides a strength against the cascading list negatives that plague popular platforms, but I don’t doubt that with a large enough user base, exploits would certainly seep in, particularly with ease of AI bot manipulation and astroturfing.

    It reminds me of the Linux saying “security through obscurity”.

    • vga@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      62·
      17 hours ago

      Reddit has so much more content and frankly 80% of their real non-bot userbase seem to be ok. Wouldn’t hurt at all to get like 10% of the best of them here. That’d be about 5 million people.

      Ok, now that I think about it, 70k => 5M would probably hurt the servers a bit.

      Let’s go for the top 1%, we all love the top 1% right?

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      20·
      1 day ago

      It’s very difficult for a set of volunteers to combat people being paid to manipulate their platform, so I’m happy with this platform remaining small enough to not be worth spending money on to manipulate.

  • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
    36·
    2 days ago

    So what’s going on here, most likely, is that the intake of new users is declining as opposed to people specifically being driven off the platform (as some users allege).

    • Dagnet@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      1 day ago

      It’s stabilising so either we are down to the really stubborn user base or it’s the start of a steady growth

      • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
        17·
        2 days ago

        Oh people making the claim that Lemmy being too political or too hard-left drives users off and is responsible for the user malaise. I’m sure that’s true, but not to an appreciable level.

          • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
            612·
            1 day ago

            The difference, one would assume, is that on the whole, Reddit’s political biases influence more what is not shown (much like lemmy.ml banning people for any criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea, or the echo chamber in hexbear), whereas Lemmy’s tankie issue also manifests as people actively sea-lioning (e.g. Cowbee) and (especially from hexbear) overt trolling, which shows up more in people’s faces. Both are issues, neither are good.

            • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.mlEnglish
              171·
              1 day ago

              Always claims of sea-lioning, but never any evidence. You’ve had me blocked for over a year now, why continue this crusade?

              • comfy@lemmy.mlEnglish
                5·
                16 hours ago

                I’ve come across some people who have no idea what “sealioning” even means. There used to be a hb user “Ulysses” or something, like three years ago, who accused me of doing it after I replied to their reply to my reply, and that’s the only conversation we’d ever had. I pulled up the definition of sealioning and the comic which the word originated from, and they just say “no that’s not true, stop sealioning”.

                I feel like some people just think sealioning means “this person keeps replying to my posts”, as if conversations on a public forum are somehow uncalled for, or unusual.

            • Bazell@lemmy.zipEnglish
              7·
              1 day ago

              By my experience, Reddit has some influence from government that they unofficially confirmed. And Reddit admins(not even talking about moderators) are actively promoting some political ideas in their actions. Like, protecting ICE and mass murders in Gaza. The most interesting thing is that this mostly works in large comunities, because of in small ones you will not see such thing except for rare occasions. This also affects their filters. In one subreddit your comment will trigger ban, while in some others the same quote will have no effect at all. This is really annoying.

              • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
                35·
                1 day ago

                I could criticize China right now, here in this community on Lemmy.world, but if I did so in a community on Lemmy.ml I would get banned from not only the entire instance but from communities that I’ve never so much as heard of. We have censorship here too.

                And we have toxicity here as well. As too does Reddit. It is a little odd to hear Redditors of all people complain about toxicity:-). Maybe they were used to smaller communities on Reddit, avoiding the big ones, but then here with far less content you pretty much have to subscribe to the large communities (like is there another one talking about the Fediverse besides this one that is more worthwhile?), where the toxicity is more visible?

                I don’t know, I haven’t wanted to actually talk to people on Reddit for several years now:-).

                • ∞🏳️‍⚧️Edie [it/it/its/its/itself, she/her/her/hers/herself, fae/faer/faer/faers/faerself, love/love/loves/loves/loveself, des/pair, null/void, none/use name]@lemmy.mlEnglish
                  5·
                  16 hours ago

                  I would get banned from not only the entire instance but from communities that I’ve never so much as heard of

                  That’s not how it works. You get banned from the instance and all communities you have commented or posted in. And it wouldn’t be any different if it were to happen on .world or .zip.

                  (I know OpenStars and piefed.social users cannot see this, however I wanted everyone else to at least understand how bans work)

                • Bazell@lemmy.zipEnglish
                  42·
                  20 hours ago

                  Well, I agree that there are some specialized comunities for people that want to believe in 1 idea. Like Lemmy.ml. And if you don’t want to be the part of a brainwashed herd, you either leave by yourself or get banned. This is normal. I am talking about the active platform wide banning regardless of comunity. I don’t see such thing on Lemmy unless you are really harming the platform like mass spamming or sharing dangerous software. On Reddit you no longer can have a normal conversation, since you can get banned not only by a toxic mod but also by shitty AI system. And then you cannot even expect for the appeal to be normally processed by a human, since either they are also being reviewed by AI or the workers are too lazy to properly work(which is quite relatable since there are thousands of appeals and not enough workers because of a greedy management).

                  Due to the decentralization on Lemmy, even if you get banned from even 2 or 3 instances, you still have a lot of parts of platform available for you. While on Reddit your ban affects you and your account dramatically. Especially, if you are not paying them for the pro version.

        • Klear@quokk.auEnglish
          43·
          2 days ago

          To be honest the tankies made my transition to lemmy a bit smoother, since they fill the same niche as the idiots of t_d, so it made lemmy kinda familiar.

        • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
          55·
          1 day ago

          Here is one such very relevant post: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/16hkxua/why_im_giving_up_on_lemmyfediverse/

          A really interesting discussion in particular is below the reply saying:

          The issues you brought up are very much on Reddit too. They are just more noticeable on Lemmy because there aren’t enough niche subs or fluff to drown them out.

          Other replies included “I did end up shutting down my instance.”, which continued on with “But, for me, seeing people blindly bash the USA every chance they get, It’s a turn off.” - like, I get that the USA is unpopular (especially now), and also I am okay with the Threadiverse remaining small, but I did want to push back against this magical type of thinking that we can both have our cake and eat it to, in the form of both bashing people from it and also reaching out to invite people on Reddit (who are primarily from the USA) to join us here. Maybe Lemmy will have more success by marketing itself as more “European” (or at least “non-USA”, so maybe European + Global South)? Whatever goal we want to aim for, we should keep our eyes open as we aim directly at it, imho.

          I do not think that all or even most Threadiverse instances should defederate from lemmy.ml, but on the other hand it would be extremely nice if just ONE instance would do so, which we could then share to people on Reddit as a nicer entry point for those more centrist-leaning users who are primarily people from the USA. Or else decide that that goal is (collectively) not what we all want. The latter being what ended up happening, whether intentionally or no.

          Fwiw, Lemmy has gotten much better over the years in this respect, imho, with many more instances having banned lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net specifically.

          Like, look at those contortionist comment replies trying to state that, e.g.:

          (if anyone’s out of the loop - lemmygrad isn’t “lemmy”, they are usually defederated by regular instances and their content isn’t visible in “lemmy” as it is colloquially understood)

          This topic is a MAJOR, oft-repeated reason why people on Reddit refuse to come here and check us out.

          https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1jjl8g5/i_tried_lemmy_again_after_a_year_long_hiatus_and/ (the title there gets cut off but continues with “it’s still beyond terrible”), and here is that post’s concluding paragraph:

          If you have a very narrow worldview, politics is your entire personality, and you enjoy dry, charged humor then I guess Lemmy is a good alternative for you, but if you’re anybody else it’s not worth it. Reddit is not good, everybody here agrees. However, despite it’s numerous flaws it’s still a product than Lemmy at it’s very best. It’s simply not a viable alternative imo. Even Instagram and Tiktok are better alternatives than Lemmy.

          Note that I do not agree, just stating how these people said that they felt, if that is helpful for a diagnosis of the state of affairs and what we could potentially do to help mitigate those concerns. e.g. I successfully petitioned for discuss.online to defederate from hexbear.net, thinking that could help make Redditors feel more welcomed here. Although now I am placing my hope more in PieFed (which e.g. allows users to perform their own personalized defederations without needing admin approval to block all users from any specific instance), while giving up much hope for Lemmy to keep up with its wondrous pace of adding new features.

          • ☂️-@lemmy.mlEnglish
            3·
            7 hours ago

            i’m glad to hear lemmy is turning fascists away.

            they can go back to reddit or twitter.

            • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
              24·
              1 day ago

              Ah, searching is super difficult on Bluesky but I finally managed to find something relevant using Google and the site: function. Here is what it had to say in https://bsky.app/profile/lagotrasimeno.bsky.social/post/3lzwma6eg7k2l:

              New here Just exploring some alternatives to the always more nazi-like policies and TOS of Reddit and X. So far I’ve tried Mastodon (which is dead btw) and Lemmy, the so-called best alternative to Reddit whose community is even more toxic than the original. This seems pretty chill 🤷 maybe too much?

              (Bold emphasis added)

              I am not trying to be negative, at least not for its own sake. This is legitimately what I see that people are saying about us here. Certainly not all of them to be fair - some people on other platforms love us here - but from the perspective of diagnosing why are many people leaving, and what do they say about us when they do, this is the top #1 cited reason that I have seen: our toxicity. And I cannot think of any better example of that than hexbear.net, which is why I am such a fan of either outright defederation if that is the only option, or at least making that instance opt-in rather than force it to be opt-out, which apparently seems to cause many people to flee us and go either back to Reddit or to Bluesky or whatever, hence opting out of the entire Threadiverse. Basically: either hexbear goes, or the newbie users do. And even that is only a start to reducing our overall toxicity level as presented to newbie users, though PieFed at least has several wonderful tools to help with that built-in already:-).

            • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
              35·
              1 day ago

              Has anything changed since a year ago in this regard though? Tankies are still here, lemmy.ml not defederated from anywhere, hexbear almost disappeared but managed to come back. We made discuss.online a better landing space for newbies, but now the shift is more towards PieFed, which I mentioned several thoughts about in a separate thread.

              Not only on Reddit, even on Lemmy there are a bunch of people bashing on the tankies being present on Lemmy, in that community e.g. in the recent discussion at https://piefed.zip/c/fedibridge/p/795307/r-redditalternatives-comments-ask-for-alternatives-piefed-and-lemmy-are-mentioned-a-few-ti, like this comment:

              That’s the problem, they do manipulate it. There was a thread a while back that showed how ml basically shows up as one of the random instances to join, like 95% of the time. So it’s not actually random.

              We can say all we like how we wish that it were not a problem, but people on Reddit seem to disagree and not want to join regardless. Though I have noticed that either positive or negative opinions are very rarely delivered these days in r/RedditAlternatives. I wonder if people are simply tired of the subject and now just tune it out like noise. If so, then we missed a major opportunity to offer a true alternative to Reddit. Hopefully there will be more, and I am not suggesting to give up, only trying to highlight a major issue of concern so that we can move forward.

              Chiefly imho, by recommending PieFed rather than Lemmy instances (and strongly preferably one that defederates from hexbear).

              • Blaze (he/him)@piefed.zipOPEnglish
                4·
                19 hours ago

                [email protected] is a very toxic community as well, you don’t see SJW defederated from most instances.

                Lemmy.ml is defederated from infosec.pub and lemmy.cafe.

                Piefed having actual instance blocking at the user level make defederation less of an issue.

                • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
                  12·
                  14 hours ago

                  Excellent point and example, I agree.

                  MwoG and [email protected] have every right to exist, just like 4chan, just like NSFW content, just like bots - my beef has always been that they should all be labeled. Properly labeled NSFW can be blurred, filtered out, now a new feature on PieFed allows it to be specifically searched for even, bots likewise can be blured, filtered out, or at least you see a visual indicator that replying to it will not yield a conversation.

                  In fairness to CTH, the community sidebar does accurately describe what it does. Unfortunately, Lemmy’s UX workflow does not show the sidebar text when browsing by All, and some apps seem to go very very very much out of their way to hide every sidebar - burying it behind 5+ clicks and also a deep scroll required. For someone who already knows what CTP is all about that’s perfectly fine - you only need such text once, or perhaps in communities like YPTB rarely (for the acronyms) - but for a newbie to stumble across CTP unawares can be… well… devastating, quite frankly.

                  So I do not begrudge its existence, only it being so readily accessible the same as any other community, even though it is NOT just like any normal community. But, like a bot, like NSFW, if someone wanted to opt-in to it, that should be their decision. i.e. by making an account on an instance that federates with hexbear and joining that community.

                  Separately, but not unrelated, hexbears are known trolls. It’s fine to troll in the community specifically created for trolling, but to do it all across the entire Threadiverse, especially in flagrant violation of the rules for other communities… that’s not ideal. Hexbear should be defederated from because Hexbear consistently violates the rules that others set for themselves, and because consent should matter.

                  But if a space like PieFed.zip wants to federate with hexbear… that’s its business, fine. Though WITH NO LABEL on CTP, I strongly think that it makes that instance less “Newbie-friendly”. Wouldn’t an instance that does not label bots or NSFW be the same? Also, note that PieFed currently has no capability (iirc?) to label all users from an instance. So when someone comes over from Reddit, makes let’s say a comment in an innocuous community such as [email protected], and gets trolled by a hexbear user, and then again by other users in other communities, over and over and over and over again, why should we be surprised when they nope right back to Reddit?

                  Perhaps goat should have a label as well. Perhaps I should myself? I agree that I write long messages, so if I had a label that said “writes long messages”, why should I even be offended? It would help warn people away, if they did not want to receive such? Though for others of us, that’s what we came here for - not just a hundred or so characters that would fit within Twitter’s old restrictions, but LONG-form content, chock full of facts and detailed analyses - I change my opinions over time in response to such, when presented with such details and logic (e.g. I used to argue that while hexbear was a troll instance that lemmy.ml was not, though I now have a much more nuanced take on the subject). Choice is a beautiful thing :-).

                  So I am not opposed in the least to someone seeing CTP, I am slightly more opposed to federating the hexbear instance (but whatever, to each their own), and what I am mainly opposed to is that Newbies in particular can be exposed to hexbear’s trolling even/especially outside of their communities without any kind of warning whatsoever - as if their trolling was the same type as any other content here. Their trolling is their decision, while our decisions to allow their trolling is on us, and all the more so to validate it when a label could be applied but we choose not to. Which makes us a Nazi bar - not that we are Nazis ourselves (or in this case, we are not hexbear trolls), but if we accept them here as if they were any other user, with zero distinction between them and us, then that makes us only one step removed from them. Especially in the eyes of someone noping out of our content because we look superficially similar to them.

                  We cannot force others to join here, only become as enticing as possible so that if they don’t join us, that’s their loss:-).

                • goat@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                  11·
                  16 hours ago

                  Meanwhileongrad is only a toxic community if you go into the community to argue in favour of tankie talking points or otherwise defend them.

                  If you believe that violence and bigotry isn’t okay then you won’t encounter toxicity.

            • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
              14·
              1 day ago

              That is a superb idea. Plus PieFed.social defederates from hexbear, so there’s no chance of them accidentally wandering into let’s say [email protected] and get dunked on without understanding why. That community has a right to exist, but it most definitely should be properly labelled so that users are forewarned - unlike how Lemmy handles it where you can get into a post via All without ever once seeing its sidebar text.

        • hector@lemmy.todayEnglish
          33·
          2 days ago

          Idk this left and right directionalism is worthless online, where half of users are fake influence agents with bots and mechanized troll legions.

          Now with chatbots, certain parties have the better ones, to flood social media, pretending to be all rypes. I imagine are a factor.

          • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
            19·
            1 day ago

            I saw this post on lemmy.ml just prior to the USA election, seemingly portraying the bOtH sIdEs myth that helped encourage people to not vote and thereby get Donald Trump elected:

            img

            Make of that what you will.

    • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
      22·
      1 day ago

      Is it not both though? I’ve noticed several users that joined here only recently - mere days or a few weeks or months - so are we not observing both users leaving and also new ones joining? Although this graph only shows the net traffic differences, so is insufficient to make claims beyond that. You could theoretically make a different one, overlaying the new subscriber numbers on top of this, that could disambiguate those two effects (people leaving vs. new ones joining)?