I’ve been using Lemmy for a couple years now, and unfortunately I’ve noticed a significant decline in the niche communities that were originally active. When I first joined I saw much more variety when browsing the All feed. But over time, the communities I liked have faded as shitposting and meme communities have come to dominate the platform.
I think this shift has changed the culture of Lemmy. There seems to be more of a herd mentality now, where people downvote reasonable opinions they disagree with. The discussions don’t feel as nuanced. Some people have even been attacked for innocuous comments that don’t align with the prevailing groupthink.
The niche communities that made Lemmy special are fading away, and the resulting monoculture makes me less inclined to participate. I want a platform that supports substantive discussions in my interests, not just memes and shitposting.
I don’t know what the solution is on a platform level, but a culture shift is needed if Lemmy wants to retain users like me who valued the diversity of opinions. I may have to move to a platform that allows better filtering and proportionality between niche interests and funny or stupid content. I want Lemmy to succeed, but right now I’m finding myself drawn back to Reddit because the niche communities there seem more active. I’ll keep checking in, but Lemmy needs to recapture its original spirit if I’m going to make it my main home.
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And like virtually every one of the similar complaints, this comes from someone who isn’t otherwise active, so basically boils down to “I’ve noticed that other people aren’t providing me with enough content. What can we do to get other people to provide me with more content?”
If you want to get more activity in niche communities, POST! And not just once - do it again and again, day in and day out.
The communities that you appreciate didn’t just spring into being - they grew, over time, because people did exactly that.
Why on Earth would we want to make (Lemmy) more popular? I want more people to leave. Things have noticeably gotten better over the last few weeks, but there’s still a ways to go. The people who are leaving are presumably mostly people who are frustrated by the relative complexity of decentralized forums and people who can’t find enough “content” to scroll through here, and good riddance to the lot of them.
You, two months ago. The quote perfectly encapsulates why niche communities aren’t taking off and why the demographic here will always be nerdy and tech-focused.
Every single one of the Reddit communities I followed that tried to move to Lemmy inevitably went back. There’s a ton of reasons why, like instances going down, poor moderation, unreliable servers, and general confusion as to how a Lemmy account works to name a few. The apps not being up to par at the time were a huge factor also. It’s highly unlikely that Reddit will ever see an organized effort to seek out communities off-site ever again, so the chance to just transplant a community in its entirety over to Lemmy is gone. Now we’re pretending it’s going to be possible to take a niche site (Lemmy, compared to the wider internet) and somehow develop niche communities from an active pool of users a fraction of a fraction of Reddit’s. It’s not happening.
It’s a tough pill to swallow, but if you have a problem with Reddit you’re in the minority. I’m fine with maintaining a Reddit account to communicate with people who are still on Reddit. I go where the users are. I’m not going to sit in an empty community for months talking to myself while conversations are happening elsewhere. It is what it is.
And I stand by everything I said there.
And I also believe that the threadiverse will continue to grow overall.
And I don’t believe that those two things are in any way contradictory.
It’s highly unlikely that Reddit will ever see an organized effort to seek out communities off-site ever again, so the chance to just transplant a community in its entirety over to Lemmy is gone. Now we’re pretending it’s going to be possible to take a niche site (Lemmy, compared to the wider internet) and somehow develop niche communities from an active pool of users a fraction of a fraction of Reddit’s. It’s not happening.
I am sure you are very knowledgable and have complex reasons for believing certain things will or will not happen with the fediverse, but you have to remember the growth that came to lemmy from the reddit-bs was massive, unexpected and utterly unpredictable in BOTH magnitude and timing.
We can’t know the future, lemmy is far more functional now than it was when the reddit burst happened and the future is unwritten.
Yea some of the communities I’m helping with just didn’t exist before we spun them up in the past few months. They’re new and fairly niche
There are other niche communities that I’m curious about and would like to see more from, but I don’t have experience in those areas to know what’s interesting/ relevant. I post what I can, but there are probably others that can do it better
I agree with this. And with the OP. And I haven’t even read their whole post, making this even more legit in a way. Post!
Doesn’t work. If you post to a dead community it’s still dead. I see my single comment on the all feed. I think a lot like myself find going to reddit more and more. Duplicate posts by a bot or something. Really weird sexual communities and not much else
For example I wanted to see what people thought of a new ev car.ooked st car communities and nothing had been published and no posts. Searched reddit and found 100 comments page.
I agree there is more discussion on Reddit
Some of the Lemmy communities need some promo too. Maybe the few people subscribed don’t use those accounts anymore
Over time as you post more stuff, people subscribe from ALL or from the crossposted communities. You can also promote the community by talking about it in tangently related posts, or [email protected] type places
Which makes sense until they go to the community and it’s dead. So then they don’t interact. There’s 3 valheim subs. Each has ,20+ members. There’s no activity. I was trying post updates but it wouldn’t let me.
Yeah. I don’t know what these “just post” types think it’s like. I tried making some relatively niche posts early on, trying to spark discussion in communities for some games I was playing. Got a single digit number of comments at most. Sometimes none. Small communities don’t get seen and niche posts in bigger communities are less likely to get votes. It feels very discouraging if you spend 30 minutes to make a post that seemingly nobody even sees.
Some folks here don’t seem to want to hear it because they badly want Lemmy to be better (and I kinda get that), but where niche communities are concerned, Reddit is unfortunately better.
Also, the “jUsT PoSt” replies are acting like everyone wants to post. Not everyone does and we shouldn’t be acting like they’re idiots because they don’t want to be the one to make the posts. It’s perfectly valid to want to read other people’s posts. There’s also some stuff you just can’t post and expect it to work. Eg, I read episode discussions on Reddit. Those can really only take off if you post them immediately when the episode airs. It feels like only Star Trek has those here. For every other show, I just go back to Reddit.
Posting in a vacuum is pretty pointless. We need engagement but we need the posts for that. I’ll leave a comment but I’m far superior at replying to comments than I am at starting discussions.
And as to said. After you’ve wasted time curating a few comments and getting nothing back. You’ll just stop.
I agree with you. That’s why I make an effort to at least leave a comment every time I use the app.
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Is this the new version of “the lurkers support me in email”?
Your account has 4 posts over a few months and one comment. Maybe you have actually been using Lemmy for longer on another account, but we can’t see that.
I’m an Elder Millennial, used to admin/mod a fandom forum around 1999-2002ish. A small percentage of active users essentially carrying the content of small niche communities on their back until ignition happens has ALWAYS been how communities work. It’s like that in real life, and it’s like that online. It was like that when niche message boards and forums reigned in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was like that on usenet, in IRC, on email groups. It was like that on World of Warcraft, when you tried to get a guild off the ground for raiding or something. It’s like that here on Lemmy, because Lemmy is a social platform too.
The only real solution to grow a community is to jump in and create content yourself, to help communities along until one or two ignite and take off. You have to participate yourself to change the culture, not just bitch in a post that it’s “changed” and that you’re going to stomp off if it doesn’t “change back”. (Although, that type of post is, admittedly, also a tradition as old as time.)
Anyway. Communities starting small and needing people to grow is just…a thing. This is how volunteer organizations work in real life–why do you think they’re constantly pleading for other people to get involved? Because you need people who actually pull on their adult pants and get in and do the work of organizing things, doing things, instead of sitting about like a lump consuming it.
You can move back to reddit of course, if you want. That’s similar to moving from a small town to a big city for the night life, which people do. Maybe you don’t have the time or energy to essentially “volunteer” your time on a small community to help it grow.
But the thing you’re complaining about is…just part of how communities work. Communities have always revolved around a few people contributing most of the content until the community takes off (or doesn’t).
So, rationally, what’s the next step? Stepping up your own contributions, or going off somewhere else?
Only you can decide because only you know your IRL time commitments. But one action is going to be more useful to helping niche subs get off the ground than the other.
(Here’s something interesting: The Frugal sub has a shit-load of people subscribed who eagerly jump in feet-first if you start a relevant topic. Why doesn’t someone here with an interest in that sub go over there and start a post?)
Yeah I’d say the only thing more regular than the 10 people maintaining the stream of content here on lemmy are the people who don’t post/comment but complaint about the lack of content.
I’m personally trying to hold up 3 niche communities right now. All of them have over 300 followers, but in each one an average of 2-3 people post. Be the change you want to be. At least jump in and comment.
And a lot of them are easy. New game update goes up? Post the new update. Are you excited about it? Plants your thing? Take a picture of it. Music subs? What are you listening to today? Just post something. It’s not like we have karma to worry about
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Tbh i thinknthroaways are a better solution. “Hiding” stuff selectively can never 100% work.
The reason i prefered reddit to all the other big socials was how easy pseudonynous activity is. No “real name policy” BS. threadiverse has the same feature so i like it too.
Agreed. It’s one of the more creepy aspects of social media that mostly leads to “gotchas” (“oh your account is only 2 months old? your opinion is invalid!”) and stalker-ish behavior – and one I wish fediverse had learned from instead of copied.
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
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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
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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?
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.
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.
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.
I’ve seen a decline since the initial jump. I moved over from Reddit. It was exciting new and fresh. That’s basically gone now and things are stagnating. I’m constantly going back to Reddit as there’s no discussion here. Half the time I’m the only one commenting on posts. It’s dead
No discussion? In the past few days you’ve commented in [email protected] and [email protected], two of the most active discussion communities on Lemmy. And you’re getting it here.
You also don’t have any posts in over three weeks and 13 in total over five months. People, if you want more active niche communities, you need to contribute to the discussion. You’re not going to be able to passively, endlessly doomscroll here. That level of content may never arrive, but there’s still plenty to build. Sure, it could be easier, with duplicate communities all over the place and defederation on the rise. For now, use Lemmy Explorer to see where the activity is and help us build those smaller communities.
Previously though. But yes I have reduced down my comments.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
I guess you could use that to make your own private community?
where people downvote reasonable opinions they disagree with
This is the scourge of any forum. Downvoting apologists need to think about what they are doing. Downvoting makes comments less visible. So downvoting is the equivalent of taping someone’s mouth shut because you don’t agree with them. Is that really what you are trying to do?
Personally I never downvote any comment that is made in good faith, no matter how much I disagree with it. Occasionally I even force myself to upvote them if they’re thoughtful. It’s not that hard.
E: Sad but unsurprised to see that a bunch of people think my personal opinion needs to be hidden. I guess it’s less risky than coming up with a counter-argument and seeing if you get more upvotes.
Downvoting makes comments less visible. So downvoting is the equivalent of taping someone’s mouth shut because you don’t agree with them. Is that really what you are trying to do?
This is ridiculous, especially the comparison with physical violence. Upvoting a comment also makes all the other comments less visible, by promoting the comment you’ve picked, taking up the place where some other comment could’ve been. Nobody’s mouth is taped shut by either upvoting or downvoting, all the comments are still visible, it’s just that their order will be determined by the upvotes and downvotes - and removing the latter from the equation won’t negate the “discrimination” (comment sorting) created by the former.
Yeah, I think some forums had the right idea with reactions of sorts (funny/helpful/informative/etc.) and being able to sort and sift through comments via those reactions.
Slashdot had a good idea for this wherein votes were combined with a small set of reasons for a positive or negative vote. I think the use of those reasons was optional there, but modern systems might do well to adopt mandatory reasons for votes. If the reasons for negative votes are limited to things like “off-topic”, “hostility”, and the like, it could cut down on inappropriate downvotes.
Of course some people might still select inappropriate reasons, but a small nudge like that can have a big impact on aggregate behavior.
Should still include “i dont like it” as a reason
It is a very (the most?) common reason for downvoting and if you force people to chose a reason but don’t include it, they will just lie and the whole exercise will be rendered pointless.
And you know even though it’s not your personal preference, I think there are situations where it’s really just helpful to know “a lot of people agree” or “a lot of people disagree”. Not everything is about having a long debate with many sides. Sometimes the most popular thing is the best thing and the least popular is that way for a reason. Or it can provide useful context to understand the comments. Like if I am posting to ask advice about how to fix something and several options are presented but one of them has 5x the upvotes, I am thinking that might be the best one.
And it can tell you about the community. Like if I go into a community and I see someone says something nasty/dangerous/stupid and it has a similar votecount to other comments, I would think “I guess that sort of thing is acceptable here”. Whereas if I see it has lots of downvotes I might think “this comment is not representative of the general community here”. Voting based on like/dislike allows the community to express approval/disapproval when things don’t meet the threshold of moderator action; especially in very permissive communities where mods do not wish to take a heavy hand.
Further more, agree/disagree votes cut down on identical “me too” type comments. They give people a way to show approval without needing to make a comment and sometimes that is appropriate.
How do you think that would improve the quality of discussions?
It would let users choose the option that best describes the reason for their voting. You then do a bit of trickery where you don’t tell the user those votes don’t count and ignore all votes with that reason. That would allow removing useless downvotes.
But this being FOSS it would have to be a public secret so the irresponsible downvoters wouldn’t know about it.
Voting reasons and weights for each reason could be made configurable on a per-server or per-community basis without showing it to end-users, but to have federated voting work correctly it couldn’t be completely secret.
Most of the people thoughtlessly downvoting things aren’t going to put in the effort. Coordinated inauthentic voting is a separate issue my proposal does not attempt to solve.
I remember this system. I had to apply to do it after my account was old enough, then they’d give me a little bit to rate at first. Then IIRC they gave me more to rate after it was clear I wasn’t abusing it.
They had a guideline page I had to read before I started to rate comments and I don’t think those attributes were optional. So, comments got a primary attribute associated with their rating.
I wasn’t able to rate comments that I saw as I browsed but rather it was a collective rating system where volunteers were served comments (with expandable context) to curb the tendency to downvote just because you disagree with something.
At the height of Slashdot the discussions on there were incredibly educational and thoughtful and that rating system worked very well.
I only downvote toxic ass holes.
I wish I could turn off seeing the voting system because I think the voting system is meaningless. No matter the topic there will always be people who are uneducated and have a lack of experience in it upvote an incorrect comment to the moon, whilst the person who is trying to share their in depth knowledge on the subject get downvoted to the bottom of the earth. So it becomes an echo chamber of the most popular opinions.
In Reddit’s wiki they state that the voting system should be used to upvote relevant conversation that adds to the topic and downvote practically everything else. So it should be a self regulating system to filter out nonsense. But most people use it as an agree/like, disagree/dislike system and it appears people have brought that philosophy over to Lemmy.
I wish I could turn off seeing the voting system because I think the voting system is meaningless.
Completely agree. This is how Hacker News does it.
IMO a first step is to get rid of the downvote counter. On a healthy forum a comment will generally have far more upvotes than downvotes. So it seems to me that showing the exact number of downvotes is putting disproportionate weight on the negativity. 400 upvotes but 9 people downvoted it, what bast***s! You often see this kind of indignant comment, which suggests that people love to focus on the negative if given the chance. We should not be pushing people to focus on this number. It’s completely counterproductive if the objective is quality and not just mindless engagement.
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.
It’s the kind of thing that happens when a space gets big - the original purpose and culture of that space is gradually diluted and overwritten by what’s popular until it’s been washed away completely and is no different than what it was trying to distinguish itself from.
Frankly, it’s a phenomenon that I think the world could do without, but I can’t do much about it until the next harvest blood moon, when my powers are at their peak.
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.
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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.
