I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
A cisgender repost farmer made a post accusing the admins of being transphobic with absolutely zero evidence, and got the other repost farmers to move with him to a community on lemmy.world. He and his friends are now some of Lemmy’s biggest power mods, with influence across dozens of popular communities. The Star Trek instance had discussion forums, lore, news, and casual conversation about Trek in addition to memes. Now people only use the .world and dbzero meme communities.
Tbf, that’s not why the only or even I would guess primarily the reason why the startrek.website instance is used less. That was my first instance hop after Kbin.Earth died off (with that whole Ernst fiasco), and I abandonded it due to the very MANY technical glitches - like I remember making a post a couple times that did not make its way over to Lemmy.World for like a week, by which time of course nobody saw it, since even though it was “new” (to them) the time had gotten back-dated to its original, so it looked and acted like it had simply been passed over and ignored by the community previously, at which point it simply continued to be so forever.
Also seveal times I would write a comment but if I spent >1 minute doing so, then it would not let me post - though neither would it deny my post either, instead simply spinning forever trying but never succeeded, my only recourse being to copy and paste it into another window to try again, and hope to avoid duplicates. Sometimes even voting was problematic, requiring MANY presses and also waiting between each to see if it “took” because of the network issues.
Please note that most non-Lemmy.World instances were having those kinds of problems at the time, one of the multiple reasons being due to how Lemmy would send each individual item on its own (a vote, a comment, a post) rather than bundled together in packets of information, causing especially instances that are geographically far from Lemmy.World to struggle severely and be behind for weeks to MONTHS (aussie.zone was hit particularly hard). So I do not blame the instance admins for that, although the problem was more severe on STW, so I created what at first was an alt to use during the the times that STW was most problematic, but since Discuss.Online had such fantastic uptime, just started using it permanently.
Also I don’t know if you are talking about Stamets or FlyingSquid or whoever, but I will note that the Tenforward community is now even more fragmented before, with a version now on Piefed.world (it is the #2 community located there), where ironically they decided NOT to put a link back to tenforward@lemmy.world (e.g. as a Sister community), plus they still call the new one by the same name, making it at least LOOK like they want it to become the new default?
Anyway PieFed has the ability to fight against such fragmentation effects by joining together all related communities into a single conjoined multi-community (“Topics” are made by admins and the “Feed” versions are user-customizeable and shareable!), see e.g. https://piefed.social/topic/tv-movies/star-trek that puts Risa, Tenforward, Daystrom Institute, and Star Trek all together.
Startrek.website was never primarily local traffic. It used to be mostly lemmy.world users posting Star Trek content to the Star Trek communities, a lot like dullsters.net, but less extreme.
The off-instance users mostly stopped posting there and moved to Ten Forward, because of that clique’s post.
Maybe. I did not even know about that post at the time - and I still am not sure that I do even now - and to similar posts people seemed to have mostly responded that they too were not aware of things. People might be a lot lazier than you are giving them credit for!:-P e.g. people coming over from Reddit simply hop onto lemmy.world without giving a single moment’s thought to any considerations like spreading things out across the Threadiverse - which for someone’s first instance choice I do not criticize (at least, back then it was more understandable), since they can best learn about the Threadiverse by having joined it, and then make a different decision later on.
Nowadays, lemmy.world makes up roughly a third of the Threadiverse (14.2k / (35.2k + 2K PieFed + 0.7k Mbin). Over on r/RedditAlternatives, people like Blaze primarily direct new users towards feddit.org (iirc) or discuss.online (for people in the USA), or more recently PieFed (both are generalist instances and avoid issues with having the name “Lemmy” as part of it). Setting aside any issues with Lemmy.World’s moderation practices (which personally I think are mostly overblown… though perhaps not entirely), it is just good practice to help spread people out a bit.
Though back then, Lemmy.World made up a whopping ~80% of the Threadiverse. So having “mostly lemmy.world users” posting was the experience shared by pretty much every community across the entire Threadiverse (back then, mainly just called Lemmy, as first Kbin and then Mbin were always barely noticeable blips with <1k active users except the very first month it started).
I do not doubt that there was additional specific drama there - several of those mods are kinda known for being drama lamas:-P - just adding this background context to it all.
Piefed.zip is my goto nowadays
It seems like a great one! Like PieFed.World seems to have zero predefined feeds? (or maybe that’s just the error message displayed to someone without an account) and also literally only four predefined Topic areas. It gives the impression that it is not finished being set up? PieFed.zip at a glance looks much healthier:-).
The zip admins are also very reactive, !home@lemmy.zip
Oooh, good to know. So is this your preferred instance to recommend to people then, as opposed to e.g. the PieFed instance picker?
At some point we may need to try to spread people around more, but it has a tenth the MAUs as piefed.social so we definitely are not there yet! :-P
Also it is highly exciting to me to see slrpnk.net’s plans to migrate from Lemmy to PieFed - that is like the #14 largest Lemmy instance (if hexbear and lemmynsfw are not showing up in the list at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list).
Edit: oh, but piefed.zip federates with hexbear.net - isn’t that going to be problematic, as noob users often run for the hills upon being exposed to such? I am perfectly fine with hexbear being opt-in, but on piefed.zip it looks like it is rather opt-out? (even though it truly has an option to allow opt-out of, given PieFed’s ability to block all users from an instance, unlike Lemmy)
Let me know if you find a well managed Piefed instance that defederates HB but isn’t Piefed.social. I couldn’t find one until now, which is why I accept that as a compromise.
Yes, I agree that most users were unaware, but most users also follow the leader-y types who have the strong opinions. Those three repost farmers worked together to move all the content over, and anyone who investigated was given the post with the transphobia claim as a reason. This locked in the network effect that made most people move over to Ten Forward, with little outcry.
ST.W did have legitimate moderation problems, but the problems with the Ten Forward clique are much worse.
Yes precisely. It might even have helped (a little?) that it was located on Lemmy.World?
And I see how your comment is relevant since aside from (tankie-bashing,) politics and Linux, and generic meme reposts from other places, Star Trek was basically the only source of real OC here on the Threadiverse (even though some people avoided it, e.g. if they blocked FlyingSquid and any community that he helped mod, before he removed himself from Lemmy altogether). Fortunately others, like LOTR and Star Wars, are picking up more than they were in the past?
Personally though, I think we are simply too toxic here to attract or keep most users checking us out from Reddit - which is ironic considering how bad the largest subs on Reddit itself have gotten. I know I for one generally avoid posting here as much as possible, seeing as how I nearly universally regret it each time I do. If it were just me that would be a personal issue, but seeing as how so MANY others tell an identical story… and oftentimes they do not even tell us here, but rather speak about their experiences using Lemmy over on e.g. r/RedditAlternatives.
Sounds like Section 31 to me.
Is that the original instance? https://startrek.website/
I think we have to think more about network effects and be willing to move away further from copying Reddit. Otherwise we end up with the same powermod problems. Reddit has used Subreddits to split a massive crowd. We don’t have such a big crowd so there could be better ways to organise our posts.