You look a bit skinny, son.

https://lemmy.ca/post/54699313

It is what it is. I have no idea how to incite a new wave short of Reddit shitting itself in some way

I think what we can try to do is to create an active community.

In the old place, I recognized I really came for the comments. That’s why I try to keep my threshold for commenting low and comment often.

Even if it’s just to thank someone for a good comment or other low effort commenting, I like to think it helps.

We definitely need better onboarding. I am pushing for this on piefed via directs to [email protected] for new users to introduce themselves
It’s that live now for Piefed.social ?
I haven’t checked personally. Requires making new accounts to check each time

It should also fire when you manually make a user from the admin panel, if you want to test it out

https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/3-general/topic/Onboarding/near/7719

You’re an admin IIRC?

Public view of PieFed | Zulip team chat

Browse the publicly accessible channels in PieFed without logging in.

Zulip
Staff. I don’t think I can do that. I can check later
Ah, I misremembered!

I’m not a programmer so I can’t speak to how hard this is, but I think it would be a big asset to building user base if there was a neutral sign up website that wasn’t a specific instance. It would basically choose an instance for you automatically and skip that part. I figure there could be some list of general purpose instances compiled that are all fair game and the site would try to spread the load across instances.

Average user doesn’t care about federation, and all of that complexity is a big turn off. I know because I almost didn’t sign up myself because of that. Having to pick a team just to get in the door feels kinda bad.

  • point people to one instance you like instead of a general website
  • on Piefed, when people register, they can either join indeed the instance they’re on, or have a look at other options: https://piefed.zip/auth/instance_chooser
Which server do you want to join?

Why not try a different UI? - [Blorp](https://blorp.piefed.zip)

Having to explain federation is kind of the issue in my opinion. This idea wouldn’t be to remove the normal sign up process, it would be a way to side step it entirely for those who don’t care about the technology aspect of it and just want to be part of the community.

If you want to pick your own instance or suggest one, that would still exist. This would just be an alternative. It would also help to avoid everyone gravitating towards the largest instance, because it would try to load balance people automatically.

Having to explain federation is kind of the issue in my opinion.

I don’t, nowadays, I just point to piefed.zip

This would just be an alternative

The issue is that there aren’t really instances that are similar enough to be considered interchangeable. They all have their specificity, be it admin style, defederation, downvotes enabled or disabled, front-ends available, etc.

Yeah that’s a good point. Maybe it’s too different for it to work. I maintain that complexity will continue to push people away, though. If instances are that different we might have better luck referring to them as their own sites. That would just increase the flocking to single mega instances though. The most important feature of any social media site is who’s on it.
It’s okay if they join one instance. I’m not a fan of the LW dominance, but it’s better to have another LW user than no user at all

I would agree with that. I think the ability to spin up new instances if something goes wrong with a big one is still a great feature even if one gains dominance.

I don’t know how hard account migration is right now, but that’s probably another UX thing to make easy if the devs decide to work on it.

Incidentally Piefed have a small bit nice trend. piefed.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48

Fediverse Observer checks all sites in the fediverse and gives you an easy way to find a home from a map or list or automatically.

Piefed Sites Status. Find a Piefed server to sign up for, find one close to you!

I was in the same boat as you regarding signing up. I also agree with you that the concept of federation might be confusing for new users. Just gave up at the promt to explore other instances (in lemmy.world sign up) and signed up to lemmy.world.
Lemmy.World - A generic Lemmy server for everyone to use.

Lemmy

I ended up where I did because I wanted the closest thing to no instance possible, and the great folks running this one try to do just that. It’s fediverse Switzerland lol

You have a point but maybe the gatekeeping is a good thing?

Average user doesn’t care about federation would translate to the average user doesn’t care about this community. Maybe?

It’s like how some old forums would charge for an account. Kept a certain low effort person from signing up. Sure it might turn people off but if you do enough work to understand how to get in then there’s a level of buying into it that might make you care more.

Just some thoughts.

I would love to have more diversity here, so I’m afraid I don’t agree with that. 🤷‍♂️
Ugh that’s a really good point. I need to work on more ‘whatever’ throw away comments
Thank you for your service. I agree with you on the issue, but am a bit afraid that if more people onboard here, the threads will be just the same reddit hivemind circlejerk like ”i also choose this guys wife” etc. But since there is no karma to gain here I wish it will stay like this.
Yep. I agree with this. Re-creating Reddit at the same scale just brings all the same problems. I like that federation means smaller more localised communities that can be connected (or not). I get that it’s not what everyone wants or is used to, and that’s okay.
The rules of the game are different so Lemmy wouldn’t be like Reddit even with the same scale.

I honestly found that one funny, and I don’t mind the funny comments either.

Still I get what you are saying about the problems.

It is funny indeed, but after a while I felt exhausted after reading the same repetitive threads over and over
last 2 years look pretty stable to me
Is this counting Piefed?
No. It says lemmy only so no piefed or mbin

Last I checked, Piefed had only a fraction of the users Lemmy had.

I have an account in a Piefed instance and it’s awesome (especially if they add image galleries before Lemmy does), but I don’t think it would meaningfully move the graph.

Yes, it does - but you have to account for the users on there if you’re measuring the fediverse activity in general. And Mbin. Combined they’d add about 2.2k extra users this month.
I mean with how many instances have launched a piefed server the last few months and with how small Lemmy is in the first place even a thousand or so users switching would explain some of that slight downward slope at the end.
There are 43 Piefed instances.
  • Clicks "All"
  • Sees impersonal biased news sources reporting how bad the world is
  • Clicks on Comments
  • Scrolls
  • Finds one person talking about how good their day is or one topic they’re passionate about
Be the change you want to see. This is your time to shine.
I blocked all the news channels, location channels (since they’re 90% news anyways), and a few extra that kept getting bad news related comments or trollish crap, and the top feeds are usually pretty good. They don’t change too much over a day, but at least it no longer feels like doomscrolling.
It’s great that we can individually curate our feeds but what I think the person you replied to is highlighting is that the first impressions a new user may get is repetitive doomer content. That’s the nature of sorting by all and our instance-based approach, but it’s definitely an experience which may put new people off
Yea it is definitely a bit offputting. I’m not sure what the fix is given the world is quite shit right now. Most news is going to less than great, so I guess we need more non-news content to help drown out the BS.
i dont block news channels, just the POLITICS on worlds. it was problematic enough in my lemmy.ee account they misinterpeted my comments as being anti-semitic/not being pro-israel. plus i detect alot of tankies, tankies adjacent on that communities too. news i dont have problem with discuss similar issues. of course any stray users that are tankies i will block too, and then people that try to disguise thier comments as helpful but is actually be super condescending.

Yeaaahhh, tankies are a pretty big issue on Lemmy, sadly… They don’t seem to understand they’re the equivalent of a dumbass redneck screeching about what ever false ‘fact’ they heard on Fox News, but from a supposed left framing…

Part of the reason I blocked news, too. Not only do I not want to doomscroll, but I don’t want to get in an argument over how the news isn’t so bad actually and Russia/China/Mao totally already have a solution we just need to implement or some such shit. (ok bad generic, but it’s hard to generalize their flavor of fake enlightenment. lol)

Also, consider switching to Piefed to be able to use the built-in keyword filter. I haven’t seen US news since using it.

You know, I had an idea for another keywords filter for feeds. It works in reverse. You type in keywords you want to see in posts and it then makes you a feed comprised of posts of that nature.
That would be nice
@[email protected] is this something hypothetically possible?

Sure.

You’d probably end up seeing very few posts, though. Rather than filtering the timeline it might work best as a “notify me when posts with these keywords appear” function.

Well depends on the keywords. If one was to make a feed for Trump it would come up a lot. But the idea would be you could combine multiple keywords, so you might have a dozen or so.
Doesn’t mastodon have that? You type in a keyword and then you add it as a “user.”

Along with the newcomers comm I’m thinking about making those as default comms that new people are subscribed to.

Gotta balance out the doom.

Nail, meet head. This is the Lemmy experience.

Reddit was big enough for people to have different interests and, here is the kicker, the subreddit system was a perfect way to separate the people that didn’t give a shit about a subject and those that did.

There was life besides /all

If you remove /all from Lemmy you have, maybe, 3-4 communities that post with any regularity. Within those there are maybe 2 people in total that post.

It’s turning to shit. A complete and utter echo chamber.

I don’t know that a lack of users across the platform to support nicher topics necessarily justifies the charge of “echo chamber”. They are two different things.

Because the only ones that are left post the same shit over, and over again. When people leave because the feed gets repetitive, they also leave the niche that they might have been interested in.

Then you get an echo chamber.

Well it’s just that politics/news are the two main things that most people can talk about. So that’s what trends. Many other topics have general interest barriers that naturally have lower ceiling of interests from the roughly 40k active users.
No, its the fact that the same couple of people post across all communitys and drown everything else. I wouldn’t be opposed to a daily limit of posts, just to bring the noise down. The only reason i still come here is for the rare, once a week, quality post.

That’s not logistically possible given each instance has its own rules.

But also, at the same time it seems self-evident to me that most of the 40k people here can talk about politics. Most are from the Anglosphere and the daily goings-on are relevant to them in some way. It seems also evident to me that less people here can talk about fishing, or baking because it’s of less interest to them. Reddit, by comparison, has a much larger population.

I’m also looking at /all/ and seeing a variety of names.