Yesterday me and Blaze had a bit of a back and forth and upon review I had some thoughts.
Let me state first and foremost, I adore Blaze and his contributions to the threadiverse. I think he makes the threadiverse a better place with his presence alone.
That said, when we were arguing I had a few problems. But the biggest and most pertinent was that I felt he was chasing Redditors.
I can't speak for everyone, but I chose Lemmy. Since I got here, I have put my fair share into making this place everything I want it to be. Whether that's conducting myself properly or whether it's trying to engage or provide a platform for engagement.
One thing I really don't want Lemmy to be is Reddit. I engage on here far more than I ever did on Reddit. I have a perfectly curated timeline which is the perfect mix of news, entertainment, enlightenment and conversation. I want Lemmy to remain Lemmy.
Lemmy works for me and my mental health. The way Lemmy is set-up, I relish the fact that I can discuss popular topics away from the general populus. In general, I have zero interest in participating in the biggest communities with, what is inevitably the bottom of the barrel posters. So for my peace of mind, I stick to strongly moderated instances and away from the catch-all communities.
That's not to say those communities don't have their place. They do! In fact they have a special place in my heart because they filter the bad actors away from me.
And ultimately that's what makes Lemmy beautiful. That there's different instances, different crowds and different discussions.
One thing that Blaze said yesterday was that, "people from Reddit say it's a ghost town." and I said that doesn't matter. He felt that we need to rectify that to ensure growth, but at what cost? Becoming Reddit? I don't want to be Reddit. Even at the software level, Lemmy has tried hard to not be Reddit, hence no karma.
I don't want Lemmy to sell its soul to attract the very people I don't want to be around. I'm not saying there's not room to grow or improve, I'm just saying we have to grow and improve while holding on to our values and having some integrity about it.
It's a well-known problem. And mixed with finding our own identity. Do we want to be a Reddit clone? Do we want to be a different thing altogether, but then we're not an "Reddit alternative" for people looking for that? In my humble opinion it's silly to do a 1:1 clone of Reddit. Who wants that? I mean Reddit is there... Unless you want something different, just sign up on Reddit.
Also the influx of users shifts things. Of course people coming from Reddit are looking for an alternative. And they also bring their behaviour, way of talking... Which shifts this place. And it has. I think we discussed this after the 2023 Spez API controversy and the single largest wave of new users. It's been the same thing on Mastodon when they first had a distinct atmosphere and every wave of Twitter exiles changed the atmosphere on the platform. Some people liked it, some didn't.
I think the user amount is a different story though. I hear that argument a lot... We'll grow organically. We don't have advertisers, so we don't need growth... But is it really that easy? Wouldn't it show how attractive and nice we are if people wanted to come here and spend their time on Lemmy? Aren't we set up to handle ten times more users? And if not, why? Should we change the mechanics of the place so we are?
My personal opinion is, the stagnation of users means we're likely just not a very attractive place. And we're just hanging around. I'd love it if people were to envy us for the nice place, and they wanted in, too. But it's not like that.
But that doesn't mean we need to focus on growth. In my opinion it means we need a better atmosphere here. Good content and not just the news (which you can get from any other social media site). Good tools and moderation and such things. But I'm not seeing much change regarding that. And that could be correlated to the user numbers.
And sometimes Lemmy is a ghost town. I wish I could talk to people about microcontrollers, electronics and whatever here. But it's not a lot of people here who are interested, so I can't get many discussions going. Instead, there's 500 people posting the global news on politics. But that's not quality content or what I'm interested in. So I think we definitely need to grow, or there's just not any meaningful conversation to be had in interesting (to me) topics.
(So to summarize: I think user growth mainly isn't the issue we need to tackle, it's a symptom.)
Edit: And that also means I don't want us to "keep" our integrity or identity. Frankly speaking, I don't think it is very good as is. It's not bad either. But I believe we could do way better. So go ahead and change it, but towards something better / more positive / whatever.
This reminds me of the SBC communities. For a long time it was just one person posting into a void and then more joined in and then it just kinda died because no one was driving it. But my point is, it will grow, it takes time, effort and dedication, but the niche communities will eventually flourish.
It is coming. https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
As much as karma was a flawed metric on Reddit, especially due to karma farming, it can still be useful to identify bad faith or toxic users.
Let's not forget that the lemm.ee admins shut down due to user moderation burnout, not infrastructure or cost issues.
I would love to believe that. And PieFed is picking up pace right now. But I'm a bit cautious. The userbase is still the same. Lemmy has long settled in into what it is now, how things are done and how the users treat each other and which popular topics they like. It's going to prove difficult to change it substancially. And I think that's what I propose. We really can't have entire teams of admins burn out, people stir up drama constantly and try to make the place about having strong opinions... I'm painting a bleak picture here. In total, Lemmy isn't like this. But it happens. And I'm also with PieFed for having somewhat of a vision on what we should strive for. I just think technical means aren't even half of the equation.
As everyone knows, I'm on Lemmy/Piefed a lot.
I mostly stick to communities like !casualconversation@piefed.social, !lego@piefed.social, !football@sopuli.xyz . Not politics, no news, no memes.
Atmosphere in the casual communities is always nice and pleasant. From time to time someone tries to get uncivil or negative, but then they get banned, and that's it.
I learned about a very important piece of news in another country on !pics@lemmy.world the other day, because I am completely avoiding those communities. People who browse All were probably aware of it for a week.
Just saying that it is possible to stay in the "casual/positive" side of Lemmy.
I know, and we definitely share some of those communities. But that's because we know our way around here. It is not the default experience. And new users at least on Lemmy have to work kind of hard to get there. And be motivated to do it right away and then also accumulate all the knowledge on which community with the same name to subscribe to and which to avoid... And even I have to put in some work at times, not to get annoyed. I think that's far from perfect as of now. It is a nice platform, though. And there is quite some potential.
Piefed has a much better onboarding experience. You can choose what topics interest you, and you're subscribed to them from the start. You can also choose to mute Musk and Elon keywords. That's already quite better