I just noticed that active users on Lemmy got slashed, what happened?
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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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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.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/358
Holy shit, the most active instance right now on the website is LemmyNSFW.
🎵 the internet is for porn 🎵
Rule 34 in action
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.
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
I mean. They’re torpedoing that open source project’s chances for growth because of their ideology. It’s pretty sucky.
I agree with the rest of your statement regarding the development of Lemmy.
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.
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!
That "little more complicated" is asking for a lot, though.
Say you're coming from Reddit, or Facebook, or something.
It would not be unreasonable to believe that, like Reddit, every single Lemmy instance is its own separate, self-contained site.
And that's even before figuring out federation works, and how to access things from outside of your instance, or all the nuances that come with defederation and all of that. You made the mistake of joining beehaw? Whoops, all the other "subs" are now inaccessible, because beehaw is not connected to any of the others.
Central places like Reddit don't have that complexity. Reddit communities are singular, and there's no overarching layer to complicate things. A community that disagrees with another, and blocks them doesn't affect your experience as an user.
People shouldn't have suggested you Beehaw.
Nowadays, I just say
That's it. No federation explanation, no Fediverse jargon. Keep it simple. Also, see my other comment below about an active community of non tech users
The decentralisation probably doesn't help either. People coming to Lemmy from other places are coming from a centralised system. That takes some getting used to.
If you're new to this, you can be forgiven by thinking that all the Lemmy instances are their own separate thing, like the forums of old, rather than that they're all interconnected (excluding a whole bunch of stuff about defederation and all of that mess).
As far as I'm concerned that's a feature. If we let the normies in then it just turns into Reddit all over again. That slop pile can stay over there.
There's still room to grow. We could still double the number of active people to 100k and have a wide margin compared to having millions of users
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
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
Right, I didn't think how it would affect the total active user count. Will have to think of a solution for that.
I guess a new flag to only exclude it from the list but not exclude it from the stats 🤷
Or even some logic to automatically exclude from the list any instance with more than x% of active users.
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.
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.
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.