I thought this too at first: I expected Piefed to have been the main cause. But, it turns out that Lemmy monthly active users have dropped by around 30k, while Piefed has risen to about 5k

they are separate, but not huge

https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats

https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats

Yep. Engagement drives more engagement.

I think this is it. Posting is reinforced by getting feedback on posts, both up votes and comments

Communities driven by bots should die

oh hey, i'm a comment dude. I rarely think up something worth posting, but i'll chat your fingers off. everyone has a place here.

Doing my part by trying to comment more on posts with 0 comments.

Yeah, same here honestly. Well said, lemmy needs more people here

0-comment posts should be at the bottom of the default feed for this reason. That way new users don't get scared by the awkward silence

Random instances are problematic. As others have said you might end up on one of the weird instances. More likely though... you just end up on a dead instance, take one look at the "local" feed and think that's all the content.

The random one can send you to places like hexbear.net (I've tried the randomizer, and I'm not joking it actually truly did pick that very instance for me). Have you ever visited that place? It's like being sent to a leftist MAGA rally. If I was sent there, I'd nope out and never return to the Threadiverse again.

Another place the randomizer can send you is lemmy.ml. Have you seen all the posts calling for outright murder of people living in the Western world? Well, let's just say that a mainstream non-technical normie user who is currently living in a Western world is not likely at all to feel terribly welcomed there.

all yea, new users are more likely to get confused that you can only sign up for 1 account per instace, and not 1-for all like with reddit, so they get fustrated because they couldnt understand why they made a lemmy account on world, and cant login in anorther.

As someone who's never made a post...

Thanks, WhirlpoolBrewer.

Just wait and let Reddit have another controversy

You know, there was a great blog recently that wrote about this, that now is the perfect time to popularize the fediverse. That's because as tensions with the US are rising, more people in europe are looking for alternative internet platforms to communicate over. So the fediverse can jump in here and offer itself as an alternative.

Just wait and let Reddit have another controversy and we’ll get another infusion of converts.

Just wait

this is how something like Digg swoops in and steals all the users

It’s quality and quantity. The quality has held despite a drop in users.

This is my experience too; I haven't really noticed a change. I still see about the same number of conversations and the same depth of conversation as I always have here. I was very surprised that the change in user count was so high.

I wonder if there's a committed/stable subsection of the userbase, that is mainly responsible for posts and comments, and has largely stuck around throughout? And then most of the swings in user count are from people who were less active to begin with?

I like it here

The quality has held despite a drop in users.

I feel like I'm going mental over here because this has not been my experience. The quality has always been spotty, but the last few months I've noticed more and more posts linking to awful "news" rags or no source at all. Worse, I rarely see people questioning the lack of quality information, simply gobbling it up because it aligns with their world view. Plus 70% of the comments on this platform could be generated by a classic r/subredditsimulator style bot and nothing would change; the same 5 points about AI, capitalism, and Linux are made in every thread in the exact same style every day.

And yes I'm mostly talking about news communities because Linux comms are usually fine but repetitive and while I'd love to interact with non-news content there just... isn't much being made.

It is. It's one of the reasons i've pivot back to reddit these last few months.

1. More then Reddit this place is an echo chamber for the far left anti capitalist crowd. While I don't mind a discussion, everything over simplified to EAT THE RICH was getting tiresome.

2. No company or institution is here. If I have a problem with my [insert device or appliance here] chances are good someone on reddit will reply and 50/50 there is a useable answer somewhere. Here it just stays silent. Or you get the anti capitalist reply that everything is fucked and we should just eat the rich.

3. There are no real gaming or device or brand communities. Want to ask something about modding game x? Not here. Want to hook up with other players of game y? Not here. Want to know how to fix your [household appliance here]? Not here..Have a problem with mainboard from brand z? Not here.

4. When you ask something here about Linux or any other gpl software the answer often times boils down to RTFMI! (I= idiot) That also happens on reddit to be honest. But here it's just more extreme. And I know I'm an idiot. That's why I asked. I'm too stupid can someone please explain.

5. Where the fuck is LJDawson. Sync is dead it seems.

And yes. Reddit more and more feels like an AI test site. For example the AITA posts are getting more and more out of this world. They are unbelievable, that's just for clicks. So the enshittification is not slowly but very fast becoming a problem and within a few months it will be another youtube, unusable. But for now... It's the best we have.

the sudden rise in 2025 early on, was the massive purges reddit was doing, banning almost anyone left and right, and hitting all thier accounts at once. when they usually never try to multi-ban you before. they did take thier foot of the pedal though, because they realized they were banning too much, lowering thier faux engagements with bots. reddit switched to more insidious bannings in the background.

Yeah I'm turned off from interacting. I got banned (I'm guessing since I can't even reply to people) from world news when Maduro was kidnapped and I mentioned that my Venezuelan friends were hopeful. As this was scary but good news. And my god how I got flamed. Theres no room for conversation I got tagged, replied to, people made fun of me and that's it. I wasn't even allowed to interact anymore so it looks like I just said something and ran away.

I'm not even close to center, yet it's all or nothing with politics here. It's seriously become reddit 2.0. Pathetic.

The info hygiene here is really bad. I thought people here would be better about finding well sourced informative articles to talk about but its the same news slop that dominates other platforms. This is a discussion forum so posts should have something worth discussing. Spamming the same trump action over and over doesnt create any discussion.

Scrolling through the news community is so depressing there is no comments because everyone is thinking "what do you want me to say its bad its awful"

I don't like how broad Lemmy assumes default interests are, though then again showing everyone the average interests may statistically be the best initialization point.

Every time I'm shown a community I'm totally uninterested I make sure to go in and block it from my feed. Likewise with aggressive or otherwise pathological users. It gets better.

why beat yourself up. you know good content won't be rewarded or seen.

only the ragebait. the internet is not information driven anymore, it's dopmine driven.

it's the super highway of rage and hate.

I get bummed that the political stuff has really taken over. I find myself spending more and more time just working on my own content and answering people's comments than browsing the other communities. It's draining scrolling past so much stuff to find the fun bits, but I don't want to just block it and not see how our platform is developing as a whole.

A lot of communities have rules that posts need to be titled the same as the source article, which, while it prevents editorializing, it also brings all those ragebait headlines here. Plus I'd like to see Lemmy users' opinions moreso than an article I could just read myself. I'd probably prefer more of the political post to be thoughts/feelings and then discussion is backed up by decent articles rather than an article being the post and comments are just all steered back to a single, often inflammatory article.

If half our content is just reposted mainstream media, why would one expect our comment sections to look any different than the comment sections of those mainstream sites?

the only way to not have an echo chamber where people vote with their emotions is to have an enlightened gnosticism user-base which is obviously very difficult to get and nurture but i'm trying :)

the best way to do this is to cultivate an atmosphere of discussion and in-depth thought regularly, which you can do by engaging with these discussions and seeking enlightenment yourself.

This is it. People are leaving because there are problems and not enough resources to fix them. Because that's dEcEnTtAlZaTioN.

That's why i run the !mars@discuss.tchncs.de community. It's a very niche interest topic but i found no other good-quality community discussing martian settlement so i made my own. And i figure if the quality is good enough, it might be enough to bring in other users from other platforms simply to have good discussions.

I have checked the mars subreddit on Reddit but it's full of idiots and people who are just generic naysayers or people who saw 1 youtube video and now think they're experts or sth.

I have been using "social software" for decades now. In the early 90s I ran a single line BBS networked across Canada and USA (every modem in the network called the nearest modem and we shared posts this way). I went to friendster (before that "makeoutclub", if anyone remembers that thing), myspace, then piled onto facebook like everyone else.

The only thing that seems to make a social media tool relevant is when a critical mass of young people, in that 15-30 demo, decides that it's time to adopt a new social media platform. This has been because they want a place away from their families, but there's also all kinds of memetic reasons behind it that have nothing to do with function.

Young people need to flood to open source, distributed networks like Lemmy. I don't mean to be a token old guy and speak poorly of an entire generation, but I'm not impressed with the embracing of Tiktok, Facebook and reddit. I find it hard to take anyone with a cause who inhabits these spaces seriously. I told my niece about why Facebook sucks, and she said "that's so boomer." Like, wtf?

So yeah. Young people, stop using twitter and all that junk. I promise if you come here I'll go somewhere else.