I never found “all” browsable for any platform whether it be lemmy, YouTube, or reddit. It’s why subscribing has been so important to me, and filtering. Like on YouTube which I access through freetube I’ve disabled “trending” and “popular” since even the thumbnails were obnoxious for majority of the videos, and I blocked out channels to keep them from dominating search results. And on reddit what even made /r/all viewable was a reddit enhancement suite filter lists that was in the hundreds for blocking of communities, and even then was a wack a mole that required keyword filtering.
All of any platform will devolve into a shit show. As for niche subs. Yeah, not much that can be done about that if the user base is small.
My main issue on Lemmy is lack of moderation, which drives many people away. Let’s take a look at c/technology:
- Scottish minister blames sons watching football for £11,000 iPad roaming bill
- The reincarnation of totaled Teslas—in Ukraine | Ars Technica
- Elon Musk vows ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as advertisers flee X over antisemitism
WTF is this crap? How’s that related to technology? Just because some dork used an iPad, that doesn’t mean it’s tech news worthy.
Lemmy is flooded by bots who post all the crap they can find crawling the media. Niche communities simply disappear from the main page and fade away over time.
But over time, the communities I liked have faded as shitposting and meme communities have come to dominate the platform.
That is perfectly normal with almost any social media platform, forums included.
There seems to be more of a herd mentality now, where people downvote reasonable opinions they disagree with.
This seems to be because of the large number of US selfcentered liberals that decided to stick to the platform after the Reddit migration. There is no solution for that. Everyone has a voice on the internet.
The discussions don’t feel as nuanced.
Agreed.
Some people have even been attacked for innocuous comments that don’t align with the prevailing groupthink.
Mhm, keep going…
I want Lemmy to succeed, but right now I’m finding myself drawn back to Reddit because the niche communities there seem more active.
The dust settled down, most people moved back to Reddit. This was inevitable. Change is a hard thing for most people, even more so when you have to deal with a completely different set of rules and choices you previously had no control over (like choosing an instance).
I’ll keep checking in, but Lemmy needs to recapture its original spirit if I’m going to make it my main home.
Don’t mean to bust your balls, but this will probably never happen. There will be ups and downs in the user count on Lemmy and the fediverse, based on how bad the other commercial social media platforms are doing, but a significant spike?.. as with the Reddit migration?.. not likely. That was a one time thing, and it only happened because this was never tried before. Now that it has, this will likely not be a viable alternative for most people that want to migrate. Hosting my own seever, paying fees or doing it on a someone else’s server, just so that it goes down and takes down the content with it 🤨. Trust me, this is not an option most people are OK with. People like stability and sustainability (especially in niche communities, memes and shitpoats don’t need that at all) and that is one thing that the fediverse can’t give them… unless you host your own instance… but then you have to pay fees 😒.
Bottom line, Lemmy and the fediverse is good for tech enthusiasts, nothing more. If everyone on the planet knew how to configure and run a Linux server, docker and all that, 90% of TLDs were free, yes, it will most probably thrive, but if any of these conditions are not met… probably not.
This is incredibly well-put and true.its a shame really as well. With the current state of lemmy it’s only going see a downward spiral
There was a peak, everyone enjoyed it, it was fun (for about 2 or 3 months)… then people started realizing this will probably never be a true place for niche stuff and started to go back to Reddit… plus mods started to abuse power, instances strted defederating in bulk whoever they see fit (which is not what the fediverse is all about… it should be a last resort 🤦), which of course pissed off users (let’s face it, if you’re on Reddit, you can see all of Reddit, not just parts of it). Now, there isn’t a single instance that isn’t defederated from at least one other instance. That and instances going dark over nigh (you go to sleep, can’t log in the next day, find out that your instance is lost in cyberspace)… yeah, that kinda tipped the scale for normies I think.
As I said, it’s good enough for techies, but normal users, nah… they want stability. They wanna be able to find a post that they posted 10 years ago and link to it. On Lemmy… there is no guarantee for that, especially if you’re on a smaller instance.
I mean I’ve only been on here for a month and still manged to make a name for myself I “moderate” a very niche shitposting community had my first shitpost get to the top in c/all and piss off most of .ml and watched mutiple instances just go pop and leave for a pack of cigarettes and some milk including one of the largest ones and i still can’t wrap my head round how all this works why the fuck is there so much “drama” why the and why the fuck is half of lemmy always so fucking angry is my quintessential question
It’s because the snowflake liberal techies are the ones that are left using Lemmy now 🤷… sorry, but that’s the truth… the extreme right and left wingers are no better though, so that basically makes up of about 90% of the Lemmy userbase now. The normies are gone. They tried it, some got pissed about the bannings, some about defederation, some about instances going dark and they went back to reddit 🤷.
There also seems to be shadow banning now (though I have no idea how it’s done here on Lemmy). I posted this a few hours ago… no comments, no upvotes, no downvotes… this is the 2nd post that I get no replies on. I asked people on Lemmy if they could see it, some could, some couldn’t but none of them got the post on their feed.
And this basically means that I’d have to switch accounts again (the first few times were because instances went dark over night), because someone decided to shadow ban me for… god knows what reason 😒.
I don’t think shadow banning is a feature, but your post looks similar to this issue
Yes, that seems to be the issue.
To be honest, with all the banning and defederation goin on on Lemmy right now, I really thought that it might be a feature now or that someone implemented custom code to make it a feature.
Prehaps if your worried about shadow banning you should consider switching to the .world instance as in my experience they tend to be quite lenient over there could also be that people aren’t interested in your memes comedy’s subjective after all what some people may find funny others may not although this is the .ml instance which is the instance which the dev is on and he has a history for shit like this
The weird thing is, there are no upvotes or downvotes. I’ve been downvoted to oblivion before, it’s not news to me, it’s the lack of it that makes me think that.
Fuck it, I’ll switch instances again.
Alright well all the luck to ya mate good luck
Hey just a headsup your post isn’t appearing wherever i click on your profile it only appears when I click on the direct link you’ve provided something definitely skeckty going on there
I mean, if you’re browsing all you can’t be surprised there’s a lot of crap you don’t care about. That’s what the subscribed feed is for.
All is practically useless when most instances uses that auto subscribe to every community on every instance bot. Just on my test community on my own instance which is there only for testing bugs and other crap, there’s 73 subscribers and 72 of them are those auto subscribe to everything bots. Now I run some tests on that community and I get downvotes and even spam reports on them, from people seeing it on All.
So, no wonder All is crap. It includes all the spammy meme communities and even test communities nobody in their right mind would even think subscribing to. The small communities you talk about are probably still there, just drowned in All. Subscribe to them, default to subscribed feed and you’ll be good to go.
What are some examples of niche communities that are declining?
Granted, I’ve only been here since the reddit migration, but after a short chaotic period, I’ve only seen growth in the communities I’ve been an active participant in.
Personally I wonder if OP just saw the huge reddit community creation burst earlier this year and thought that’s it, it’s Reddit now.
I’d wager 90% of those communities are ghost towns right now, with the creators long gone. Everyone just wants to be in charge of a huge community, but very few actually want to hang around and build/nurture one.
I don’t know what the solution is on a platform level
It’s not really Lemmy’s problem, using “All” on a large instance like l.w is going to get you blasted in the face with a barrage of low effort posts, that’s just the nature of the beast.
I’m on a smaller instance (they’re all smaller than l.w which is the size of the top 50 other instances combined) and use subscriptions to manage what I see and it works out nicely.
On Lemmy (and most of the rest of the Fediverse) there aren’t, yet, fancy algorithms serving you a bespoke selection posts that filter out a lot of the “noisier” communities and boost the more interesting ones. You have to get out there and curate your own feed, it’s pretty easy but whenever I see a post complaining that there’s too much about Linux or too many memes it’s clear that the OP isn’t taking (m)any steps to improve their feed.
I’ve noticed a significant decline in the niche communities that were originally active
Niche communities can often only have one or two people posting regular content. If no-one else chips in or replies then that can be a dispiriting experience and that’s how communities die. If there’s a community you like then drop in, comment, make a post from time to time. That’s how communities gain momentum and start thriving.
There was an explosion of users when Reddit went Monopoly Man over their API. It makes sense that usage will waver a bit for a while, and that not all people will stick. Lemmy is like Reddit, but it doesn’t have full parity to it.
Yeah, I’m not having that experience. I think you need to be a bit more selective with blocks to curate your all.
Also you’re on the most reddit-mainstream of the instances, maybe you should move somewhere smaller and sort by local every so often.
Kbin communities are having new life breathed into them lately, by an update that allows us to automatically remove inactive owners from communities.
the upcoming release of Lemmy, v0.19 (which as of two weeks ago is planned for release “within the next weeks”) includes among its many improvements this PR: Adding a scaled sort, to boost smaller communities. Hopefully that helps!
go to https://voyager.lemmy.ml/ to test it out, they need help finding bugs anyways
deleted by creator
Maybe it’ll be able to revive some? Though there’s still the issue of smaller communities being fragmented because of being spread across many instances (without any software support to make that easier to work with).
This exactly. It’s pretty hard to imagine that a weighted sort algorithm is really so complex that it couldn’t have been implemented during the last migratory wave
deleted by creator
if you want to browse All then I think you might want to ban some of the meme communities
also v0.19.0 is adding the Scaled sorting method, which should help you see those niche communities more again
go to https://voyager.lemmy.ml/ to test it out, they need help finding bugs anyways
This is the way. I just block all the biggest meme communities and my all isn’t memey. All sorted by new is still a great way to find things.
Removed by mod
its obvious that things more people like, i.e. memes and whatnot, will grow faster and take a larger spot on any platform. that is normal and unavoidable.
small communities are small and hinge on people staying active in them, which they often stop being when everything is said and done. they dont regenerate as much as say, a meme community which has high visibility and low barrier of entreance.
i’d love to hear what niche communities you actually mean, i always find it sus when people make a reasonable sounding point, then move on to ‘unpopular opinions get downvotes’ and are afraid to actually name what kind of unpopular opinions they mean. meme and shitposting growing and vague unpopular opinions being unpopular ultimately aren’t related.
Haha, good point. I can’t say I find, for example, Nazi views being downvoted a bad thing, no matter how reasonably they are presented.
The solution would be to be more active. Fediverse and the experience in it is in your hands. And if you don’t give anything others won’t do either and we get nowhere.
I don’t know where I saw it but it’s some internet law regarding communities: 90% of all users are lurkers 9% are commentors and 1% are posters. In regards to Lemmy those percents translate to very few “content creators” (on reddit as it’s bigger it’s way better).
Squabbles had a really good approach in this to motivate lurkers to comment and post. I don’t see a similar coordinated effort for that here.
How did they do that?
They had a community/place for “former lurkers to cheer each other on as we work together to overcome our hesitation when posting and commenting”. People shared stories how for example “I have never posted on Reddit but today I posted here in a community that interests me” and would get positive encouraging comments.
It seemed to work, the other communities benefitted from it.
Well why don’t we do that then? What should it be called?
Lurker’s Lounge?
it’s becoming “redditified”
I think “multireddits” can help with that (it’s the issue with the most “thumbs up” on the lemmy issue tracker) , You could have multireddits based on mood or importance (Sometimes i might want to read up about subject X, other times on subject Y).
deleted by creator
I guess you could use that to make your own private community?
Seems like that’s able to created as a client-side feature, since the Summit app already does it. Now we just need more apps and frontends to implement it too.
