[email protected] is getting some activity.
Good to see!
My community is very niche and probably won’t grow till Lemmy/PieFed booms.
But I’m making a home for people to come to when it does happen one day.
It’s a marathon not a sprint
I’ve been feeling a bit negatively lately. I know I’ve stated a lot of times over the last year that I feel I’m getting less traffic, but it usually stabilized after a week or so. But now I feel the weekends into Monday are super dead for me, and I’m having trouble getting posts to the like-count that I used to, and most importantly, I feel there are less people talking and asking questions in comments.
There are some great users who have been here forever now, and I’m extremely grateful for what they do add to the comments, but I don’t think I’m getting as many questions asked, and I’ve been trying to share more varied content, but it doesn’t move the needle all that much.
I’ve started reducing the amounts of things I share from 5 a day to 3-4 now. The lower interest has me spending time I’d be making posts on other things instead, so I haven’t been preparing as much work or doing any deep dives into things like I was.
I’m still here all the time reading things and responding to the comments I do get, but like the comments on this thread from Captain Patrick, this place hasn’t quite been what it was 2 years ago. So much angry and violent talk. Many obvious cases of people responding from emotion from headlines and not actually reading articles. More infighting in comments. Less debate and dialog, just arguing. There’s still a ton of great content, but it’s being eclipsed by so much negativity.
I still think I am doing something significant here, but I can’t make people happy or to participate. If I look at my upvotes, I still see other old regulars here and upvoting content, but with them being quiet I either feel their interest is waning, or that they aren’t in a good enough mood to just say some little comment on things now and then. I get incentivized by seeing you all have a good time, but if it’s just me and 3 people talking every day, that only takes me so far.
Sorry to hear.
I feel a bit similar, but I am myself quite less active lately as I’m vacationing. I guess quite a few people in Europe are doing the same, or maybe just spending more time outside as it’s summer.
Activity should probably raise again in September.
Good points. I’m but a summer person so I hide myself indoors, but lots of other people do enjoy it and everyone’s kids are out of school and such as well. None of that applies to me so I tend to overlook it.
I don’t think we have much traffic data available anywhere that one could see if it’s ebb and flow or a steady change in activity, and I tend to assume the worst.
As usual, you’ve managed to put some more positivity into things, and I appreciate that.
Happy to help!
Just the fact that this beautifully written contribution got zero engagement for three whole hours is enough to bother me!
Many obvious cases of people responding from emotion from headlines and not actually reading articles. More infighting in comments. Less debate and dialog, just arguing.
So well put. People responding to headlines alone really is the bane of social media. Personally, I’ve begun to systematically add a quote from the source article, even when it doesn’t add much to my comment. As a way of subtly showing others that I actually read the article and that perhaps they should too.
I appreciate the nice words.
I like to do the same thing, grabbing snippets of q that article, not whatever broad frustrations we have on the topic while ignoring the new info we’re being given. That makes all the posts feel the same and full of mostly generalities or just straight complaining.
There are some prior sharing really interesting and important things, and I don’t get the appeal of using social media to wallow in misery when it can be used to educate and congregate. Things like 50501is using it to try to build political momentum. I want to get people interested in less familiar animals and hopefully encourage them to volunteer, donate, or at least see them as more than memes or NPCs and rather unique individuals that have important roles in our world and have full lives and semblances of individual personalities.
It just feels we’re squandering an opportunity if we just let this place turn into just another social media site.
I second your manifesto. It’s always been a mystery to me that so many people seem to enjoy wallowing in misery and anger and negativity and helplessness. It really seems to be the essence of much of social media. I’m guessing it’s something to do with catharsis, and release of frustration. But there must also be a certain personality type that is attracted to social media - and apparently we’re the odd ones out. Just downvoting is a mystery to me TBH (I see it as pure toxicity and obviously antithetical to civilized discussion) and I know from bitter experience that quite few people here agree with me on this. But I there are a few who do and I take heart from that.
It just feels we’re squandering an opportunity if we just let this place turn into just another social media site
It can’t ever be that bad as long as there is no advertising. That’s my positive spin.
I get the need to vent. There is a lot to be bad about these days. But it just feels like it takes over everything.
I only downvote on stuff where people are outright mean or lying. If it’s something where I think people should just ignore it, I move on, but if someone is hateful or talking stuff that is knowingly false or dangerous and I feel others should know to ignore whatever they’re saying, that’s worth downvoting.
It is nice having a place that isn’t commercial in any way. That is one thing we still got.
There are still a lot of positives here, don’t get me wrong, but the early adopter phase feels over and some of the shine has worn off.
the early adopter phase feels over and some of the shine has worn off.
Yeah, we are not in growth phase, but maintenance. Finding fulfillment from the actual relationships and engagement we have is important.
The dopamine hits of growth phase Lemmy are very much feast or famine, but can’t be the only reason we are here.
[email protected] should make it to 1000 subscribers by tuesday, or wednesday. Also, it’s now the most active piefed community and brushing up on the frontpage of active communities per day/week as seen on lemmy.world.
Well done!
Moved a community over from lemm.ee to Piefed ([email protected]). It’s going well enough. The community never had all that much engagement, but the content is complementary to the [email protected] community that I mod/curate, so it doesn’t require additional time/effort.
First lemm.ee goes down and I migrate to dubvee including exporting the post archive
Now dubvee.org is going down and I have to repeat the process.
Gotta say, it really zaps my enthusiasm for Lemmy with these frequent instance closures.
Maybe the instance model isn’t the right one for long term federated communities.
Maybe the instance model isn’t the right one for long term federated communities.
The primary problem here is community mobility. If any community could be, with a few key presses, decoupled from an instance and essentially plopped onto another maintaining all of the posts, comments and subscribers - it wouldn’t matter as much at all. Piefed has community migration, and I assume that is ultimately the end-goal. It just needs all the major instances to read and recognise such moves.
For all the whining Element gets when it comes to being buggy, etc. The matrix protocol has solved the room moving part very well. Any alias of the room has the same validity to be the main room because the content is being stored on all the servers where people joined the room and the room name is just that an alias and you can have many of them pointing to the same room.
I understand it’s more difficult to do with the ActivityPub protocol, but something like that would solve this problem once and for all.
piefeed migration doesn’t save the old non-federated content, and doesn’t take over the old community name. It’s more like a community clone tool. But yeah, its a good start.
Yeah, it’s not where it should be. But I’m quite confident that such is the end-goal.
Instances will always come and go in many cases.
Sorry to hear about dubvee.org shutting down.
Another harsh reminder that admin burnout is real, and that unfortunately choosing an instance with a team of multiple admins willing to keep going is probably very important as community builders.
Yeah, well, maybe if I felt like I wasn’t the only one around here taking a stand against extremism, violent rhetoric, and toxic behavior, things could have played out differently and I could have pushed on. You can’t place the blame on just having a single admin - that may be one factor, but becoming completely demoralized from the lack of support from most other admins/instances was the real cause. This is a wide-ranging problem, and a single small instance (let alone a single admin) cannot solve it alone.
Sorry not sorry - For the next 2 weeks I’m in “captain going down with his ship” mode and I’m not holding back on what I think about this place, what it’s become, and where it’s heading. Two years ago, we had the tools, motive, and opportunity to make something truly better here, and we failed.
Yeah, well, maybe if I felt like I wasn’t the only one around here taking a stand against extremism, violent rhetoric, and toxic behavior, things could have played out differently and I could have pushed on.
You probably felt that way, but people working on Piefed are also trying to create ways to mitigate those behaviors.
You can’t place the blame on just having a single admin - that may be one factor, but becoming completely demoralized from the lack of support from most other admins/instances was the real cause.
I get the burnout and burden, but I also understand where @[email protected] comes from. It’s unfortunate to have to move communities twice in one month.
You’re not going to find a sympathetic ear from the mods of this community (believe me I’ve tried, oh have I tried) but I understand where you’re coming from and agree. The Lemmy network in general is comprised of a lot of people who are here (I’m sorry to say) because they are too poorly socialized even for reddit, and there are too few mods/admins in the overall network are who know what it means to be the adult in the room. The result is that most places with authentic activity are too toxic for “normies” and the places willing to enforce something as simple as good manners are quieter.
I still believe a critical mass of more ah, well-adjusted people can improve the culture, but that day gets further and further away as long as the existing culture remains in the state it is in.
You’re not going to find a sympathetic ear from the mods of this community (believe me I’ve tried, oh have I tried)
You reported a post I made about creating [email protected] as “steering drama”. And I will not even link the [email protected] post about your instance, people who are interested should be able to find it quickly.
And if they can’t find the YPTB post, just ask me. I would be more than happy to go over the literally criminal level harassment that the admins of Startrek.website subjected me to.
Yep, yep, and yep to all of that, and some of it I’ve said for over a year and was dismissed with “just give it time”.
The Lemmy network in general is comprised of a lot of people who are here (I’m sorry to say) because they are too poorly socialized even for reddit,
I’ve always referred to that as the “elephant in the
roomfediverse”. But yeah, I fully agree that’s definitely a major contributing factor to the current environment. I even made a joke post about it the other day: https://dubvee.org/post/3789665Here's the gist of the post to save you a click
Title: “We are not the same”
The first 6-12 months here (during/right after the Reddit API drama) were great. After that…not so much.
I still believe a critical mass of more ah, well-adjusted people can improve the culture, but that day gets further and further away as long as the existing culture remains in the state it is in.
Like I said in my shutdown/meta post, I want the concept of the fediverse to succeed. I really do. But exactly as you just said (and others have said and I have said), the more well-adjusted people need to arrive in a critical mass, and I don’t feel there’s an environment here to welcome them let alone attract them or entice them to stick around. Maybe that will change. I hope it does, but I’m not optimistic enough to stick around and find out.
I do feel we started out on the right foot back in mid 2023, but as we’ve grown, we’ve just turned into a refuge for people who have proven too toxic to remain anywhere else.
At the end of the day, aside from the people like you, ValueSubtracted, and other friendly
facesnames I’ve come to enjoy seeing around these last couple years, I’m going to miss the idea of this place far more than the place itself.At the end of the day, aside from the people like you, ValueSubtracted, and other friendly faces names I’ve come to enjoy seeing around these last couple years
I mean Corgana and ValueSubtracted went on a campaign behind the scenes, harassing admins of various instances, trying to get me permanently banned because I left startrek.website and set up /c/TenForward. I’m going to be real? They’re exactly the problem that you’re talking about. They’re the toxic Rick and Morty from that meme… They got ran off of reddit by the users. They ran /r/StarTrek and were the reason why so many other subreddits had to be formed. To escape their abject tyranny. They then doubled down even harder and have gone completely insane on their own modlog.
I think your grievance is beyond Lemmy and more just a grievance with people in our current culture currently, at at the minimum those inclined towards social media sites. Lemmy isn’t magic software that makes people behave in a particular way.
You’re not wrong (though I got rid of other social media and thus have little to compare against).
But regardless of what’s happening on other platforms, we do not have to allow or platform that here. We can be better We should want to be better.
We can show people the door who are taking things too far, making death threats, promoting violence, and/or otherwise stirring the pot - force them back to the fringe instances and away from polite/civilized society.
Please do share.
I am not attached to Lemmy, I joined because from my perspective commercial American social media is not viable for me, it’s equivalent to supporting/enabling those who wish you harm.
I’ve outlined it in other threads, so I’ll just link to a few of them instead of repeating myself.
- https://dubvee.org/comment/4486545 (Mostly the 3rd section in that comment)
- https://lemmy.world/comment/18189873 (ThePicardManeuver’s comment and replies)
- https://dubvee.org/comment/4492868
- https://dubvee.org/post/3788765 (Really, the whole post covers things, and most of the comments are insightful).
- https://dubvee.org/post/1516426 (A post I made almost a year ago to the day when I first noticed extremism becoming prevalent here).
Some very perceptive observations in those comments. To others - click thru and have a read! This is clearly a mod of unusually high quality, if they’re really bowing out then we really owe it to them (and ourselves) to understand why.
Heh, thanks. It’s proven difficult to condense a little over two years worth of behavioral observation into succinct comments, so I’ve tried to just build on what others have pointed out with my own experience.
I really empathize with your take BTW. Over the last year I have been unsubscribing from mainstream communities one by one for pretty much the exact reasons you cite: acute groupthink, dogpiling, purity testing, incitement, celebration of violence (the Luigi Mangioni cult was why I unsubscribed from “Uplifting News”, for example), vulgarity, basically all the things you find in a school playground.
So I get you totally. And yet the “ban 'em high” zero-tolerance strategy only goes so far. I was myself banned for the cardinal sin of racism after making a subtle (but entirely innocuous) point which happened to challenge the prevailing groupthink in an otherwise pretty decent community. That community now has one less moderate centrist.
The best possible solution is surely hands-on moderation in line with what happens at Hacker News (where the quality of discourse is incredibly high despite, as I understand it, very infrequent recourse to bans). But that community is full of literal-minded geeks and has a full-time paid moderator, yes.
Thanks for sharing!
From my perspective, the best way to deal with toxicity (whatever that might be for a given individual) is to have multiple accounts and to have regular “time out” periods where you only use the non-politics accounts. This is of course not viable if you are a single admin.
Then there is the issue of making the most of a bad situation. Even though for me tankies are mortal enemies (including the Lemmy Devs), I see usage of Lemmy (well the Threadiverse) being a less worse choice than using American commercial social media.
With the Threadiverse, there is a weak light at the end of the tunnel. We may never get there, but it’s there. On the other hand American social media is an intellectual, moral and even economic (I am actually serious about this) dead end. That’s why I use the Threadiverse, although I am trying to slowly move off Lemmy to Piefed for obvious reasons.
Just sharing some thoughts in context of your very justified comments on the Threadiverse. I am not necessarily trying to change your mind or prove anything. :)
In terms of Lemmy Dev admins being the mortal enemies, piefed is up and kicking (I’m sure you know this)
EDIT: I see you do based on another reply by you.
From my perspective, the best way to deal with toxicity (whatever that might be for a given individual) is to have multiple accounts and to have regular “time out” periods where you only use the non-politics accounts. This is of course not viable if you are a single admin.
From a user’s perspective, yep, that can and does typically work.
I’m looking at things from a higher vantage point, though: The health, safety, and reputation of Lemmy and the Threadiverse as a whole.
As it stands, I’m embarrassed to tell people what I do in my spare time (run an instance and interact on Lemmy). You get a “normie” coming in off the streets, and what are they going to think jumping into this place? Are they going to want to stick around? I genuinely feel this place is on track to becoming the next 4chan, and that’s with me being largely (though not entirely) desensitized to much of this stuff. I can’t imagine how fresh eyes would interpret the atmosphere here.
And like one of the linked comment threads mentioned: We need the normies. If we want this place to succeed, we need them. Otherwise, it’s going to continue distilling down to the most extreme views as more and more of the rational people call it quits. And I just can’t see normies wanting to come here and stick around the way things are. Not without a LOT of work curating things, but I can’t see them wanting to do that either.
On the other hand American social media is an intellectual, moral and even economic (I am actually serious about this) dead end.
Agreed.
That’s why I use use the Threadiverse, although I am trying to slowly move off Lemmy to Piefed for obvious reasons.
Having tired to have rational discourse here about anything related to the outside world (without things immediately devolving to extremes), combined with the demographic overlap between Piefed and Lemmy, I strongly disagree lol
Just sharing some thoughts in context of your very justified comments on the Threadiverse. I am not necessarily trying to change your mind or prove anything. :)
Same.
As it stands, I’m embarrassed to tell people what I do in my spare time (run an instance and interact on Lemmy).
Oh man i feel that, i was telling and recommending people IRL about lemmy in summer 23. Not doing that anymore 😅
As it stands, I’m embarrassed to tell people what I do in my spare time (run an instance and interact on Lemmy). You get a “normie” coming in off the streets, and what are they going to think jumping into this place? Are they going to want to stick around?
I don’t think telling anyone you moderate a community on Lemmy and interact on Lemmy is somehow more embarassing than telling them you moderate a community on Reddit (for comparisons sake). People who would mock you in some way for that would do so whether or not its Reddit or Lemmy, and likely would just view all of it as inherently nerdy anyway.
Lemmy, from my observation has more of a reputation to outsiders as being a lefty-safe-space (closer to Bluesky) than anything else. It’s really not that close to 4chan at all given the sheer gore and overt racism and hatred on there. I know what you’re getting at here, but the dredges of 4chan and Twitter have outright open nazi apologetics in front of everyone. Also, given how unpleasant Reddit can get at times (at least just as bad as here) - I don’t think the type of conduct you’re referring to is inherently a problem for budding social media sites. Not excusing it, but just that it doesn’t seem to be an existential factor.
What “normies” want, if anything, would be non-political communities taking more of a focus. Which I am certainly trying to do.
The Threadiverse is definitely not ready for “normies”. Even if we ignore the extremism, the on-boarding, UX, service provision stability, topical coverage is not at the point where normies can join.
I’ve told people about the Fediverse as a concept, but I haven’t suggested anyone try it, as I don’t think it’s ready.
I will note that I personally think the federated model isn’t inherently too complex, it just needs better UI/UX and the network needs to be larger (e.g. 1 M MAU, 50 K DAU with coverage of at least 5 major langauges).
I am not really sure there is any magical solution to dealing with extremism. Better mod tools, a development focus on automated admin work will help, but I don’t think it will solve the root cause. IMO it’s not technical problem, it’s a social issue that’s also present in mainstream corporate network (albeit it can be more subtle there).
maybe if I felt like I wasn’t the only one around here taking a stand against extremism, violent rhetoric, and toxic behavior, things could have played out differently
Since you’re in a sharing mood, what made you feel that way?
Not OP but go peruse the links they posted in this thread. Everything is explained there, it’s well-written, we can’t ask them to lay it all out again here.
Thanks for following up. When I asked this there were no other responses from OP. I’ll check those out.