I am fine with the place settling for a bit. It would suck if this place was as big as other sites are overnight. I want to watch this place grow over time
Yeah, my main problem so far has been finding communities actually worth following/joining/contributing to.
If suddenly tons of average people join, they won't really find communities, they'll deem that their analysis of Lemmy, and leave with tiny chances of a second chance. It'll just boom and bust in it's current state. Most people aren't interested in starting or growing a small community.
Meanwhile, if we stay at this size for a while, communities may form/grow, and as people trickle in, they'll grow bit by bit.
The apps are already amazing and will not suffer issues of scale themselves because they run on users’ devices. The scaling issues will be in Lemmy server code and ActivityPub in general.
ActivityPub doesn’t seem very scalable IMHO. It works well if all instances are about the same size and communities are well-distributed. Right now a few servers like lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.ml are much larger than others. They host most of the popular communities as well. This creates an imbalance which ActivityPub doesn’t handle well.
I think Lemmy instances should be topic based. But that’d be confusing for people coming from centralized social media who are only trying to find a reliable starting place. So I really hope we reach a point of maturity and mainstream-ness of Fediverse that people feel comfortable with smaller theme-based instances.
As long as we have the population to stabilize the big communities and slowly fill out the niche ones as reddit drives ever downward. I think we will be ok.
I hope that the lemmy devs take this time to look at how they're distributing users. We need a better browser for people to find what instances to join. The next Reddit exodus is going to be massive and .ml and .world aren't ready for it.
The brain-drain has already happened on reddit and it's only a matter of time before the good content and 3rd party development explodes here on Lemmy.
Chill man. Even my activity is dropping now, but that's just me thinking that Lemmy will be self-sufficient while I read my books. It's true that Lemmy is not as addicting as reddit, but that's for the best. I've actually gotten into new hobbies whose communities I might eventually join here.
"We had a 2% reduction in profits this year guys, 😭"
"The company lost money?"
"What? Oh no! But we made 3 bn in profits last year and we only made 2.8bn this year... So to make up for the shortfall, we'll be reducing 401k contributions."
Every capitalist: You did great, and we know all the prior meetings talked about record profits, but we just can't afford to give you a bonus. Soooorryyyyyyyyy.
There was a post the other day about other lemmy servers that had thousands of inactive users. The OP contacted the admins of those servers to let them know and several admins did purge a load of accounts.
People were pushing for everyone to comment at least once a day so all the lurkers were counted as active users. It's a little bit of The Pot Roast Principle at this point.
Edit Ok, so don't just pick the first link off Google folks. That got weird fast. Have this Less insane version instead.
man what the hell is that article on? It starts off explaining the pot roast principle which ok that makes sense (it's that we often do things not because of logic but simply we were taught to do so by our parents), but then it says that a message to take away from the story is that "persistence is a virtue" which I mean I guess but you're kinda missing the point? But then in the very next sentence where it says "sometimes things we take as fact are just superstition" it goes "and we should consider prayer as a healthcare alternative" and compares listening to only medical science as like cutting the ends off a pot roast. Not like "superstitions hang around for a reason though and there's perhaps some minor psychological value in these harmless cultural things" or "people who strongly believe in something tend to report more positively in negative times" or even god forbid "have you considered that prayer is like cutting pot roast ends?", straight up "have you tried asking God for help? When was the last time you did that huh? Why are you treating God like a teabag that's pretty ungrateful you dick"
I'm guessing you probably didn't mean for that to be the message (this article is weirdly the first to pop up when you google the term) but uh, maybe you should vet your articles? Unless you're really trying to say we should try praying for lemmy to succeed
I read about an experiment once, where monkeys were placed in a room with a ladder leading to a reward. Whenever a monkey attempted to climb the ladder, they were sprayed with water. Over time, new monkeys replaced the original ones, and even though the water spraying ceased, the monkeys continued to prevent each other from climbing the ladder based on learned behavior. This went on and on even though none of the monkeys in the room had ever been sprayed.
I think about that a lot whenever people say they aren't allowed do something, especially because of religion.
Most people just call that “cargo cult” where they don’t know why they do something, they just do the ritual without questioning it. Also it probably won’t lead to people looking up stuff related to putting a roast on a spit 😉
This is a pretty standard curve for a recently discovered thing. Everyone is curious what it is, tries it out then a percentage decides it isn’t for them and goes elsewhere.
I had to be pretty stubborn to get into Lemmy, never received the verification email (likely due to sudden server load) and no way to retrigger it, so had to wait until the new version came out. Apparently that removed the login block. Not to mention the filter on my account defaulting to showing no posts (needed to set language filter to include undetermined and my language), so it was kind of a rough entry.
But this number isn’t total accounts, it’s active accounts. So that means people who have logged in at least once during the last month. The accounts still exist from when people came to check it out, but if they decided it wasn’t for them or ran into issues like I did and didn’t return then they’d fall off the active user list.
New products face this curve all the time. Steady growth, discovery spike then retained user drop back to steady, hopefully accelerated, growth with a higher baseline than before.
I am also under the impression that active only counts users who commented or posted. So there is also a very significant possibility that people are just settling in and starting to lurk. It's really the 90-9-1 principle (in a stable community, 90% lurk, 9% are occasionally active, 1% are consistently active). It would really be weirder if we didn't see some lurkers after such a massive influx of people
I honestly was worried about our growth maybe 3 weeks ago... It seemed there was a boom and then sort of an exhale after that initial rush in early June. However I'm subbed to about 130 communities. My feed is nice and busy where I couldn't even chance to see all the content. I can look through my sub list (LemmyTools addon plug) and catch up on some comms I missed in my feed. It's going great now as we are seeing steadily more upvoted posts (in the ks) now. Memes are off the charts. Tech and News seems to be hot. Im not super stitious well, maybe a little situous but I think things are going well and seeing a good base here form.
There will need to be some sort of stale/abandoned community cleanup or filter eventually though.
Totally, I actually feel we are already passed that concern. I am seeing a pretty established base forming now. I think we screw to a certain demographic but that is OK by me. I for one am tired of all tired of corporate social media crap. So I'll be here or somewhere like it but lemmy is a very viable platform already
As a cheapskate selfhoster who can only afford a few gigabytes of storage, It may come to a point where 30GB would not be enough to host the entire post history of the lemmy fediverse once user activity rises, and only those with deep pockets would be able to host archives of lemmy posts, just like usenet servers.
Meh, storage is cheap, you can get TBs of storage for less than $100. If things really pick up and you're a smaller Lemmy instance, I bet there'll be some good ways to filter exactly what you store on the server.
Well, I am hosting this instance on a VPS, also given that I currently reside in a third world country, my pay is shit that I cannot afford more storage. If there comes a time that I would have to delete some posts and comments to free space, given that I still have not explored the Postgres database container, I hope the devs included some foreign keys on the comments table that would make deleting stuff way easier.
I liked Lemmy a little bit more before the July 1st influx. Not because of the people, but because there is now more ‘popular’ content that has resulted in less niche content. I’ve subscribed to so many communities that I don’t even see comments from many of the smaller ones because the larger ones dominate the feed.
That's why there needs to be some kind of algorithm when it sees the standard sorting of your feed would result in a long list from the same sub it should instead alternate as much as it can with other subs before continuing with the one dominating, if that makes sense.
more before the July 1st influx. Not because of the people, but because there is now more ‘popular’ content that has resulted in less niche content. I’ve subscribed to so many communities that I don’t even see comments from many of the smaller ones because the larger ones dominate the feed.
Do you have any recommendations for cool niche communities? I just got here.
Also, I'm tempted to make different accounts for different feeds to customize what I can see when I want to see them to avoid exactly your described problem.
For me it still feels a lot more silent than in the old reddit world. Nonetheless I enjoy the content here more than I did in the end of using reddit 🤷♂️
I personally miss understood the fedivers and had multiple accounts on different instances. Currently I am only using one. I guess that is part of the dip.
I've still got two, and I like some features on each better than the other. Kbin for instance doesn't federate with some instances very well, doesn't have an app (yet), and doesn't have some of the other features of Lemmy (like cross-posting), but I like the look of it better and some of the posting features are preferable (like when posting a picture post/thread, it gives you a box for alt text). On the other hand, lemmy has a lot of great apps (I have only tried wefwef and Memmy, but I've heard good things about at least 3 more), allows cross-posting, federates well with both search and posts from other sites/instances, but the /all needs some work and it's not as attractive and is missing some features I'd like. Also, sometimes, one or the other is down, so I just switch. I'm active on both lemmy.world and kbin.social.
LOL this reminds me of the numerous news articles that kept saying how Mastodon wouldn't scale and how it would never take off. The most ridiculous one: "Mastodon is crumbling". (We're over 13 million users right now.)
What's with this meme format having repeated words at the end of the first line and beginning of the second. It happens so frequently it surely can't just be inattention.
I think it's a way of denoting satire. The opinion given, like the grammar used, is intentionally bad. I think it originates with r/okbuddyretard where many of the posts are created in ways that mimic how 12 year olds on the internet speak.
💯 Lemmy is self-sustaining now, and the programmers/server admins are getting experience with scaling. IMO Lemmy is now open for business to steal users every time Reddit does something shitty. I'd say spez should be worried, but he probably doesn't actually care past the pump&dump IPO and if Reddit becomes a ghost town after that he'll have already rode off into the sunset.
honestly, even i went off of lemmy for a bit, not because i dont like lemmy, but because every time i reloaded the page, it would sign me out, and i couldn't save any settings, it seems to be happening across most lemmy instances right now
That happened due to the emoji vulnerability. One mitigation step admins had to take is rotate JWT secrets, which essentially deauthenticated everyone's sessions.
Lemmy-UI and some 3rd party applications didn't know how to react to that, as this is not an official Lemmy feature (it required a database query), so they stayed in that limbo state you're describing here.
Just log out and back in. If the problem persists, delete the cookie for your instance and try again.
I haven't seen that issue. I use browser mostly (even on mobile). Sometimes use liftoff. Never had an auth issue. Maybe something with the larger instances?
I was just thrown error pages when trying to load lemmy throughout the day earlier today and this is my second attempt to reply to your comment here as it would not let me post comments on Jerboa and I'm now trying it in a web browser.
Well some people start communities but are not up to task. There should be a well developed rules/about community page. I have seen just create a community post links and do very little to build engagement.
People are gonna look and leave if a community has like 10 members a new thread with a few replies every two to three days and links.
When I get a little time I will be creating a community. Either way level of engagement will take time to build but lackadasial community creaters add to the build time.
I created a community for the sub I missed from Reddit. It might not be everybody's cup of tea, but I will keep the content flowing to Lemmy every single day.. It takes me 20-40 minutes each day to look for interesting content but it's worth it.
As for the lack of comments they will come. The important part is being consistent.
This! Maintaining AND moderating a community is no small task, even in reddit times. You need to keep your block list fresh and look out for trolls; reminding rude users about not being assholes; banning nazis on the spot; upvoting interesting content and then posting your own. Doing this onLemmy/kbin is even harder, as software is still being developed and admins have their server issues. Oh and if you're an admin yourself, don't get me started on nazi instances and DDOS attacks. You need to blocklist bad instances entirely before they start ruining your users' experience.
So yeah, running a community is no walk in the park, especially if you're an admin. But if you persevere, it will be 100% worth it.
I recommend getting in touch with other mods / admins (is there an admin community? 🤔) and maybe follow Mastodon admins to see how they run their own. This is a team effort and things will run much more smoothly if we work together.
(I also recommend getting a Mastodon account for a backup communication channel, in case your own instance goes down or starts getting too big for your comfort. You never know and it's better safe than sorry. Think of Twitter users who didn't migrate, as a cautionary tale.)
I remember the good old 4chan days when every 3rd post was about how "this is the cancer that is killing /b/" ...
Which in hindsight was not wrong. It's a husk of what it was. I fought with many a /b/tard in the great Tumblr wars. It was remnant of a more wild age, before the summer posters, before the psyops.
I haven't been on Lemmy in a few days because I can't even login on their website. Broke down and downloaded an app through play store so I could login to comment. I was waiting for Boost for Lemmy, but I guess fate had other plans.
It's just the pullback, if it's worth something it will keep going up. I held during the GameStop pullback and made bank on its second wind a month later.
That's OK. Those are just people from the influx. Eventually it will stabilize and start growing again. Gradual growth is the best way to build upon a solid foundation.
The log in and voting issues aren’t because it’s dying, they were because of scaling issues and DDOS attacks because Lemmy is now a visible / popular target.
This stuff is pretty normal for a new upstart service that is becoming popular. This feels like Reddit’s early days.
This is on the community owners. Almost all subreddits start as spaces where one person (the creator) posts daily until the community grows.
It's also a thing on reddit. The vast majority of subreddits created get abandoned. Only a tiny percentage go the distance to become active communities.
Simply subscribe to the active communities, or take part in making communities that you want to be active into active ones. You haven't made a single post and you're complaining about a lack of posts. The problem here is that you just want a slop feed rather than to be an active member of a community.
So far on lemmy all I've really encountered is a bunch of threads going on and on about how great lemmy is, a bunch of assholes who contradict those threads about how great lemmy is, and a shitton of bugs like the one you mentioned and more. I'll give it a shot I guess but my experience has been pretty underwhelming so far.
Here’s my July comment. It’s been a struggle getting used to lemmy but it’s still pretty early and I think I’m soo mad at Reddit that I being a lurker have decided to be more active and post more. It might take close to an year or so for more posts to show up and fill the communities so be patient and cut them some slack.
Real. But no cause for concern. Lemmy experienced a massive, 20-plus-fold increase in userbase almost overnight. The small dip is most likely just the new users settling in and starting to lurk. The recent bot purges probably helped a bit in causing the dip. In any case, it would probably be weirder if we didn't see a dip after such a massive flood of new users
I know I have not. I have had some trouble commenting here, often getting an error and I haven’t had time to keep trying, but that doesn’t mean I give up. It isn’t a big deal to experience glitches. I never expected this to be perfect. It’s a work in progress.
Reddit proved we don’t
matter to its admins at all. Not even a little. Who wants that?
If I’m looking up how to do something with my homelab and there’s a Reddit result I’ll go in, grab a screen of the info I need and then leave. But I deleted my account and don’t browse it at all, won’t be returning
Nah. The place just feels shitty anymore, angry even. And there are too many bots now (including all the suddenly pro-Reddit shills who strangely cannot be downvoted into negative numbers).
If anyone wants that, cool. That means more for you because I'm gone.
I didn't. However, my brother, who is mister super liberal, stick it to Reddit, shame on The Man, went back after a couple of days. He's an unsmart person.