I’ve subscribed to a plethora of communities that really interest me and actually have posts and discussions in them, but I have to go to the specific community to see this. My “Subscribed” feed only contains a few of the same posts that I’ve seen for weeks in Hot, the same posts from even longer ago in “Active”, posts from the same communities as the ones in “Hot” in New and no other communities, and pretty much only posts from the Meme’s community I unsubscribed from when sorted by “All”. I also see a majority of posts barely have upvotes or comments on them at all from the “bigger” communities. Is this just the growing pains of this site? Am I still doing lemmy wrong? Is it the instance I’ve chosen to join?
UPDATE I want to thank everyone who posted and gave me helpful advice on this matter. It turns out that there are still lots of people here on Lemmy with me, I just couldn’t see you because I was sorting my feed incorrectly. I’m excited that there are more people here and I’m excited to continue to contribute to Lemmy with you! Thank you all for the help, I really appreciate it. The solutions are to continue to subscribe, contribute to my favorite communities, and sort by top day, 12, and 6 hours. It really helped liven up my feed!
The Hot timeline becomes stale if the lemmy server isn’t restarted every 6 hours or so, which takes 10 seconds but can’t be done on larger instances such as lemmy.world because it kills the queue of outgoing activity.
This is a known bug and is being worked on. For the time being you should try with “top 6 hours” and “top 12 hours” sorting.
I appreciate the sorting suggestion! I’ll try that. I understand that Lemmy isn’t as big as Reddit, but I swear there are more people than my feed is leading me to believe.
It’s been hard to look at all these posts about how big lemmy is and how fast it’s growing, to watch the scale-up issues, and keep in mind just how much smaller it still is than reddit. According to https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats the lemmyverse is just now closing in on 2M users (from 750k last month), but only 70,000 of them are “active.” Reddit claims 50,000,000+ daily users and 400M monthly. That’s essentially 1000x larger than lemmy - that’s the difference between seeing your favorite band at a stadium concert or your local pub.
I’d be curious to see what the comment/post rate is for “active users” per platform.
It’s an open secret that it’s a very small percentage of users who engage in comments, and a MINISCULE fraction of a percent who post content… Tinier still the percentage of accounts that post the things that end up in the “all” feed. A boggling percentage of Reddit front page content comes from like, 100 user accounts.
The comment/post ratio for active users on Lemmy is 100%. An active user on Lemmy is defined as someone who has made a comment or post within the last month.
Sounds like we should change the definition of active
It does seem like the threshold for “active” should be just going to the site with a logged in account, or at least voting on anything
Then the solution becomes simple. Track those 100 power users and lure them here.
Please don’t! That’s what made reddit such a shithole in my opinion.
Well that’s the beauty of the fediverse. If you are the minority that want to keep your lemmy small niche content then you can freely do that in the instance of your choice that defederates the popular ones. Most users like the variety of reddit content.
I get that. And reddit had tools so that you could create your own groups of subs. I guess I just am not the target of the kinds of crap posts that were just constantly force fed to the main feed by the relatively few mentioned above. Quantity doesn’t equate to quality.
I think that’s largely happened… I mean look at the top comment. Almost 200 upvotes. On Reddit this post/comment would definitely not get 1000x that - so clearly it seems the participation rate is significantly higher.
I think I might legitimately start doing that for my country sub in the coming weeks.
No wonder everything on the hivemind-that-must-not-be-named sounds and feels like it’s being regurgitated by the same people, from the low-effort memes to the armchair city planners, atheist circlejerks and very enlightened political/economic views.
So…where are those 70k active users? The posts I’ve been seeing definitely don’t have that sort of interaction.
They’re spread all around. The ‘big’ lemmy communities have 2-5,000 monthly users, which probably means a few hundred to a thousand daily users. In the more active communities I follow c/selfhosted@lemmy.world or c/games@lemmy.world I’ll see a half dozen or so posts a day and up to 50-ish comments on a super popular topic. Most of them get just a handful of replies. That feels about right to me: the vast majority of people are lurkers, and the vast majority of accounts are abandoned.
It’s why the commercial sites fought so hard for market share and why being The site for microblogging/link aggregation/image sharing is so important. People go to those sites because everyone is there, and everyone is there because that’s just where you go.
There’s no lemmy-wide algorithm making sure you have shiny new topics to look at. The lemmy “all” page is not at all equivalent to r/all, especially on an instance as small as fediverse.boo. The “All” tab is only going to have content from communities that at least one person on the instance has subscribed to, and with only 6 active users ( https://fedidb.org/network/instance/fediverse.boo ) that’s not likely to be a large set. It’s also possible that the federation mechanics result in you seeing less or delayed content from other instances. Maybe try browsing, even without an account, https://lemmy.world or https://sh.itjust.works
I’ve never seen motorhead at either myself.
Man, I’m sorry. You really missed out.
I saw motorhead at sxsw and it awesome. A power circuit cut out on stage and only Lemmy’s amp and mic worked. As the crew troubleshooted, he walked up to the mic and was like, “does anyone know any jokes?” He then proceeded to noodle a shitty walking bass line like every other bass player in the world when that shit happens
All of us reading this post feeling the same way can do our part by posting and commenting. If everyone who thinks they’re the only ones here start talking the emptyness disappears
I’m definitely more active here than I am\was on reddit, and there’s definitely less activity here… but I can accept that, just to get away from the firehose of nonsense that reddit has become.
Specially sorting by 6 hours is important :)
That’s great information. Thank you so much!
Dito, thanks a lot for the technical background which makes sense @Wander@yiffit.net . I was also running into this staleness of the timeline and was wondering,
If that’s true it should really be stickied by am admin. That’s crucial info.
Huh, I thought Lemmy was dying, posts are so stale.
That was my main reason for posting this question, to see if I’m alone in this site with just a bunch of bots posting. All these responses have given me hope!
I feel the same way and made a post about it yesterday that got hammered with downvotes.
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I like how two people still downvoted you. I’ve seen this behavior before in niche online games.
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Do you have a link to the bug tracker for the restart problem?
You’re doing Lemmy wrong, and it’s not your fault. People keep saying “instance doesn’t matter” - sure, you can interact with anything all over the main lemmyverse, but the best experience is to find a home server with a community that feels right. Subscriptions and the sorting will get there, but right now ALL (or maybe even local) is a way better experience
Here’s the servers I checked out:
Lemmy.world
What I signed up on. The most people, the most content, civil community. Moderation is there, but you mostly feel it by the sense of civility. They keep getting targeted and they’re experiencing a lot of hiccups, but they’re the biggest source of content right now. Feels to me at this point
(Sh.itjust.works)[Https://sh.itjust.works/signup] About as close as you can get to freedom of speech while keeping out the aggressive bigots. I think one of their rules is along the lines of you can drop n-bombs or argue for whatever you want, but not use slurs against actual people. That says a lot… But they’re great for shitposts and are experimenting with democracy at !agora@sh.itjust.works
(Beehaw.org)[beehaw.org/signup] I’d describe it as a safe space. Heavy moderation and curation of content. Those kinds of places feel uncomfortable and tense to me so I find it hard to give it a fair review. Not my thing, but they claim to be closest to Reddit… I’d give lemmy.world that title, but it was a big site and I was constantly searching out the medium sized subs.
(Lemmy.nsfw)[Lemmynsfw.com/signup] A stable server that will show you plenty of sfw content, and the community is welcoming. And of course, there’s the obvious…
(Blahaj.zone)[https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/signup] The flip side of why I go to sh.itjust.works, lots of queer shitposts. I like the memes, I like the people, not so sure about the admin… She’s been stirring up a lot of drama the last few days. Maybe there’s more to it, I’ve mostly just seen her posts that look a bit power-trippy from a distance. I’ve also been waiting for that to happen to see how we as a community handle it, so
(pawbs.social)[https://pawbs.social/signup] This is my main home server now. A while back I came to realize furries are always big early adopters of every new tech, they’re super welcoming, and they don’t care if you’re not a furry so long as you don’t care that they are. I like the art anyways so it doesn’t bother me. A lot of tech stuff too. They are most definitely furries though, and you’ll see OwOs and all that comes with that. They’re very chill, until someone isn’t, so if you can’t handle that you’re going to have a bad time
(Lemmy.ml)[Lemmy.ml/signup] The original devs instance. They’re going through some stuff with their domain and definitely anticapitalist, but after digging for evidence and talking to them they’re far from extremists, but the constant stream of people heading over to there to pick a fight, the site was on edge when I went there a few weeks ago. A good place if you’re into good faith debate on economic and governmental systems
lemmygrad.ml was a more extreme version (literally someone came in to start a fight in every thread i saw) they’re understandably pretty wary. Their ideas are out there, but they’re definitely not pro genocide and don’t worship Stalin (at least as a whole).
Lemmy.ml I wouldn’t pick until they get their domain issue shaken out, but I included them because after an afternoon trying to get to the bottom of it (the only proof of anything I found was a mastodon post about someone very vague about what was said and ending with “unfortunately the conversation was deleted”), so it seems to me they’ve been getting misrepresented. I’m very open to more concrete details though
(Dbzer0.com)[https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/signup] They sail the high seas. Less content, but what was there was pretty interesting if you’re into tech, security, or digital rights
Those are the sites I remember off the top of my head after exploring around, there’s >2k instances (although about 100 were populated by users when I went through the data dump a few weeks back)
If you’re on Android, I’m doing bug fixes before launching my app very soon, and iPhone build is coming once I can get one to test on. I pushed back the launch to pack on features, I’ve got keyword filtering, you can explore servers without changing accounts, it saves your place, hides read posts, it offers URL replacement (I accidentally went to Twitter for possibly the last time today and YouTube yesterday, the logo change was worth it but nitter is less jarring).
You can interact with Lemmy links, collapse comments, post with a control bar that doesn’t float around, save drafts, and it’s all in a dark material-design style (but with way less cards). There’s still a lot to be done, but after bug fixes and optimization v2 will be focused around combing feeds and accounts to get just the right mix. Eventually I’ve got eyes on pixelfed and maybe even things like friendica - the beauty of the fediverse is how amazing a foundation it is to build on
For today, there’s still occasional bugs and jank, but at this point I can say it’s pretty stable when the servers cooperate. I’ll be covering for more and more of it through the client as time goes on, but for the last 2 weeks I’ve been using it exclusively. My friend convinced me I need to wrap it up and put it out there and get feedback, so
Check out !flemmy@lemmy.world if you’re interested, I just posted some screenshots (it will get prettier, but hopefully it’s good enough to not be distracting)
Thank you for posting this! I realize it’s just your assessments of these instances, but I’ve been interested to see summaries of what other instances are like, since I’m not completely satisfied with Lemmy.world. Having read your descriptions though, I think I’ll stick with it a while longer.
Alternatively, lemm.ee, sopuli.xyz or reddthat.com could be interesting alternatives, pretty generalist too
Great instance review, thank you! FYI your markdown links are broken, switch the brackets, links are [like] (this) not (like)[this]
In my instance, we use Arch.
Jk. We’re pretty chill although we’re too small to be anywhere popular. We like memes but not really overrun with it. The admin and the owner are nice and relaxed. Not much content since we’re just a small group, but some members are pretty active in their communities.
Thanks. I needed this
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Lemmy but twitter instead of reddit.
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Saved this even if only you have a good description of the major instances.
Thanks for this!
Thank you for taking the time and writing out such a detailed response 🙏
👍
Commenting for dot
Content aggregation is a WIP around here. Reddit had very similar issues in its early days. Give it time.
The amount of responses in this post have been extremely reassuring. I honestly just felt like I was using the site alone with a bunch of bots lol
It’s a bit of both. No, the place isn’t empty, but it’s still not populated enough for content to aggregate as well as it does on Reddit.
Content aggregates based on how the users vote. The more votes there are, the more data the algorithm has to work with, the better it can sort content.
Think of it like a waterwheel. On Reddit, the water comes in like Niagra, that wheel can power a city. Here, it’s like modestly sized, gentle river so you’ve got less to work with.
Simultaneously, the waterwheel here is still somewhat under construction, whereas Reddit’s has been a well oiled machine for many years now.
In both cases, time will fix it. Just need a little patience.
As others have said maybe it’s a sorting issue. I can scroll for hours getting new content with comments on it
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Yeah. I’m ok with it for now, it’s better than reddit and helping to establish the fediverse.
Yeah. I’m ok with it for now, it’s better than reddit and helping to establish the fediverse.
Protip: if you hit submit and it doesn’t look like it went through it probably did
Yeah. I’m ok with it for now, it’s better than reddit and helping to establish the fediverse.
Yeah. I’m ok with it for now, it’s better than reddit and helping to establish the fediverse.
Big companys dump millions into a perfect algo to milk engagement and ad views. Right now the priority seems to be security and stability before moving on to features. Lemmy blew up pretty much over night. Its going to take time and volunteers to improve.
Sort by 6 or 12 hours is super important.
This is the way
Here is what I do. First, sort by Top Day to see what I missed. Then sort by Top 12 hours to reveal newer stuff. Then sort by Top 6 hours, Top 1 hour, any finally Sort by New until I run out of content. At that point, it’s time to put down the phone and do something else.
I pretty much sort by new most of the time. There is less noise in the system right now so you do not have to wade through so much toxic BS. That also means that you actually run out of genuinely new content pretty quickly. Viewing new posts has some nice side effects in that comments get good engagement much more often and you get to have a real influence on whether something gains traction.
I try to comment on new a lot too. Even if it’s nothing substantial I figure people are more likely to add something if there’s already a comment. Someone could have a really interesting take but if they see 0 comments they might not even bother.
Agreed, I’ve been commenting on several posts over at !macrophotography@lemmy.world just to encourage people to keep posting their images.
There’s just not as many people here as there is on Reddit. Things will be slow for as long as we don’t have large numbers. Best thing you can do to make things better is engage frequently and spread the good word of Lemmy
Thanks, I’ll keep trying to do my part to grow my favorite communities on Lemmy.
I feel your pain! Sorting by Top 6 Hours is my current go to, mostly because I only scroll every few hours or so. Additionally, I start by scrolling through “Home” then transition to “All” if I feel like it. If you use the voyager app, there’s a new function to hide read posts, which could be helpful to you, as well!
That “top 6 hours” tip is great, thanks for sharing
I felt the same way, but it’s mostly due to lemmy’s still premature sorting algorithm. Sorting by New, Top Hour, or Top Six changed my experience drastically. There’s still issues like posts having not enough involvement through comments, and duplicate posts from similar communities, but overall it’s much better after about a month in.
I’ve been preferring new or top X hours ago, then just choose the X for the last time you visited.
Okay, so here’s my first problem with the Twitter rebrand
100% legit criticism.
I honestly didn’t envision a timeline where melon renaming twitter would cause confusion in math.
Your typo calling Elon melon is the cherry on top of this discussion
Ha ha :) Thank you. It’s a term my friends made up for him.
It would be nice to have 2,3,4,5 hour options as well. Adjusting it manually in the url does not work.
When I joined there was nothing shorter than top 24h so maybe in the future they’ll add more.
I’m just seeing a wall of the same crap about Reddit and Twitter most of the time. I need to learn it better, and I think the technology has room to grow. The userbase exploded, and a lot of people have their own ideas of how it should work.
I was going to say the same thing. I’ve been doing what others recommended (sorting by Top for last X hours) and I see so much about Twitter & Reddit, and to make it worse, reposts of the same link that got upvoted a lot in different communities. I really wish there were a way to filter these posts out in the Lemmy settings (like Mastodon filters), because I’m tired of seeing the same rehashed discourse about those platforms over and over again…
My takes: 1. Lemmy is small yet, so, few content. 2. A lot of propaganda accounts. You need to block communities and users. 3. Once in a while a small community make it to the top, so you found about it and subscribe to it. 4. Little by little your feed gets better. 5. Human nature, you can’t escape from it, you know, that quote about how stupid is the average person and so. 6 Accept the limitations and enjoy the platform. PS: I do like all the silly memes.
You’re not going to like what I’m about to say.
You’re part of the problem. You can fix it though.
Ready?
You need to make original content for the communities you are apart of and stop expecting others to provide you the conent you want. Because if that’s what everyone did, then there would be absolutely nothing here.
That’s just the way it is right now. There’s not enough original content creators on Lemmy yet.
What does original content mean? It doesn’t mean reposts from other websites. It doesn’t mean articles from other websites. The original content was already posted by the writers of the articles, on the original website. It doesn’t mean comments you make. My comment here isn’t original content. It’s a reaction.
Original content is something you make. You baked some sourdough bread? Post. You made a chair from wood? Post. You made something out of leather? Post. You took a nice photo? Post. You made some digital art? Post. You drew a sketch of a building? Post. You did “insert hobby”? Post. You’re a collector of this niche thing? Post.
The truth is, original content can be hard and time-consuming. It takes a certain mind to want to post original content. If everyone here would make just one original content post, I think that would help make Lemmy a better social media site.
Be the change.
Your
rantpost is ill-placed, because I’m trying to do that. I’ve already posted and commented multiple posts in communities I enjoy trying to garner attention and content. But i’m also a busy person who’s trying to live with a family, children, and a budding carreer. I understand I need to be a part of the community and I am doing more now than I ever have on Reddit.EDIT: I also wanted to add that this post is not about me complaining about a lack of content, it was a misunderstanding of the sorting algorithm. After posting this, I got lots of very helpful advice to help me use Lemmy’s sorting better and my enjoyment of Lemmy has improved immensly to the point of where my experience on Lemmy is no longer lame.
EDIT 2: I must have misread your post because it was not condesending, but more motivating. I appreciate the sentiment and redact the condesending part, but stand by the rest of what I’ve said. I deleted the entire second paragraph because I was defensive and wrong in its entirety. I appreciate the sentiment while affirming I am trying to contribute more while my life is still very busy. I apologize for getting defensive.
You’re right, I didnt look at your profile. That was my mistake. My comment wasn’t intended to be an attack on you. It was more of a generalization of a problem of Lemmy at the moment. I should have gone out of my way to look at your profile and to better phrase what I was saying so that you and others wouldn’t feel as though I was making a personal attack. Sorry about making you feel attacked.
I commend your amazing apology. This is what makes this community better than Reddit.
I think what your post was getting at was valid, and I promide I will do my best to not be the reason Lemmy has a lack of content, i want to do my best to contribute! I don’t think your intentions were wrong, and hope you continue to advocate for people to contribute.
This type of ‘post or you’re the problem’ comment really gets on my nerves too. If no one replies, people won’t post again, and if a sub is nothing but single posts no one’s coming back.
It’s great you’re putting in the effort to post, and people should appreciate that. I’m autistic and I can’t post. I can give incredibly detailed information in response to a post or a comment if it relates in any way to any of my special interests. And I do. And so do people like me. It’s why you can find the answer to basically any question on the internet. These ‘post more’ people need to cool it, because the reason people like content like this is depth and engagement and it’s not going to happen without people engagine with the content too.
Yeah, I’ve made some posts trying to start discussions on a game I played or the likes. Posts that, to the extent of my knowledge, have literally never been made on Lemmy before (I searched – though admittedly the search system makes Reddit’s search look like Google). I actually did get a couple of replies to some and some were really great replies too. But it’s barely a trickle compared to what I’d get from even a middling popularity post on Reddit. I want waaaay more discussion, especially for novel topics.
And there’s so many niche posts that I can’t make. I really enjoyed communities like AITA or Best of Legal Advice or the likes. What, should I make up scenarios? I’m happy to contribute to comments of posts in such communities, but they basically don’t exist here.
Local communities are even worse. I’ve made several posts to my city’s community and can’t recall if I ever even got a reply to a single one. On Reddit that never happened.
Yes. You put more into a post, so it hurts more if you don’t get anything out of it. If I were to make a post i’d agonize over the wording and set aside time in front of an actual keyboard to respond and then i’d be completely overwhelmed anyway if there was even a modest response to the post. It’s a pretty self centered, basic misunderstanding of people to think that everyone can or should make their own posts.
If I reply to someone, I assume at least they read it. As a person who requires little social interaction that’s enough for me, even if I wrote an extremely detailed wall of text.
“Hey man. Just uhhhh… you know… paint some walls with colored rainbows and ponies and shiz. That’ll make the world better.”
- (You)
I mean, I know that complaining won’t change anything, but holy bimbles in my dimples, you are really suggesting this guy to just ignore all the porn and start adding some “healthy content” in? There is this thing called tendency… and if a certain community/place/etc has some “furry porn” in? Then its not him that’ll (magically) change it “for the better”. It’ll not make the “furry porn apologists” (suddenly) stop being degenerates. Its one guy versus a bunch of porn-addicted, degenerative individuals. He doesn’t stand a chance. Your post is just plain “wishful thinking”.
Is there a look at my turd sub, because that’s about the level that 99% of users will contribute to IF prodded. Beyond that, the “it’s you, your the problem it’s you” argument will not produce change. It’s simply a numbers game. Need to get enough users that 1% producing content is still a lot of content. Awareness / marketing tactics can help. Mention Lemmy on reddit boards and threads or whatever the kids are using, (instabook?). Oh, also someone needs to get some money and get some famous people on here. I could give a damn what they say, but the youth hang on their every word. Get that rapper guy or one of the telltubbies or something talking about Lemmy and you’ll get people to flock.
That isn’t true. It is not a numbers game. Reddit didn’t start off with numbers. Facebook didn’t start off with numbers. Tumblr didn’t start off with numbers. Twitter didn’t start off with numbers.
They all started small. Growing gradually. People stayed because they enjoyed the content and the community.
Hype and influence only attract a certain type of person. Fools. That will just create an inferior community. You’ll have a digital Fyre Festival that way.
Artificially inflating numbers creates a community with no respect of the community itself. There’s no thought in that. When you put no thought into something the results aren’t good.
This is already started. Those things started out small but succeeded because of aggressive marketing practices and huge investmentments. That could be the next phase for Lemmy. Growth can happen without but it will be slow and there is high risk of implosion during that period of slow growth.
When I joined Facebook in ~2006 there was already a decent amount of people using it. There was enough interesting content for me to stick around.
When I joined Reddit ~2009 it was also starting to really become popular. The Digg exodus helped tremendously.
The difference between them and Lemmy is that they already felt polished compared to Lemmy. Lemmy feels almost as though it’s in Beta. Lemmy goes down practically everyday for me. There’s not a lot of original content and it’s a very different experience than any other social media sites. Honestly, it’s complicated compared to the straight forward nature of other social media sites.
Instances, communities, Fediverse etc. I’m going to say that a lot of people will not like the hassle.
Can there truly be an implosion of Lemmy? I thought the nature of the Fediverse was that it can’t be controlled by a single entity? If an instance goes down, can’t there be something to replace it? As long as there are servers and people willing, it will remain. Right?
If you are experiencing downtime, you might want to create another account on another instance and clone your subscriptions using https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
Yeah, maybe implode isn’t the right word. Remember what happened to slashdot? Sad fizzle is more like it. Hard to kill Lemmy maybe, but I can easily see this devolving into a few grumpy communists and crappy ads for diet supplements. I sure hope not, but there’s no reason to be overly optomisitic about the tech world these days. It’s all so damn sad.
Instance war, ideology clash resulting in censorship, random rules on different instances.
That is also the cause why some people are reluctant to contribute.
It’s not that easy to make stuff. I find myself pretty creatively dead. I have communities I’d love to make content for but I’m a talentless waste of breath.
Turn on “hide read post”! It changes everything
I did that and it confused the hell out of me, half of my instances communities were empty all of a sudden
Sort by “best” is coming to Lemmy, in case you didn’t know.
That’s great
Once clients add “mark read on scroll” this may go away, too.
