tl;dr: Be excellent to each other, do something constructive here?
I’m not sure anymore where the Threadiverse is headed. (The Threadiverse being this threaded part of the Fediverse, i.e. Lemmy, MBin, PieFed, …)
In my time here, I’ve met a lot of nice people and had meaningful conversations and learned lots of things. At the same time, it’s always been a mixed bag. We’ve always had quite some argumentative people here, trolls, … I’ve seen people hate on and yell at each other, and do all kinds of destructive things. My issue with that is: Negative behavior is disproportionately affecting the atmosphere. And I’d argue we have nowhere enough nice behavior to even that out.
I don’t see Lemmy grow for quite some time now. Seems it’s now leveling off at a bit less that 50k monthly active users. And I don’t see how that’d change. I’m missing some clear vision/idea of where we want to be headed. And I miss an atmosphere that makes people want to join or stay here, of all of the places on the internet. The saying is: “If you don’t go forwards you go backwards”. I’m not sure if this applies… At least we’re not shrinking anymore.
And I’m always unsure if the tone and atmosphere here changes subtly and gradually. I’ve always disagreed with a few dynamics here. But lately it feels like we’re on the decline, at least to me. I occasionally keep an eye on the votes on my comments. And seems I’m getting fewer of them. Sometimes I reply to a post and not a single person interacts. Even OP seems to have abandoned their post moments after writing it. And also for nuanced and longer replies, I regularly don’t get more than one or two upvotes. I think that used to be a bit better at some point. And I see the same thing happening with other peoples’ comments. So it’s not just me writing low-quality comments. What does work is stating simple truths. I regularly get some incoming votes with those. But my vision of this place isn’t spreading simple truths, but have proper and meaningful discussions, learn things and new perspectives or just mingle with people or talk. But judging by the votes I observe, that isn’t appreciated by the community here.
Another pet peeve of mine is the link aggregator aspect of Lemmy. I’d say at least 80% of Lemmy is about dumping some political (or tech) news articles. Lots of them don’t generate any engagement. Lots of them are really low-effort. OP just dumps something somewhere, no body text added, no info about what’s interesting about it. And people don’t even read those articles. They just read the title and react (emotionally) to that. In the end probably neither OP nor the audience read the article and it’s just littering the place. Burying and diminishing other, meaningful content. (With that said: There are also nice (news) discussions going on at the same time. And Lemmy is meant to be a link aggregator. It’s just that my perception is: it’s skewed towards low quality, low engagement and random noise.)
A few people here also don’t really like political debate. And there’s no escape from it here on Lemmy since so much revolves around that. And nowadays politics is about strong opinions, emotions and emotional reactions. And often limited to that. The dynamics of Lemmy reinforce the negative aspect of that, because the time when you’re most incentivized to reply or react is, when it triggers some strong emotion in you, for example you strongly disagree with a comment and that makes you want to counter it and write your own opinion underneath. If you agree, you don’t feel a strong emotion and you don’t reply. And the majority of users seems to also forget to upvote in that case, as I lined out earlier. And we also don’t write nuanced answers, dissect complex things and examine it from all angles. That’s just effort and it’s not as rewarding for the brain to do that as it is pointing out that someone is wrong. So it just fosters an atmosphere of being argumentative.
Prospect
I think we have several ways of steering the community:
- Technology: Features in the software, design choices that foster good behavior.
- Moderation: Give toxic people the boot, or delete content that drags down the place. Following: What remains is nice people and not adverse content.
- The community
I’d say 1 and 2 go without saying. (Not that everything is perfect with those…) But it really boils down to 3: The community. This is a fairly participatory place. We are the ones shaping the tone and atmosphere. And it’s our place. It’s kind of our obligation to care for it if we want to see it go somewhere. Isn’t it?
So what’s your vision of this place? Do you have some idea on where you’d like it to go? Practical ideas on how to achieve it?
Do you even agree with my perception of the dynamics here, and the implications and conclusions I came up with?
I would question your focus on growth. Yes, we all want this place to succeed. But do we really want this unlimited growth like Facebook, Reddit and all those other companies? Small communities are great, they give you a connection between users, they spark friendships and great discourse. Those are great. Yes, they are smaller than those multimillion user subreddits, but we’ve all seen those big subreddits slowly burning down. Dying to bots, to marketing spam, to low effort, popular comments, to reposts, to karma farming, to US politics. We’ve seen subreddit after subreddit dying to moderator burnout - because big subs are really hard to moderate, people will burn out. They are sacrificing their free time to deal with trolls, shills, putins guys and receive no compensation for that.
So maybe … let’s don’t replicate Reddit? Let’s focus on creating small, helpful communities and people will come.
I agree. I must admit my title was a bit clickbaity. Growth - meaning growing in user count - wasn’t my intention. I think it’ll be a result, sure. But I agree with you (and the Lemmy developers) in that growing (above all) isn’t what Lemmy is about. And it’s not healty anyways. And I think I didn’t include any reasoning or suggestions in my text that’d propose doing it.
What we’d need is the communities be at a healty (and useful) engagement level to allow having a conversation in the first place. Well, and I occasionally keep an eye at such metrics, because for example seeing something stagnate or decline could mean there is an issue, somewhere. I think I mentioned that in the post. But it doesn’t necessarily mean we have to push that metric. It’s tackling the underlying issue (if there’s any) that’s the important thing to do (in my opinion).
I think one of the best things we have are users like @craftyindividual@lemm.ee and @anon6789@lemmy.world who almost single-handedly curate fantastic communities of content they’re passionate about.
It’s a huge job, and not something one could easily ask of anyone. So I don’t have a quick fix how to attract more people like them or anything like that. But I think people doing these kinds of efforts deserve a shout-out.
I’m not very worried personally. I like it here, and it seems healthy enough in my eyes. I see people ask quite specific questions about many diverse topics and get incredibly helpeful answers, and I’ve been in that position myself as well. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth discussing the state of the community though, and I’m curious what people have on their minds. :)
I don’t have time to respond everything, but just about the growth part: Before the Reddit blackout happened, Lemmy was stuck with around 1000 monthly users for at least a year. It was quite boring compared to now, in 15 or 30 minutes you could read all new posts and comments for a day. It was also easy to recognize the handful of regular posters (cheers). At that time you could easily think the same, that Lemmy will never grow and people will leave. But then the Reddit migration happened and we got completely overwhelmed with a 70x increase in active users.
It seems to me that growth on the internet always happens with short spurts and long quiet periods. There will probably be a time when people come to Lemmy again and we reach hundreds of thousands or millions of active users. Then we will fondly remember the time when it was so small.
poVoq and anon6789 pointed out similar things with the growth happening in waves. I’m not sure if it’s healthy, though. It puts additional strain on the platform, devs and mods and everyone. And there are (long) dry spells in between. I’d rather have it grow constantly and slowly. And I believe quite some other Free Software projects do. It’s a bit of a different story with social media platforms as we have some unique circumstances like the network effect…
And I think the correct way to do it is to provide something to the people, so they want to join. Idk… be useful to them, a delight to spend time here. And offer something distinct or unique. That’d make the platform attractive all around the year. If we don’t have a superior product, we just rely on the other platforms becoming worse and that’s where our new users come from. Kind of accepting the role to be (and stay) an inferior Reddit clone. But that’s not how I see Lemmy or the Fediverse. I want to attract people who’ve never used Reddit before. Tech enthusiasts, … join because it’s a great platform to discuss their matters. Linux forums switch to Lemmy because it offers them interoperability. And sure, also Reddit users. But not just because they’re pushed out, but because they’re positively motivated to join this place.
The software is one thing. I think we’ve come a long way and both Lemmy and the network feel pretty stable now. It’s part of the equation. But I think the thing that really makes a difference is the community and the atmosphere. That’s why people would want to join. I’ve started this discussion now, because i think after the Reddit exodus, things had to settle down for a bit. And as other people pointed out it seems we’ve reached a plateau now. I think that’s a comfortable position to take a step back and think about the way forward. I’d like to take this as an opportunity to not just wait for incoming waves shape us, but now decide where we want to go and actively steer in that direction.
I think Lemmy is attractive enough, but that only matters when people actually want to join something new. Thats currently not the case, so for better or for worse we have to wait for another wave.
I don’t think the timing is quite right.
I don’t really have anything meaningful to contribute to the feeds and most of the discussions are a bit pointless. They’re not really changing anything. So, in part those other platforms are fueled by outrage culture. Which I know is bad, so not having it is good, but then we also don’t have the growth from it.
The technology is there and that should help. Apparently people aren’t going to mass migrate from reddit quite yet, even though the push last year probably helped a lot.
It is a network problem. I think the slow growth will / should happen eventually, because the fediverse is an objectively good place to start a community. It’s just not going to be fast and other platforms adding push factors would help obviously. We’ll see where reddit goes with their paid subs.
I don’t think the low effort posts are a problem, there is hardly motivation to interact with an empty page and there is slightly more if there are “boring topics”. At least it’s a place.
I think we have to actively provide something to the people to attract them. Something better than other platforms so they’ll want to be here. Not just because the other places become worse and this is the only alternative… But both is part of the equation.
I don’t think the timing is quite right.
What makes you think that? Because I think it’s a good time now, but I’d like to hear different perspectives.
I think the timing isn’t quite right, because the other social media places aren’t figuratively totally on fire.
There isn’t “the great social media collapse of 20XX” happening, because of some security issue or servers being super expensive or ads being actually 99% of the content. The forces that be are managing things well enough that things aren’t collapsing right now.
There is no single actually big celebrity that has picked a fediverse platform as the place to be, follow and discuss news.
And there is no killer feature that you can only get here.
The bonfire is stacked nicely, but there is no spark. For now. That could change at any moment, but it could also take a while.
Fair enough. From the other perspective, I think it’s a good thing. When the Reddit API thing happened, people were complaining, too. And focused to hold things together. So there wasn’t any time to purpusefully take a step back and guide things. Everyone was busy with admin stuff. That makes me believe when a wave hits us, also isn’t a good time to actively shape this place.
I’d like to note that while to you it may seem there is little interaction on lemmy, ie. votes and comments. I can assure you the median engagement on posts is far higher than reddit. The bottification of reddit has made it so that the few bot/troll posts get lots of engagement, and anything organic gets pretty much none.
Absolutely, given the pretty low active users (compared to large social medias anyway) there’s a lot going on here. There’s certainly not infinite new content like Reddit, but that may not be a bad thing.
There might not be infinite content, but there is enough content that I’ve had to unsubscribe from a few communities in order to keep up with my main feed. That seems like a promising sign as far as growth goes.
When I first joined Lemmy, I made a really big effort to make my interactions more positive than they were on Reddit. But the problem is that this required effort, and I am afraid over time my resolve might have eroded as the fediverse became just another online space instead of something new and distinct. This is a good reminder, but I wonder if this solution of just trying to be better is really sustainable for me or others? I’ll keep trying but we may need a more concrete change to get where we want to go.
I am curious if it’s time to evolve user engagement beyond up and downvotes. While they were relatively innovative at the time they were introduced, it’s been some years and we’re still here using the same system.
The biggest problem with voting as content curation is that people vote to communicate very different ideas and reactions in different circumstances. So people are sending the same signal to a well-researched, respectful but dissident perspective and to content that is rude, violent, hateful, incorrect etc.
This could be solved by allowing more diverse reactions. People will always want an agree or disagree button, so give them that. But we could also vote on how factual a post is, how polite a post is, how uplifting a post is, etc. We could then build algorithms that prioritize quality content instead of just the current popularity contest. Ideally I’d like multiple transparent algorithms that the user can choose from (or leave a default chosen by their instance) so that users can choose what kind of content is most valuable to them.
One concern is whether this would be too complicated for people to understand or engage with properly. I’d be curious to hear what others think: would this just devolve into upvotes and downvotes again or could this be a better system?
Votes are needed to sort the posts and decide which ones are shown at the top of your frontpage. If we add different reaction types, it’s not at all clear how each of them should affect the score. We might come up with some arbitrary numbers, but then the system will get a lot less intuitive and more complex.
Points that could improve the 1. point “Technology”:
- Make it possible to follow single users. Often I see some high quality content by users posted on communities to get drowned out by low effort posts … Though on average high quality users post to high quality communities. Make it possible to follow/subscribe to a single user, making this place more like twitter without the character limit. A similar point about singular users carrying Lemmys usefulness on the back was made by cabbage@piefed.social
- Introduce hashtags, to make it simpler to follow/ search interests. At the moment I do not see the niche communities I see on reddit thrive but broad categories that are hard to break up: Technology, Politics. While on reddit you would see multiple large active communities/bubbles related to politics with widely differing ideologies. This may be fixed by time and scale though…
- Since every user is tainted by the server they log in to, it is easy to assume the ideology because he joined server lemmy.X … make a way to hide that information, idk if that is technically compatible with lemmys design though …
I think something which would benefit the tone or ‘culture’ here would be to make it immediately and publicly clear that a negative interaction is unwelcome. Rather than get into a pointless debate with a troll, simply reply “This is a rude and/or low-effort comment which nobody wants here.” It might not make much difference to the troll but for anyone else who reads it it creates and reinforces expectations about behaviour. The same thing goes for positive contributions; make sure to comment letting people know when you value their contribution.
I wouldn’t mind if moderation was more heavyhanded too. If someone is rude and abusive, block them from posting on the community, regardless of the point they may be trying to make. In that respect I would like to see more moderators from the community
I’m sure technical things could be done to help too. Perhaps letting users switch off visibility for posts/comments that have received a certain proportion of downvotes for example.
make it immediately and publicly clear that a negative interaction is unwelcome
I couldn’t agree more strongly… I mean we kind of have that already. Everytime I see something that has a score of like -40 because of all of the downvotes, I think they got their just punishment and it’s clear that no one likes what they wrote. I think it’s superior to replying because it doesn’t give that person any reply to start an argument. Just silence and downvotes. But however we decide to do it, i think we should be very open and upfront with what’s expected behavior. And I’d like to see that happen more often.
switch off visibility for posts/comments that have received a certain proportion of downvotes
PieFed has that feature. Comments with a score less than -10 (I think) just collapse. I think we need more of those features in Lemmy and the respective apps.
Comments with a score less than -10 (I think) just collapse.
Neat idea. Would be cool if the threshold could be configured by the user too (though a recommended default value would be wise).
Oh, forget what I said. I was going to write a lenthy reply… But in fact it is configurable in the user profile. -10 is just the default value.
Being able to do this in Lemmy and configure it would be amazing. In Piefed’s implementation does it leave ‘orphaned’ responses to the hidden comment visible or does it hide those as well?
I think no one ever opened an issue for such a feature, so please go ahead and do that.
Comments help. I feel like there are a lot of lurkers who’d engage more but a lot of posts never get any sort of comments so people are less likely to read/participate and it makes the place feel more empty than it actually is.
But I think back to posting on web forums and whatnot and it was always a fairly familiar set if folks and that’s not a bad thing so long as people are engaging.
