this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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I know. Still it's engagement farming and posting under false pretenses. And that's my parallel to Reddit. A platform could be about the users and let them talk to each other in genuine conversations. Or there is some manipulation going on. Mixed with the users are other people who post for ulterior motives. And they even act differently than regular users. You usually won't get an answer from them in the comments. And they don't post a tech article because they read it and it seemed interesting to them, but because they pick more or less 10 things each day that seem about right and just post those. Obviously lowering the quality of the feed, since other people had been posting things which were somehow connected to them.
I don't think that's my experience any more. My feed now has more things than I can read in a day. And I've even started unsubscribing from noisy communities. In reality I'm in desparate need for comments. I sometimes post 6 comments or so a day and sometimes I don't get a single reply. And then those places feel kind of empty. (empty of human conversation.) Yet what we do isn't adding more comments, but mainly dumping more of those posts, and that's somehow supposed to help.
And I don't think it does, really. Prime example is lemmit.online which pulls in lots of Reddit content. All with zero upvotes, zero comments. If you fall prey to that and comment, you just waste your time. No one is going to interact with you. Then we have the high frequency posters in the tech communities and it's mixed with them. Some articles are noise, get low engagement, have been posted 6h earlier, some are good. They're almost constantly lower quality though, than what other people post with a summary attached and it somehow has some soul and is not just random uninteresting news like in 500 other places.
And then we have places like this. the piefed.social communities have kind of all started strong. LadyButterfly's posts have long and nuanced threads under them with genuine conversation. And I'd love to do away with all the noise and read just that kind of thing. And I get nuanced answers on other piefed.social communities as well. But... now people say "Here, you need more content", come here with their garbage truck full of ideas and posts they picked up at other places and dump them over my head. Turning it effectively into the same thing as the other place.
And frankly speaking, I thing that drags it down. I've subscribed to all new communities because they were kind of higher quality. It wasn't as much posts, but good ones. Now they're augmented and I can tell the added ones have less interesting titles, less and shorter comments underneath. I think all the garbage truck approach does is even things out and adapt it to the same questionable quality as all the other communities.
And it changes the ratio and now I'm even more unlikely to get a reply once I comment underneath a news article. (It's a bit different with AskLemmy type stuff.)
(Please take what I say with a grain of salt, it's an opinion piece focused on negative things, so my words have an overly negative tone.)
But I really wish there were some communities that were less "enhanced" for growth, had low frequency but just high quality content, and lots of conversation. This is working against that in my opinion.
Copy pasting my answer to your other comment in the [email protected] thread as that already addresses a few points.
Beehaw wanted to have this kind of very curated approach, their communities aren't much more active that on non-curated instances.
If you want very in-depth conversation, maybe try to revive [email protected] ? It seems to fit your requirements.
You talk about original content, it is not contradictory to have both OC and reposts from elsewhere. A thing to keep in mind is that people posting OC will only do so if they get enough reactions on it. [email protected] used to be quite busy when it first started, but the main mod who used to post a lot hasn't been active for a year, probably because there weren't enough people here to justify posting here on top of Reddit.
It depends. I post about things I care about. My latest post was about a new movie coming, there were 68 comments: https://piefed.zip/post/153138 , and it was a legit conversation, even though it was a repost from a new movie poster. Reposting existing content isn't contradictory with having genuine conversations.
It's a multi factor issue.
To have genuine conversations on a certain topic, there need to be at least a minimum userbase interested in that topic.
With 45k MAU, we can talk about generic topics. The more userbase we get, the more niche topics we can have.
When I talk about Lemmy on Reddit to try to get those additional users we need, the first issues they have with the platform is the political stances of the devs, and the fact that a lot of communities are still hosted on the hosted instance (you've read cm0002 comment, so you're aware).
Lemmy has a bad reputation due to this, and while this will remain true, this will prevent us from getting more people. That's also why Piefed raises a lot of hopes.
Last potential example of growth: a niche community moving.
Db0 had a large influx of users (625) following a post on Reddit about their instance: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37167077
[email protected] is mostly reposts with news about piracy, not a lot of OC content, but it being out of Reddit is enough for people to use it.
Now about this comment
Are you referring to the community we're in? As we discussed before, a question can be a good conversation starter among other people, even if the person posting it isn't that involved in the follow up conversation. Of course, if it's a personal question or asking for advice, that's a different story, but even then other people might be in the same situation and chime in about their experience.
If it's another community, I'm curious as well.
I had a look at your latest comments. Seems like a few of them that never got any reply were on [email protected], which usually has a lower engagement ratio than the LW version. Maybe comment mostly on the LW one for now? Not ideal for decentralization, but perfect is the enemy of the good, and that way you're more likely to get answers.
You're lucky in that sense. I'm not that interested in tech, memes or news, so as you can guess the relevant content for me here is limited. Which is why I would like other people to join as well. [email protected] is basically someone else and me posting, it says a lot about how low the interest is in other topics on the platform as a whole.
My point is more, we've been trying to do it this way for like one and a half year now. And I think it doesn't work. As we can see in the numbers, the approach we do, leads to stagnation. It's been pretty much 45k users all the time and it never grows. That's likely because we do things like we do. My speculation is, if we'd do it differently and had a substantially better atmosphere, more comments, less news and less of the same content from other platforms, we'd start to grow. Instead we follow the old approach and we know that makes us flat out at 45k users, which isn't great. I mean we've tried it for quite some time now. If you ask me, I think it's clear it's just not going to do it.
Yes, I like that. I wish the Piefed communities were to pick up on that approach. I think it's excellent and often leads to above average quality.
I often feel the content in the high volume quality drowns out the other stuff. For example I've completely missed the post in the Fedigrow community you linked, because other things showed up for me and buried it.
I know, that's the reason why I complain here in one of the piefed.social communities. I wish we'd now do it better than Lemmy and get this somewhere. That's why it kind of pains me to see we just import AskLemmy content and don't just dare to be better and have confidence in us.
I know. You're quite the opposite from what I'm talking about. You're everywhere in the comments, giving advice, connecting things. And I always know if it's you, I can write something and it has a 100% chance of leading somewhere and I'll get to learn something or hear a different perspective. With the high-volume posters (and not commenters) I'd say it's like a 5% chance it leads somewhere.
Yeah I know. But I feel this place shouldn't be full of conversation starters. The important thing are the conversations themselves. And people like it if they're genuine. Which isn't entirely the case here.
I'm not super lucky with that. Most of that content isn't really relevant to me. And there isn't really a way to tell which is which. And people mix stuff. There's the people who post for example interesting articles about AI. And then there's 5 other people who add 15 random articles of the day to it. Hence the reason why I complain here. It's not useful activity. The relevant content for me here is limited as well. Plus people bury it so it's even harder for me to dig it out. And that takes away from it. I'd rather have just the interesting articles. Or a way to seperate them.
Replying here for your edit
Beehaw probably went a bit too far by defederating LW and SJW. A lot of users on LW and SJW are valuable people, cutting from all of them at the same time seems a bit much.
You said somewhere else that you use New as a filter. Have you tried using Piefed feeds to be able to track different topics separately? I have a "movies" feed, a "privacy one", and that allows me to keep an eye on everything posted on that topic without having that content buried in the Subscribed feed.
It's also important to keep in mind that we can't expect a single poster (LadyButterFly) to keep this community active by herself. I understand that cm0002 posts aren't ideal, but at the same time they allow to relieve a bit of the pressure that a single poster has.
I am the only poster on [email protected] . It makes me question regularly if it's still worth it to post there, as it seems I'm the only person on the whole platform bothered enough to post about that topic. "Shouting in the void" is a regular issue for single poster on a community (https://lemmy.zip/post/14347368 ), and I would prefer to avoid that to LadyButterFly.
If you are interested in raising the quality of this community, could you maybe try to post here once a day? Then we could probably consider discussing with other people whether we should change the stance against questions repost. If not, it would probably be better to keep them.
We probably all would, but that's where the crowdsourced voting is supposed to help. If you want to have a more active approach, you can try to post on [email protected] to see if other people would like to start a "curated technology" community with you, and see if there is interest?
Thanks for your perspective.
Yes, I think all our internal drama, politics and how it's handled in the software leaves a lot of room for improvement. We should try to cut down on that. It'd help new users and people who just don't want to talk and not be bothered with all the quirks.
That's indeed an issue. I know how it feels and it takes a special type or person to do it to begin with.
I'm sorry, I can't. I already do this for other communities. I'm also active in other areas, I contribute to PieFed development... And there's only so much I can do in a day.
Plus as I said I'm opposed to the concept. I think it was necessary in the beginning, but now our focus needs to change. I post 100% genuine questions which come from my heart only. And only articles I read and I think other people want to read specifically that article instead of the 5000 other ones in some feeds on the internet, because we really have enough of a flood of information. I don't post for engagement. Not even in this case (any more).
That'd be a nice idea. I would have liked the new piefed.social communities to be exactly that. But if it were me, I'd ban people who post and don't comment. Or once I see they didn't actually read what they copied. Interesting idea, though, I'll think about it.
That makes sense. I suggest to put that topic on hold for now, and revisit it once we have more than 2 active posters in this community.
Sure, good luck with that idea!
Interestingly enough, if you look a bit back there was actually an influx, from 45k to 55k, from March to April, mostly when people were looking for non-US alternatives
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120
Since then, we've been back to the 45k numbers. If we ask people why they left the platform (I've did it a few people who were announcing they were leaving), the main issue they have is not even the lack or saturation of content, but the duplication. With many communities being the same, but on different servers, it's difficult for a new comer to know where to find posts and content to read, without even talking about replying.
As you're aware, that's something that Piefed has corrected, so that could help a lot with adoption.
I suggested it in another comment, but feel free to try to influence communities into having a better atmosphere. Report comments or posts you think are inappropriate. The general issue you might face is either mods not willing to change their rules, or not willing to share powers. My personal stance on it is that we are actually lacking moderators. It's a tiring job, and we currently don't have the best tools to do it. Again, another topic where Piefed can help.
Are there any specific questions you wouldn't like to be asked? I keep an eye on the community, and I rarely see anything that looks like it should be removed.
Also, this community doesn't have that much volume compared to the LW and lemmy.ml versions, so it's probably not too bad for now. We can always revisit later if we see it's becoming too much.
We could probably also benefit from a "Hide post" feature, the way Lemmy does it. It could help people customizing their experience: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/762
Thank you for your kind words!
I agree a lot with @[email protected]
They said:
And I know, we occasionally climb above 50k. But it's never lasting. After that we drop back to 45k and it's always been that way. I think it's because people come here to see, and find out we're not that attractive and then they leave again. And we don't really address the issue with the community. We still add posts instead like we always have. The community all the while is the same, and that'd be the one thing that'd make the people stick around.
I think Piefed is now our one opportunity to try a different approach. Cut down on frequency, up the quality. Foster the community, tone down the detrimental old behaviour like adding noise. It didn't do us any good. I think that's the main takeway from the MAU numbers. 10k people came here and we lost them. We'd need to change our approach if we ever want to change that around. I'll just keep being this way if we don't.
On top of everything I said above (comments fragmentation, moderation tools), there is one last aspect: text based forum aren't that popular anymore.
Most people nowadays are used to consume short videos for entertainment. Reading comments on a forum isn't that common, especially among the younger generations.
Reddit numbers are always overestimated, but even they suffer from the same issue.
Discuit has a nicer atmosphere, but it only has 174 weekly commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/FHtQTJYj
https://tildes.net/ is a very slow pace platform, a few posts on the front page have less than 10 comments. There might not be that many users interested in this type of format.
Thanks for all the nuanced perspective and information from your side.
I think I disagree with that. I have some pretty active Discord servers, and even some singular PC magazine websites with attached forums which are quite alive and have some nice internet culture. And some are more active than Lemmy underneath a certain article. I think it's still very much in demand.
Let me sum up my main point a bit differently: I think the retention rate showcases a big issue with us. And it might no even be the network effect. Thousands of people actively volunteer, sign up and have a look around. But we're not what they're looking for and we lose them. Again and again, and that tells us something. Also 5k or 10k is kind of a big number for us, so there's a lot we don't do right.
And who do we cater to? Is it the people who want a lot of posts each day? Because I think we can't even attract them. They're better off on Reddit. It'll always have more content than we do. And then there are people who come here for different motives. And those are the only(!) ones we could attract. Idk, with genuine conversation, which Reddit is lacking. A better atmosphere. Less bots and corporate decisions. Being refreshingly different. Whatever they're looking for, we absolutely need to focus on that.
The "more posts" part is part of the equation, but I think after years now we need to take a step back and re-evaluate. More posts tries to cater to the first group, which we're never able to attract, since they're better off on Reddit. So it's kind of a waste, plus we've already done it. Now (if I'm right) we need to let go and focus on the people who we could attract. And I bet a lot of them come here well aware that Lemmy isn't as big. That's not what they're looking for... But we kind of fail them. And that should be our main focus. The other thing (just more posts) obscures the problem.
It's really a multi-faceted issue. And not just one thing. But I think this distinction is really important. One vision is kind of a worse copycat of Reddit, focused on quantity first, the other one is a genuine platform with a nice culture, and everyone is focused on that. And I bet the people leaving right now are looking for the latter. And since they don't stay, we're obviously not that at all.
I'll let you reply the other comment where I mention "shouting in the void" issue for single posters, we can probably resume there
https://piefed.zip/post/154573#comment_244487