I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
I have been noticing a drop in post/comments diversity and quantity. The diminishing users is something noticeable and sad.
We’re in times where we need to seek alternatives to big tech more than ever, and yet, people don’t seem to care :(
me too i noticed, the problem was when lemmy.ee went down and all the users scattered to other instances, or the piefed but would not engage any post on lemmy. i saw massive reduction in posts like movies, entertainment tv shows,etc. also the tankies i blocked, or the problematic accounts are likely posting themselves. i dont even come on during daytime, only a 1-3 hrs before sleep at night, because i know there will be less content overall, its probably healthier for people anyways. people are still addicted to reddit unfortunately.
Well yes, lemm.ee hosted the movies and television communtiies. You know movies and television reformed over on piefed.social? The content you’re referring to didn’t disappear. You can still access it.
and here I thought it was because I’ve blocked close to 300 users.
same, i blocked almost as much. condescending even from non- tankies will be blocked, or smartass.comments. probably those people posts the most, since the most chronically online are the controversial users/posters.
it’s not just not caring. lemmy is currently not a viable alternative for e.g. reddit (there are no active conmunities for any of mine hobbies and posting to any of those that are here doesn’t make sense - there is nobody out here who could respond to a specific question about analog photography or something similar). fediverse as a whole will never reach the momentum of old centralized social media - by design. it turns out that having many small servers with different moderation policies is great for resilience but sucks for bringing people together. i found out recently that my mastodon server is blacklisted on many of mainstream ones not because there is some bad content there but because it federates with some servers that mods somewhere else consider harmful… and so i am missing large swats of content from those.
Genuinely, why would they do that? Like does Mastodon software work differently than Lemmy’s - is there some way that someone from one of THOSE places could post content onto your instance (I dunno, CSAM? or just some trolling or piracy or something that someone considers offensive), and thereby it could come in indirectly to theirs? It makes no sense to me, at least if we were talking Lemmy, but I am interested how Mastodon differs there.
i find out alot of people i blocked are the likely posters, yea thats probably why im seeing less and less posts now.
I’m not talking about people I block (I am not exposed enough and don’t suffer enough harassment so I don’t block almost anyone)… I’m talking about about mods of the instancr that hosts people I care about suddenly blocking instance that hosts my account - not because anything we did but because they didn’t like that mods of my instance didn’t block another instance that has some weird (e.g. transfobic) content. I follow a friend and suddenly we are out of contact because some entirely unrelated drama. And that’s how fediverse works by design.
Ah yes, cancel culture. The Left always eats its own (and btw the Right does the same, eventually, but usually waits to win against the Left first).
Edit: moral purity beatings will continue until morale improves.
We have to earn it if we want it. Oftentimes someone will mention some event or trend or something that happened and being only on the Threadiverse, not also Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or X or Bluesky or even Reddit I have no idea what they are talking about - it’s not good to be too isolated.
So… bring on the downvoting I suppose, because I started checking some of those places, including Reddit. Not like daily but not never either. That’s where the content is, so where else can I go to get at that?
It is so easy to say that “something should happen”. It’s much harder to MAKE that thing actually happen.
Maybe I should admit defeat and go back to reddit… Perhaps everyone is supposed to be slaves to the shareholders
It is your choice, but if you stay you could put in some real EFFORT to make things better. e.g. people keep saying how difficult it is to make an account - and as a result now https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser exists. There is no hexbear or lemmy.ml on there, but even if theoretically there was one day, there’s specifically an option for “Good for newbies”: Newbie-friendly vs. choose your own adventure, to accommodate both desires, effectively making such controversial places as opt-in rather than having to opt-out, which requires first understanding and awareness of the details and ramifications of the decision.
Another problem is community discovery: yes entire communities are dedicated to helping with out, but how does one find out about those communities in the first place? They are not mentioned in any instance side-bar that I have seen, and rather most side-bar links to places are to expired or dead communities, e.g. Discuss.Online points to [email protected] with 3-year-old pinned posts and the most recent post was 1 year ago, plus only one more from all of 2025. But in contrast, PieFed has a new user sign-up wizard that asks the user questions and subscribes them to communities based on their interests - memes, news, whatever - plus long after that aids greatly in community discovery, e.g. with Topics, Feeds (user-shareable and customizable), and combining comments across all cross-posts.
PieFed gives me hope for the Threadiverse.
In the meantime though, if you need something specific, then yeah you have to go to wherever it is located at. I haven’t posted or even commented on Reddit, and made probably <5 votes in all of 2025, all to help promote either PieFed or Lemmy, but I do read it occasionally because that is the only place I know of where the discussions that I was looking for were taking place (other than Facebook or Xhitter that are 1000x worse). Call this defeat if you will, I call it strategic assessment of the current situation, even as we strongly push forward to make this a better place, i.e. realism.