Fediverse

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.

I'm fairly new to Lemmy and started an account when all the api's went down (because the reddit app suck) but ended up back there when I got one of them to work (at cost).

Until I got banned for "hate speech" by a random mod because they didn't know the lyrics to Fairytale of New York and appeals go nowhere and then I commented on something on a different user account and got perma-banned for ban-evasion. All dumb.

So now I'm back on lemmy permanently, trying to find as many communities as I had in my reddit subscriptions (I had a lot), and bringing my daily engagement here. Would be good if numbers went up, but also, there's a lot of idiots on Reddit too. The Fediverse needs better SEO to drive engagement. I haven't once seen a solution to a problem (e.g. IT, tech or DIY) that links to a fedi page.

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.

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! :>

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

So steady numbers are better.

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".

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.

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.

Another top quality blazepost. Thanks for those community recos

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).

In the repost on the Chile community, also saw one or other comment about Lemmy being toxic. I do notice a certain "toxicity", though from certain corners and which seems to stems more often from what I call "misery posting", which would be posts whose main focus seems to be to make the given topic appear like a lost cause to the reader (even some "meme" communities seem to fall on this).

Since some communities seem specially prone for such posts, I second blocking those as you notice the patterns to try to make your feed healthier, and to hopefully make such places shrink into a healthier size. Or at least, if you got the patience and resistance to mass downvoting and mobbing, to post in those communities and within their rules what to you is positive. Alternatively/Parallel to that, one could make sure to react accordingly to posts, instead of uninterestedly hide everything in feed as the user scrolls.

Otherwise, a given environment shrinking or tanking in growth could also mean people that use it are growing apathetic or anomic to popularizing it, to which I repeat my suggestion in the Chile community, change starts by small steps. So for example, if someone is on a platform compatible by extension but without an ActivityPub bridge or function active (e.g. Threads and Bluesky), to explain to them they could activate it, and e.g. Fedi Brdigy is working on Lemmy compatibility, so more potential users going around. Also, if you see a funny meme or the sort, you could share the link, provided it has a decent blurb preview on the platform to be sent.

Also spikes happen anywhere when competing platforms have issues, so current retention might just be its natural one.

And even on a Lemmy account I have (thus little noise from microblogging) and while highly curating my feeds there, the amount of posts is almost too much for me to be able to go through. So by observation, the "threadiverse" as a whole seems rather healthy in numbers.

60% of those are alt accounts prolly

maybe the real problem is Nicole left us

There are dozens of dozens of dozens of dozens of us! Dozenses!