I do generally wish there was more content. So I've decided to start actively participating rather than lurking more recently.
I appreciate your effort. I was more of a lurker on Reddit, but realised we all got to actively participate here if we want Lemmy (and the Fediverse at large) to succeed.
Unfortunately, content marketing is a long-term ROI strategy. IMO other marketing means (e.g. ads, influencers) would do a better job of bringing new users onboard in the short term, helping us to tap into the network effort.
Fediverse does everything I require out of social media. Functionality of threadiverse is mostly there and getting better (Piefed will probably replace Lemmy as the go-to eventually), apps are better. Mastodon / microblogging was always good enough for communicating with real people, it’s when you’re an influencer you run into limitations but who cares about that. Maybe there aren’t that many people that are into this and that’s okay because we’re not a corporation that needs to report quarterly growth forever.
Didn't the UK recently have a controversial online safety act or something? And didn't many servers defederate UK servers as result?
No, lemmy.zip just geo blocked UK IP adresses, but the content is still available from other servers, no instance defederated.
But usage is not going downwards. Check these stats out: https://fediverse.observer/stats
MAU has been steady at 1.1 million since this time last year.
Within the fediverse there are some platforms that are losing ground and some that are growing.
Up the top it has software filter, if you select lemmy:
At this rate by 2035 the lemmy userbase will be depleted
Maybe we're all just waiting for reddit to pull another... reddit.
As a general comment, I suggest everyone interested in making the Fediverse grow to join those two communities
Nobody likes to shout into the void. The second one helps finding people to help you grow your communities.
Why does everything need to expand? I’m happy with where we are. It feels cozy.
Social media is kinda washed up. A lot of people are on substack, too. The internet as a place is just less popular, I think. We're all getting sick of it.
Uk subs are too fragmented and I never see anything from them.
Hopefully voyager implements piefeds topics functionality.
What. I see so much !uk_politics@feddit.uk !casualuk@feddit.uk !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk etc.
And I wouldn’t call them fragmented, all on the same instance.
How are you noticing that you're specifically seeing less interaction from UK people?
Yeah, both. It's flatlining globally and down in the UK.
It kinda seems like historically, growth has been driven by exoduses from larger platforms. Right now there's not any huge things going on on other platforms that piss people off and make them wanna leave but like, twitter, reddit and meta seem really good at finding shitty thing to do, so I'd kinda expect growth to just pick back up whenever the next outrage happens 🤷♂️
Isn't it a little bit sad to think that the best we can do here is to wait for everyone else to get pissed at Big Tech's fuckups?
The horrors persist, but so should we
Network effects are incredibly strong. Xitter is now a disinformation and fascist hellhole, and yet people who should know better still refuse to leave. We have the advantage that we're not growth focused, so we can can bide our time. The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually, but there's no telling when the tipping point will happen.
Network effects are incredibly strong
Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though they started way after us
We have the advantage that we’re not growth focused
This is not an "advantage". This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.
The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually,
And when it does, the majority of people will go the next shiny "free as in beer", VC-funded siloed platform and we are going to be just another "They don't know" meme.
Not gonna argue with you mate, I know we disagree fundamentally on what the fediverse means. Me and most others never will see eye to eye with you with your capitalist growth-focused approach.
Me and most others
The "most others" here is a heavily self-selected group of people who don't want to compromise on any of their values and treat any effort to grow as a threat.
All of this to say, it's fine if you say "Yes, we are small and I want it that way because if it gets any bigger we will be surrounded by people who do not uphold the same values we do". The problem is that you're arguing "We are only small because of $random_reason (network effects/evil capitalists/not enough funding/etc)", as if "being small" was determined by external factors and not something that you can control.
That's the point of disagreement. I think we can control this and we can bring more people here, but it's just that you don't want to do it if means sacrificing your ideology.
I honestly think self-righteousness pushes people away. It's why I can barely stand bluesky. During the big exodus from reddit, all these so-called far-lefties (who I think were just reddit goons doing infiltration) were all screaming for everybody to defederate. Even now, I keep arguing against idiots posting "kill a cop" or "kill fascists" memes, like this is literally an "advocate violence" platform. I don't expect to pull big numbers with that kind of shit.
Yeap, 100%. The extremists and the terminally online are overrepresented here, and that keeps the masses away.
I'd suggest though to not waste your time arguing with the self-righteous idiots and just focus on bringing more normie-friendly content.
I mean everyone already has platforms they're largely comfortable with and fediverse platforms are less accessible, smaller, and usually clones of existing formats. The primary place we compete is on not being total dogshit, so when people can forget that their comfortable platforms are dogshit, it doesn't surprise me that people wouldn't be going out of their way to venture out into a new unfamiliar thing, with a different culture and much smaller userbase 🤷♂️
I'm happy to be here regardless of whether we're growing personally. In spite of Lemmy's challenges I enjoy it here, and that's enough for me.
We had some nice steady growth up until some months back, probably partially driven by dissatisfaction with Reddit rallying behind Trump and further enshittification of it. But predictably the lions share of users just accepted the new normal as the inertia of leaving is just too high to overcome. For another exodus event there needs to be a bigger shock to the system, probably something like turning off old.reddit.
something like turning off old.reddit.
One day...
It definitely will happen. I've already noticed I'm sometimes getting weird "your IP is blocked" warnings when using old.reddit. They go away after a refresh but it wouldn't surprise me if they're trying to get people to stop using it.
I've spent the a good part of last year working on Fediverser. The tools to lower the barrier of migration and to get people out of Reddit were built. To me, it feels like it's the users and admins here that were not interested in pushing that as a goal.
I browse lemmy exclusively, as a result of distaste for corporatization. Personally I have no reason to leave and I doubt I will anytime soon. I don't have any particular niches that I'm a part of, so the only thing that would cause me to leave is if the feed dried up. I usually open lemmy in the morning and scroll All - top 12h. I get an hour or so of scrolling before I reach posts with sub-10 votes. And that's all I really need. I'll be here until I can't do that anymore.
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)