I just noticed that active users on Lemmy got slashed, what happened?
References:
Lemmy devs decided to exclude lemmy.world from the join-lemmy site because it’s too big. Obviously that removes a lot of active users.
Holy shit, the most active instance right now on the website is LemmyNSFW.
🎵 the internet is for porn 🎵
Rule 34 in action
Ahem maybe not the best choice of character there old chap
I missed when reddit had more porn so here I am
Welcome!
I’d shake your hand, but, well…
That’s stupid.
The main problem with lemmy now is adoption, there isn’t a critical mass of users yet.
When users see the stats without lemmy.world, they’ll be discouraged from joining. Add to that the issues with federation and the few who join will leave because of the steep learning curve.
Way to alienate potential users.
Yeah. If they pushed it to the bottom of the list, or even removed them from the list but kept the user count, I could kind of understand it. But censoring them completely for being too successful seems like shooting yourself in the foot.
Lemmy.world is doing great and I’m happy for it and all that, but… 20 000 monthly active users does not exactly make them a tech giant that needs to be kept in check just yet. Ideally, instances of 20 000 active users should be quite normal at some point, and having stress tested the software before then should, one assumes, be a good thing.
You probably also have the friction been .world and the developers’ Lemmy.
There is also a problem that Lemmy seems to be having problems maintaining a good middle ground of Lemmy servers.
buT mUh DeCenTrAlIZatiOn!
It’s because the devs suck
The devs are working hard providing a public service that they make available for everyone. And the product they’ve developed is pretty impressive, in spite of its shortcomings.
They hold some opinions I disagree with pretty strongly, and I’m not a fan of every decision they make. But they’re creating a truly common good, and for that they deserve praise. From a technical perspective, they have created something completely new that serves thousands of users and constitutes a system of huge complexity. They very much do not suck.
Anyone who thinks any person maintaining an open source project “sucks” should feel free to fork the project, fix whatever they’re not happy with, and maintain the repository and handle commits and all the shit that goes down in managing a large open source project. After dedicating all this time to people, some random ingrate will inevitably disagree with some minor decision they’ve made and decide that they “suck”.
I mean. They’re torpedoing that open source’s projects chances for growth because of their ideology. It’s pretty sucky.
I agree with the rest of your statement regarding the development of Lemmy.
Yeah, for sure. Doing something great doesn’t shield you from also making some really shitty decisions or holding some god-awful positions.
I just think it’s good to keep a nuance of language. Too many open source developers burn out, and a hostile community is listed as one of the reasons too often. There will always be disagreements, and there are valid ways of voicing it, but one should never forget that there is humans on the other side and remain kind. :)
also making some really shitty decisions or holding some god-awful positions
You have been banned from Lemmy.ml
They are okay as devs, not that good as admins, which is fine, it is known by now, and people can move easily.
To the people who are going to answer that they are bad devs too, which other devs are that much better than them at this moment for link aggregators in the Fediverse?
I like Piefed and Mbin as much as the next guy, but Lemmy is still the most polished software as of now. Maybe that will change in the future, but let’s face it: with the amount of pushback the Lemmy devs are getting regularly, the fact that most of the instances still use Lemmy is a sign that there the alternatives aren’t that much better.
Nah we’ll keep dropping instances when they hit 20k users.
the few who join will leave because of the steep learning curve.
what steep learning curve? what’s so steep about thinking of social media like email?
Oh come on, let’s not pretend that the fediverse is just super intuitive and easy for regular users (i.e. non-techie people). Same ridiculous notion as when people say Linux is just as user-friendly as the more mainstream OSes. It’s sad and I wish it was better but it’s just not right now.
It might be a little more complicated than normal social media and email but it definitely is not that complex.
Sorry, but the fact that you’re here means that you are probably in the top percentages of tech-literate people. Especially considering you’re on programming.dev.
You’re severely overestimating the technical literacy of regular people. For many people (maybe even the majority of people) even email is complex.
I never want to mention them explicitly to avoid them getting raided, but there is a community which came here after their sub got banned.
The sub was about an influencer, so definitely not the crowd you would expect on Lemmy.
They are doing just fine. We helped them a bit at first, showed them that there were apps, told them to remember the name of their “server” when logging in.
The community is quite active with over 150 monthly active users. They discuss their topic in their community, everything is going well.
Sometimes I feel like we overestimate the complexity of Lemmy.
If they can do it, everybody can do it.
That is a nice success story!
goddam
I want the biggest Lemmy you have.
No, that’s too big.
It’s a genuine concern though. If you want one centralised server hosting all the content, just use reddit.
so lemmy.world became too big to fail and the other instances decided didn’t want to risk a potential bail out?
This has nothing to do with other instances. The join-lemmy.org site is run by the Lemmy developers and they decide what happens with that site. They think it’s problematic that lemmy.world is as big as it is (as one of the points of the fediverse is decentralization). So they removed lemmy.world from the listing on join-lemmy.org.
Note that this is in no way a defederation or anything of that sort. The site just doesn’t show lemmy.world, that’s all.
my comment was mostly a joke, but it doesn’t contradict your point, lemmy.word got too big(relatively) so it got de-listed to flow new users to other instances
my comment was mostly a joke
Sorry for not getting it, it’s just that sometimes people (understandably) get very confused about the technicalities of the fediverse and mix up things like defederation and stuff like this. 😅
Consider a /s in the future :)
it’s ok, it was a reference to the 2008 finacial bubble, i knew there was the risk younger people wouldn’t get it
@Blaze@feddit.org falling asleep with a smile on their face tonight :)
Not really, pretending a third of the monthly active users do not exist isn’t really anything I’m happy about.
LW is still in these stats, so there’s that
That is a very weird thing to do, unless they are looking to boost their own instance.
You can read their motivation in the linked pull request. FWIW I don’t think there’s any ill intent here and certainly not an attempt to boost their own instance. I think they just want Lemmy to be decentralized and lemmy.world being as big as it is kinda prevents that.
I’m not sure I would’ve done it that way personally but I can see the reasoning and it’s not entirely unreasonable.
In my humble opinion, join lemmy should only exclude the instances that is harmful.
They should not choose the instances to include for the users.
I think I generally agree with you, but I don’t think this is a big grievance. Lemmy.world has enough traction as it is, they don’t really need the “publicity” from join-lemmy.org.
It would’ve been better if they had written this as some kind of policy beforehand. Like if they had written somewhere before this pull request something like “any instance with more than 40% of active users may be excluded from the join-lemmy.org listing”, then it would’ve been more reasonable too.
It would have been better if they communicated to us first. I don’t disagree that user signups should be spread over instances. We now have a link to https://lemmyverse.net on our signup page so people can check if another instance would fit them better.
Lemmy.world becoming the default Lemmy instance, and it growing to outsize all other instances is a danger: it makes the Fediverse centralized, easy to take down and easy to take over.
The same applies to the mastodon . Social instance and the same applies really to every Fediverse software available, with the exception of pixelfed.
with the exception of pixelfed
Why not that one? I’m not familiar with pixelfed.
Pixelfed has a default limit to the number of users per instance.
In my humble opinion, join lemmy should only exclude the instances that is harmful.
They’d then have to hide their own instances…
I very much doubt that they have discouraged signups to their instance many times
Why does removing them from the site also mean cutting their user count from Active Users though?
That’s just how it works at the moment. It only counts active users from the sites listed.
School probably.
Honestly, what’s more surprising is the numbers are that drastic. I didn’t think we have that many Gen Z users here.
EDIT: Actual reason can be found here: https://feddit.dk/post/7667476/10289642
Thanks SorteKanin for providing the context.
I don’t get it. I work full time and have no problem wasting my
lifeI mean time here…The notion of “summer reddit” went hand in hand with notion of “mom’s basement” and even “touch grass” in a way.
Namely, all are dated ideas from millennials that are still thinking the person on the other end of the comment is sitting in front of a computer, as the default. It ignores the simple fact we all have the internet in our pockets and can be chronically online AND actually out in the world doing things at the same time.
i’m in school, still have to shit from time to time
Hijacking top comment to give the actual answer: https://feddit.dk/post/7667476/10289642
Oh wow didn’t even see this. Thanks for providing the actual reason.
You may want to edit your comment :)
Good point, just did :)
What is your default sort set to?
I’m set to scaled and subscribed by default which mostly gets me posts from the last 0-6 hours. But for some reason Lemmy on FF keeps logging me out so I get to see the default all with active sort and it’s a wildly different user base.
There was a post the other day in like Linux memes about case sensitivity in the file system. Early on the post was mostly the Linux die hards who love their case sensitivity. After about 1.5 days it showed up in active and all of the newer comments were (probably normal people) bashing case sensitivity. It’s almost like R*ddit to a degree where the general consensus in the comments can change over time as different users start seeing the post.
I sort by new a lot so it definitely could be that actually. Good point.
FediDB shows a stable 44k MAU
The statistics there is confusing for me.
How so?
How does the software pull the numbers? Maybe an instance got blocked 30 days ago?
We need @SorteKanin@feddit.dk to dive in and tell us how these numbers work!
Here you go: https://feddit.dk/post/7667476/10289642
Well, that was fast, lol.
Thanks!
School started? 🤷🏼♂️
I’m still here most of my day.
I think because we have mostly memes and any discussion is just won by downvoting your opponent. :)
I’m half serious… The platform right now is lacking actual discussions. Everyone seems to just like memes.
The platform right now is lacking actual discussions.
I keep promoting the non-memes communities every time I can (usually on !newcom@lemmings.world ), after a while it just seems like most of the users do not actually even want to discuss that much, just look at memes (which is also fine)
Unfortunately, the Lemmy community copied opinion downvoting from Reddit.
There are good reasons to downvote, but a different opinion is not one of them. This just leads to echo chambers.
There are 3 options: upvote, downvote and the 3rd one is just not clicking anything.
Literally all my downvotes are from people with different options. This is a huge echo chamber. I rarely insult anyone and I’m always polite. I don’t believe vaccinations are safe for everyone since there are side effects, and I think each person should make their own decision about them. I don’t think gender issues are the most important thing in the world.
These are controversial opinions on this platform. :) And I get a lot of downvotes for those opinions when they show up. Not that I care, because I just ignore it. But in the larger picture, it makes people leave the platform.
Why should they stay? I think Lemmy needs to have a good reason to be used. Memes won’t be enough.
I still like the idea of a platform without big tech though. I just think most people don’t realize what makes people stay on a platform. It’s not memes.
I downvoted you
The platform right now is lacking actual discussions. Everyone seems to just like memes.
Honestly I’ve just blocked most of the meme comms 😅. It’s easy to see memes when I want to anyway by just opening a private window where I’m not logged in and going to the all feed. It’s always mostly memes anyway. Then when I’m logged in, I can see some other stuff without all the memes clogging up my feed.
Same here
Not to mention the deluge of posts/comments advocating greater violence in the name of stopping violence. Honestly? I think people are just waking up to the fact that behind the techno babble and ideological propaganda, Lemmy is a social network just like any other.
Memes and tech
Edit: and politics
Eh … i use lemmy pretty regularly but not in the last few days. Maybe it’s just a lull
yeah it’s probably @thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org ‘s fault
huh, there’s a whole instance just for the Ascendance of a Bookworm anime/manga
Ya damn right! Probably would’ve been a lot more popular too if Lemmy had spoiler tag support (see discussion https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/317). But now that the LN is finished, it’ll probably be a lot harder to convince people to move over from the subreddit, even if spoiler tags were implemented. 😢 Maybe when the new season of the anime premiers it will pick up.
Honestly, it’s a short-sighted move made with hubris by the developer’s personal ideology. Both @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml admit in the PR that it’s not a good solution, but yet they continue any way — probably because it’s an easy “solution”, despite alienating 41% of their active user base.
It’s a terrible trend in a lot of programming circles that programmers think because it is easy and it “works” (in that one circumstance) that it must be correct. This can be evidenced by browsing StackOverflow and reading the accepted answers for a lot of questions (SSL errors in software and disabling hostname verification or cert checks comes to mind).
In my 18+ years of experience, if I find an “easy” solution to a complex problem, I keep looking for the correct solution. What is “easy” now will most likely lead to more complex problems down the line. And as they say, “if you can’t find the time to fix it right the first time, where are you going to find the time to fix it again?”
Look, I get Lemmy is meant to be decentralized. Hiding away your biggest instance looks shady to outside users not in the know. The real solution is to “go door to door” to app makers and ask them to not default to any one instance of Lemmy (side note: randomizing a default server is not much better). If anything, add a link to join-lemmy where people can browse the list of ALL instances (yes, ALL of them) and let them make a genuinely-informed decision on their own. As a convenience, and API should be provided (assuming one does not already exist) so that apps can query a pageable/searchable list of existing/active instances (maybe also provide a link to their homepage too).
Hell, if it makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, the default sorting of returned values can be weighted by percentage of active users (i.e., higher percentages get lower weights to help promote smaller instances). This would help to round out the number of signups without excluding instances.
But whatever developers do (not just Lemmy devs), do NOT overly dictate how people use your software “because I don’t like it”; lest you piss your user base off.
/two-cents
Edit: clarified a few points.
You’re talking about something without actually clarifying what the hell you’re talking about. That’s the short sighted move? The easy “solution”? What “works”?
Did a russian troll farm get shut down or something (/s)
No, ml and hex are still online
The asterisk means that, by “active users”, they’re considering only those who commented and/or posted “in the last month”. Maybe join-lemmy’s algorithm is considering from “day 1” of the current month, so a time span of 10 days, against 29 days from the second screenshot?
If it’s true, it kinda of statistically makes sense: 10 days (28.4K) versus 29 days (47.8K), 34.4% of days with 59.41% of users. We’d need to wait till the 29th day to really compare the difference.
Also, “only those who commented and/or posted”. Sometimes, people can become much of an observer, just seeing and voting up/down, without actually commenting or posting.
I have NO idea about the actual answer. Is it possible that these are from different time-of-day readings?
Think a lot of people joined because they were mad at Reddit’s fuckery last year but have since gone back.
His screenshot is from a couple weeks ago.