I’ve subscribed to a plethora of communities that really interest me and actually have posts and discussions in them, but I have to go to the specific community to see this. My “Subscribed” feed only contains a few of the same posts that I’ve seen for weeks in Hot, the same posts from even longer ago in “Active”, posts from the same communities as the ones in “Hot” in New and no other communities, and pretty much only posts from the Meme’s community I unsubscribed from when sorted by “All”. I also see a majority of posts barely have upvotes or comments on them at all from the “bigger” communities. Is this just the growing pains of this site? Am I still doing lemmy wrong? Is it the instance I’ve chosen to join?
UPDATE I want to thank everyone who posted and gave me helpful advice on this matter. It turns out that there are still lots of people here on Lemmy with me, I just couldn’t see you because I was sorting my feed incorrectly. I’m excited that there are more people here and I’m excited to continue to contribute to Lemmy with you! Thank you all for the help, I really appreciate it. The solutions are to continue to subscribe, contribute to my favorite communities, and sort by top day, 12, and 6 hours. It really helped liven up my feed!
I appreciate the sorting suggestion! I’ll try that. I understand that Lemmy isn’t as big as Reddit, but I swear there are more people than my feed is leading me to believe.
It’s been hard to look at all these posts about how big lemmy is and how fast it’s growing, to watch the scale-up issues, and keep in mind just how much smaller it still is than reddit. According to https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats the lemmyverse is just now closing in on 2M users (from 750k last month), but only 70,000 of them are “active.” Reddit claims 50,000,000+ daily users and 400M monthly. That’s essentially 1000x larger than lemmy - that’s the difference between seeing your favorite band at a stadium concert or your local pub.
I’d be curious to see what the comment/post rate is for “active users” per platform.
It’s an open secret that it’s a very small percentage of users who engage in comments, and a MINISCULE fraction of a percent who post content… Tinier still the percentage of accounts that post the things that end up in the “all” feed. A boggling percentage of Reddit front page content comes from like, 100 user accounts.
Then the solution becomes simple. Track those 100 power users and lure them here.
Please don’t! That’s what made reddit such a shithole in my opinion.
Well that’s the beauty of the fediverse. If you are the minority that want to keep your lemmy small niche content then you can freely do that in the instance of your choice that defederates the popular ones. Most users like the variety of reddit content.
I get that. And reddit had tools so that you could create your own groups of subs. I guess I just am not the target of the kinds of crap posts that were just constantly force fed to the main feed by the relatively few mentioned above. Quantity doesn’t equate to quality.
I have a friend with similar mindset and he likes Mastadon a lot more. Because there he can research which people to follow and make sure they post quality stuff. Quality over quantity. But it takes time to know who to follow. Once you have though, it can be a goldmine.
I think that’s largely happened… I mean look at the top comment. Almost 200 upvotes. On Reddit this post/comment would definitely not get 1000x that - so clearly it seems the participation rate is significantly higher.
I think I might legitimately start doing that for my country sub in the coming weeks.
The comment/post ratio for active users on Lemmy is 100%. An active user on Lemmy is defined as someone who has made a comment or post within the last month.
Sounds like we should change the definition of active
It does seem like the threshold for “active” should be just going to the site with a logged in account, or at least voting on anything
No wonder everything on the hivemind-that-must-not-be-named sounds and feels like it’s being regurgitated by the same people, from the low-effort memes to the armchair city planners, atheist circlejerks and very enlightened political/economic views.
I’ve never seen motorhead at either myself.
I saw motorhead at sxsw and it awesome. A power circuit cut out on stage and only Lemmy’s amp and mic worked. As the crew troubleshooted, he walked up to the mic and was like, “does anyone know any jokes?” He then proceeded to noodle a shitty walking bass line like every other bass player in the world when that shit happens
Man, I’m sorry. You really missed out.
So…where are those 70k active users? The posts I’ve been seeing definitely don’t have that sort of interaction.
They’re spread all around. The ‘big’ lemmy communities have 2-5,000 monthly users, which probably means a few hundred to a thousand daily users. In the more active communities I follow c/selfhosted@lemmy.world or c/games@lemmy.world I’ll see a half dozen or so posts a day and up to 50-ish comments on a super popular topic. Most of them get just a handful of replies. That feels about right to me: the vast majority of people are lurkers, and the vast majority of accounts are abandoned.
It’s why the commercial sites fought so hard for market share and why being The site for microblogging/link aggregation/image sharing is so important. People go to those sites because everyone is there, and everyone is there because that’s just where you go.
There’s no lemmy-wide algorithm making sure you have shiny new topics to look at. The lemmy “all” page is not at all equivalent to r/all, especially on an instance as small as fediverse.boo. The “All” tab is only going to have content from communities that at least one person on the instance has subscribed to, and with only 6 active users ( https://fedidb.org/network/instance/fediverse.boo ) that’s not likely to be a large set. It’s also possible that the federation mechanics result in you seeing less or delayed content from other instances. Maybe try browsing, even without an account, https://lemmy.world or https://sh.itjust.works
All of us reading this post feeling the same way can do our part by posting and commenting. If everyone who thinks they’re the only ones here start talking the emptyness disappears
I’m definitely more active here than I am\was on reddit, and there’s definitely less activity here… but I can accept that, just to get away from the firehose of nonsense that reddit has become.
Specially sorting by 6 hours is important :)