If you want some replies just post against the hive mind. Lemmy is absolutely big enough for some hive activity. We did it!
I feel like Lemmy has reached a critical mass of user base at some point in the last year.
I commented on like ~50-60 threads a day on reddit, when I had it.
I would get like 3 notifications, and half would be about votes.
The people who say there’s no activity tend to be lurkers and they mean post activity not comments.
If you’re on a big community that’s usually not a problem but for the small ones it is. If you have a hobby, then chances are its biggest lemmy community still doesn’t see enough new activity to feel alive.
Agreed. I have more than enough responses in political subs to be satisfied on Lemmy, without all the bullshit that makes up 3/4 of any political post on Reddit - bots, trolls, puns, Russian propaganda farmers, idiots, etc.
But i really miss the active guitar subs. Lemmy’s go days or even months and years between posts. I’m so desperate, I’m starting to browse guitar forums on Facebook (gag!).
Only one way to start it. :)
Funny I come here every day, and every day there are thousands of fresh posts.
There is a noticeable lack of niche content though, so Redditors saying that aren’t willing to see how the style of interactions on the Threadiverse is different.
I didn’t like the lack of micromobility content, so I made [email protected] and we have close to 3,000 subs now.
Be the change you want to see is my advice to them.
The thing I used to use Reddit for that I miss most is news on specific games I was interested in. If I wanted to actually post news about games, I would need to actively search for the news elsewhere (often times exclusively on Reddit) and regurgitate it here. This defeats the point of the me wanting the community or leaving Reddit in the first place.
I guess that depends on your reasoning/purpose for being here, but the more capable people who contribute to this place, the better it will get.
Yeah but that’s still an example of where we’re at, though: niche subs rely on single committed users doing 99% of the posting to sustain enough activity.
There’s nothing much to do about it at this stage though except try your best to be that user. We probably need to at least double our userbase for that to no longer be the case. Maybe more.
To be fair, we’ve got two committed users modding and submitting regularly now with a smattering of semi-regular post contributors and a good number of commenters.
Your point stands though, most of the comparable niche communities on reddit are far larger at least in user count.
It’s just the 90-9-1 rule in effect. We’re only at just under 60k MAUs. It’s a great number and makes for decent activity in the larger subs but if 1% of those are regular posters that’s… 600. That’s not really enough to spread across niche interests, so it figures that most of them lack active subs.
Plus there’s a bit of a toxicity problem.
Reddit shares that but fair has nothing to do with it: people are grandfathered into existing Reddit subs and for them to switch, they want it to be painless. Also, niche subs with fantastic mods are particularly where Reddit’s toxicity problem is least apparent, as compared to coming to Lemmy and browsing by All. Otherwise new visitors go back to Reddit and complain in e.g. r/RedditAlternatives about what meanies we have over here… which is a true statement, as Lemmy was literally created by the same people who were kicked out of Reddit for being too toxic, and created this Reddit 2.0 (but decentralized, making it worthwhile).
Being told that e.g. having a bank account makes them equivalent to supporting genocide does NOT endear people to us. Take a look at Lemmy.ml, and/or hexbear.net, if you don’t believe me - tbf there were far more of such BoTh SiDeS sAmE posts back prior to the USA election, and pretty much every election in a Western nation, but they still persist today. We are a Nazi bar here, by federating that content everywhere. Also, the last time I checked out that join-lemmy website, it literally gave me the advice to join… wait for it… Hexbear.net, making even defederation from such instances as Lemmy.world insufficient so long as people are being told to come here via that website.
People do not enjoy being made fun of - should they though? - hence Lemmy will never gain a mainstream audience of non-technical users from the primarily centrist or even right-leaning userbases of Reddit or X/Twitter. We can be okay with that, or do something about it, but either way those are the options, not the middle ground of just hoping that people will ignore the trolling that is far too often allowed here.
A lot of Redditors are lazy consumers though, not wanting to put forth any effort to making their spaces better.
Oh well, guess they’ll just have to stay on Reddit then… 😉
Well you do post a lot here, I mostly just comment but I do get a bit on my inbox
I did a couple of stupid posts with my monkey brain and I got a very high number of useful comments! Monkey happy 🐵
Heh same.
I love how on Piefed you can check or uncheck “Notify about replies”.
Yeah, what the hell?
I was a prolific reddit commenter for over a decade and myailbox would be empty each day
I have 600+ comments waiting for me now iny Lemmy inbox. Something is different
You were shadow banned most likely
601 now >:)
I wish I could check a box “No notifications” when posting
Piefed has an option to disable them
I need to use Piefed more.
Not only there, but the little bell icon next to… well… everything. i.e. not only at the time of posting, but at any time you can click, unclick, click again, etc.
And you can do it for other people’s content as well as your own.
You can also do it for other people too, or for communities (both of those work best for low-volume entities, obviously:-P). Like poetry tends to get swamped out in Hot, and is still fairly rare in New, so the notifications is one way to make sure to receive all of them. Or posts for a community that you moderate, even if using an account on a different instance.
PieFed is fantastic! 😍
I wonder if all the bot activity on reddit makes it look so busy that people are confused when they come somewhere with far fewer bots around?
I notice significantly more positive interaction with (at least what I believe to be) real humans here than I did on reddit in my last couple of years there.
Probably slightly controversial but I’m actually missing getting into arguments with strangers. I feel like I need some conflict in my life.
What’s your most controversial opinion?
That if Trump annexes Canada, European countries should provide weapons and ammunition to Canadian guerrilla groups. Tends to scare people IRL. Didn’t get into an argument on Reddit over it. They just report me.
Sorry I think I’d agree. No argument for us today :(
People always talk about wanting to grow Lemmy, but honestly I like it a lot more the way it is. You can comment on a post that’s been on All for 6 hours and still get plenty of thoughtful responses. On reddit, there was so much noise - especially on major threads - that commenting was like pissing into the wind.
I find the current Lemmy perfect for general news and discussions, but I sure do miss some of the more niche hobby communities reddit had to offer.
The solution on that on Reddit has been, retreat into more niche communities, remove default subs from your feed. Right now the way to make Lemmy usable is to browse All, because otherwise there isn’t enough content, but I bet as it grows it will go the same way.
For Lemmy that’s what I used to do yeah, bc there was no better option.
PieFed offers numerous additional options though, most especially categories of communities, including user customizable and shareable Feeds. You can even have your cake and eat it too - like subscribe to no political communities to avoid them showing up in your Subscribed, but then it’s a click away in the News and Politics Topic area. Or, the keywords filter options (for e.g. “Trump”, “Musk”, or whatever you want) include All, None, and Some, allowing you to refine your Subscribed feed to meet your interest level in a particular subject.
And then for very low-volume communities, you can even set up Notification triggers upon every new post (I also use this for a community I mod using a Lemmy alt) - e.g. poetry tends to not be highly upvoted so super difficult to catch organically on either All or Subscribed (you might have more luck there sorting by New, but this requires blocking a TON of communities like for sports and individual locations and such).
PieFed really is an entirely different experience than Lemmy! Maybe as it becomes successful, the Lemmy devs may start to port the features over? But it’s doubtful, as existing requests have languished for like 5 years already - PieFed’s being written in Python rather than Rust really makes a difference in such matters.
I think there’s a lot of development going on with the lemmy UI, for example the lemm.ee developer has next.lemm.ee for his new UI design beta. I’m looking out for a golden age of lemmy UI development where everyone’s copying each other’s functionality and they all continually improve until it ends up being about whichever interface personally prefer, like we had with 3rd party reddit apps.
To be clear to others, though, PieFed is itself its own lemmy instance first, but it’s open source so works as an example UI that could be implemented by any other instance. Every instance of lemmy is potentially different, not just in which version of lemmy code they use but any number of modifications the instance admin may choose to apply.
No, PieFed is not in any way Lemmy. Maybe you are thinking of Tesseract, the alternative Lemmy front-end? See e.g. https://t.lemmy.world/ or https://t.lemmy.dbzer0.com/.
PieFed is an entirely different implementation of the ActivityPub protocol, similar to Mbin (and Kbin before it), and the Sublinks project that hasn’t seen updates in a long while (the developer had a baby:-). PieFed has its own UI, with many themes and configuration elements (normal vs. compact vs. super compact mode, as well as List vs. Tile vs. Wide Tile display of posts), and app support in Interstellar and a not-official-yet fork of Thunder.
Those two apps also support Lemmy and the former also supports Mbin. So a lot of these things are interchangeable, but what I want to convey here is that PieFed is an alternative back-end, not merely a new UI for “Lemmy” (bc with those apps someone can have the same UI they are already used to, but swap out a Lemmy instance with a PieFed one).
And that’s important to have another source of these forum/thread based software, bc otherwise development gets stagnated and locked in to a single dev teams viewpoint. e.g. Lemmy is actually more authoritian than Reddit itself is in a number of ways - yes there is a modlog, but there is no modmail, no notification of a moderation event, no ability to contact a mod, nor even a way to know which mod did it when the modlog (if you even noticed that your content was affected and went looking) simply says it was a “mod” who did it. Lemmy offers enormous freedom to instance admins, who typically offer much freedom to moderators, but individual users have actually fewer “rights” than on Reddit - e.g. again the right to even be told that your content was removed, or to ask someone why.
In contrast, PieFed offers a very large set of features designed for democratization of moderation, e.g. keyword filtering, labels placed next to user account names (example: this account is less than two weeks old, or this account posts ten times more often than comments so may be an unregistered bot, or this account receives and gives ten times more downvotes than upvotes so is a highly contentious/toxic user), all designed to put the power of choosing what content goes where in the hands of the end user, rather than require moderator decisions for each and every tiny matter.
i.e. Lemmy was designed by people kicked out of Reddit for being too toxic to be a less feature-complete replacement for that exact experience, whereas PieFed in contrast is blazing new ground that even Reddit had not bothered to offer such things to their users (all new features on Reddit for years now have been designed to maximize profits, not make users happy with what they are seeing, very unfortunately). Even if you choose not to use it (yet? although I challenge anyone to go through the sign-up wizard process and not become enthused by what you see), it’s really quite an exciting project!
I honestly think that there is more direct activity here. I asked the same question on reddit in 3 different places, but had more replies here than there.
It depends if you want to have a conversation with bots or other people
Less bots. Reddit is all bots now
Dead Reddit theory Explains the popular subs’ comments
