The groundwork made in the apps, frontends, tools and instances is finally paying off. The masses are noticing the value!
Yes I’m here so expect this place to be filled with awful soon.
I can’t go back to Reddit. Bots, bots as far as the eyes can see.
Welcome!
So, back in 2023 I discovered Lemmy, made an account, but after a bit quit again because I never checked it. I recently made an account again since Reddit has started getting really bad (tons of bots, tons of conservative posts on r/popular after the election, etc) and only recently started actually using said account.
I think using Lemmy requires a different strategy than using Reddit. On Reddit, if you wanted to subscribe to, say, a Linux discussion group, you would just go to r/linux, and there would be just 4 more even more niche subs you could join, like r/linux4noobs. On Lemmy, their are 6 main Linux groups and 14 niche Linux groups across several instances.
The first time I joined Lemmy, I subscribed to just one of these groups like I would on Reddit, but my feed didn’t have enough content so eventually I got bored. The second time around, I created I’ve just subscribed broadly to every community related to my interests, so I if I was interested in Linux I would subscribe to all 20 Linux communities.
I then hypothesized that if I did this for every interest (ex, say my only interests were Linux & Plants, or something), that discussion of topics that was more popular on Lemmy, like Linux, would drown out my other interests. To avoid this being an issue, I made 3 accounts for 3 feeds
- My “general account” in which I subscribed to nearly every top sub, so if I found I didn’t care about a certain topic on All I could unsubscribe instead of outright blocking those communities (that’s this account)
- My “interests account” in which I subscribed to my personalized interests like privacy or environment
- My “fun account” in which I subscribed to just meme, gaming, cats, etc communities
That’s all just me though, how do y’all use Lemmy differently from Reddit? I’m curious as to how I can git gud at Lemmy lol
I just always sort by all and block instances / communities I don’t want to see
that discussion of topics that was more popular on Lemmy, like Linux, would drown out my other interests
I certainly run into that. I don’t think I have the energy for multiple accounts, but I wish I could ask for roughly equal numbers of posts from my top 4-5 communities, instead of News + WorldNews dominating everything.
To avoid this being an issue, I made 3 accounts for 3 feeds
Similar approach here. Works okay, but personal feeds would be better
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In 2010 I was part of the Great Digg Exodus, and now in 2025 I’m part of the Reddit->Lemmy migration. Truly I’m part of the crowd.
You’re so cool keeping up with the trends 😎
More like I have no personality and just go with the flow 😜
I get its a bit of self deprecating humor but in seriousness it shows the exact opposite IMO. Going with the flow would be continuing to consume reddit slop no matter how awful the website gets, no matter how much content is baked by a bot, no matter how many more ads they show you just to comment or post.
“Lol I know its getting shittier but im addicted and unwilling to change my habits or show some backbone. Im sorry for even considering a 12 hour protest, Please daddy just let me continue posting I promise ill be good little content monkey and keep your shareholder numbers up this quarter. I don’t miss my old phone app for reddit at all…”
wipes away a single suppressed tear for the death of boost/sync/whatever and their own lost dignity when spez isn’t looking
Seriously good on you for being a trendsetter with a basic shred of self respect who knows when to tap out of a bad/abusive situation, Echofox. I wonder just how much more the water needs to be boiled before even the joke characature above gets tired of reddits BS. Maybe never.
Hey thanks, I do lean a little hard on the self deprecating humor sometimes.
Reddit has been getting worse for years, and the comments there are so adversarial and insincere.
Users definitely can get sick of bad sites, what happened with X shows that. Their user base is a small fraction of what it was a few years ago.
I’m definitely liking it here though!
Oh baby, if you wanted to get away from adversarial sarcastic comments you sure came to the right place.
Internet is going to be internet, but this place is like 10% as adversarial as reddit from my experience so far. I haven’t even had anybody DM me to end myself yet. At reddit I got those for saying my favorite game was Total Annihilation.
If you want to be unique start using friendica lmao
Hopefully they are active and interesting people.
I am not interesting
Proud to be one of the active user 🫡
Sounds like good news. Only heard about this place start of this year so glad to be in the numbers
Welcome!
You’re welcome.
Slow and steady wins the race.
I find this true of so few actual races.
Counter-point: he won the race by being the fastest runner. But I grant you it took him awhile to decide to run the race relative to average life spans and the age of the likely typical marathon runner, so we can just call it a draw.
Edit: Okay, I read the rest of the article. Quite a ride.
Wow. Absolute legend
Upon being awarded the prize of A$10,000 (equivalent to $36,011 in 2022), Young said that he did not know there was a prize and that he felt bad accepting it, as each of the other five runners who finished had worked as hard as he did—so he gave A$3,000 to 41-year-old Joe Record and A$4,000 to the other runners, keeping only A$3,000 for himself.[2] Despite attempting the event again in later years, Young was unable to repeat this performance or claim victory again.[8]
It was our evolutionary success as a human animal. We were never the fastest, strongest or even the most numerous at the start. But working slowly as a cooperative community, we conquered every liveable space on the planet. We can do the same online.
Persistence hunting corporate dominance, I can dig it
Someone fetch me my spear
And my axe!
Thank you for providing this informative graph! I will be saving it for future use.
That’s great to see we’re spiking a bit recently just not as much as the days of the Reddit api shutdown situation.
You could use this graph to investigate the incidents that have occurred with the user spikes.
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Wonder what happened in ~June of 2024. Summer signups?
That incident completely flew under my radar. Unbelievable that Reddit did that.
Why’d they get banned? That insta girl take issue with her image being sullied? The other general snark subs are still around.
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Nice graph
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Lemmy determine active users differently now, as compared to then? I recall a .world post about that, contemporaneous to when active users spiked. In any case, I appreciate the new folks!
That’s true, originally only users that posted or commented were counted as active. Then they changed it to count users who had voted as active, even if they didn’t post or comment.
But I believe that change occured almost one year ago, in March 2024. You can see a big spike of active users at that time. Starting this January we’ve seen some really nice organic growth, although it’s not nearly to the level of the API exodus. We still need more users, but it’s really encouraging to see some solid growth after over a year of stagnation/slow decline.
Yes, back then you had to comment or post. These days it also counts users who vote within the timeframe as active users.
I’ve always wondered why active-but-silent didn’t count. If you bother to login, you’re active to me.
Logins aren’t federated, so for counting active users in a community votes, comments, posts is about all you have.
I always thought Reddit was an exception and I wouldve drode it forever if they didn’t auto perm ban me “ban evasion,” and deny my appeals. I just believed there was no other option and had been arguing there for 15 years and didn’t want to leave lol. Sure like 25% of my comments and 50% of my posts would get removed for not following some arbitrary rules perfectly, but it just felt like the tradeoff of a big forum. (At least here when mods only can post it’s clear, on reddit you could drop a post for a game release and get it removed so a mod can post it)
Every negative change came with some good, like oh they banned some free speech but they also got rid of jailbait/creepshots so good? Except one of those should.ve never been there for so long and on the front page in the first place. It’s like they sneak in the terrible decisions they want to make with the obvious ones that should’ve been made long ago.
what you mean all around the GLOBE there are only 47k active users? How does it compare to Reddit? I am an ex redditor. Banned for a comment in unpopular opinion sub lol
Suprisingly better for actual conversation, reddit would be like screaming into a void sometimes, any topic you’re interested in if it doesn’t already have a community, make one from a popular general purpose instance and start posting, people will reply and see it, and it’ll potentially hit the front page equivalent letting more eyes see it. Reddit was no longer showing me interesting niches, I had to already know about it to find a sub and get it on my feed, so many interesting subs I only learned about because I got into the hobby outside of reddit have more potential to be visible on the main feed here. Reddit algorithm right now is a roller coaster, this feels more like reading a newsletter, old reddit.
You know how on reddit people comment to tell you to google, argue, etc. Here they just answer the question or move on, it’s wonderful.
Like, they’ll answer everything but your question, tell you how you’re wrong and should do something else entirely, here they read your question all the way and actually answer it
Yeah i know what you mean. I never thought about it. Thanks. I am fairly new on lemmy. I sure do miss more memes on reddit but damn you are right.
Well, in your case, even if Reddit has 8 billions users, you still wouldn’t be able to access it, so why worry?
I can access, I believe I can create another account. I just feel like lemmy is more like me people
Users are more active as the platform is smaller, interactions are more engaging
So in reddit not engaging? What users do there then?
Yes I think what everyone is trying to say but can’t quite put into words is that reddit is an order of magnitude larger than lemmy like a massive big box store is an order of magnitude larger than a corner mart & cafe and yet nobody would stand in the corner mart & cafe and conclude it felt less human in comparison to the big box store because so many less people passed through its doors.
The environment of a big box store is steeped in distrust and it is a space where spontaneous interaction is codified with deep suspicion.
A local mart or cafe on the otherhand is more likely to suggest trustful grounds to interact that may provide bridges over the roaring rivers of first impression.
That is a difference that is invisible if you are primarily looking through the lens of large statistical noisey trends, but no mistake that unmistakable difference between “big box store” and “cornermart & cafe” is a multiplicative factor acting on every moment and is of the type that can nullify extreme powerbalances by making the entire paradigm that carefully precipitated it irrelevant in a flash.
Mostly lurk, as there’s no point commenting in a thread with 5000 comments
ah yes, true dat, I happened to comment sometime ago on some posts like related to luigi mangione as one of the first ones, and got upvoted like 20k times and got awards and such. Good times good times.
I don’t know how many users reddit has, but it is a lot more than lemmy. Lemmy is quite small in terms of number of users.
But I think focusing on relative numbers of users is a mistake. Forty thousand people is still a lot of people. And we can see that it is enough people to create a vibrant community with a steady stream of good content and conversations. So the fact that it is small compared to other social media is not really relevant, in my opinion. Having a thousand times more users doesn’t make things a thousand times better - that’s for sure.
(That said, I do think its worth noting if the number of users is going up or down… because if there was a significant downward trend, that would be a bad sign.)
Well there’s still more niche topics that are hard to sustain a community for on Lemmy due to the lack of population. I’d like to see that grow. Hopefully in time.
I came back to Lemmy as in trying to avoid American corporation owned social networks. Reddit falls into that category.
Welcome back!
I have been temporarily banned from a new account I made a while ago to return after my permabanned last summer. I am seriously thinking of fully ditching reddit save for a few special nerdy interests (and porn).
We have porn! But yeah we need more population growth for niche and local communities to really flourish.
That’s why I’m here.
Welcome!
Yeah, I can tell; I’ve had a sharp uptick in people picking arguments and then sticking their fingers in their ears.
No you haven’t!
I mean, if they drop a hot fucking meme like this every time I wouldn’t even be mad.
I’ve logged back onto here for the first time in ages because I do not trust big tech.
Good :) welcome back!
because I do not trust big tech.
Dude, same. I mean, I get that’s why many are here, but it’s just gotten so much worse lately.
Starting to build my first Linux machine to use as my daily driver laptop. Been meaning to get into it all for years, but Microsoft’s constant shenanigans as of late and everyone on Lemmy really pushed me to take the plunge.
It’ll be a “baby’s first project” of a used Thinkpad running on Mint, but it’s a start to getting out from under these corporate fucks. Every step away is a step to which I’m not planning to return.
Welcome back
Welcome back!
