Ask Lemmy

I'm one of the people that deleted my Reddit accounts and went to Lemmy. One of them was over or at a hundred K, karma, and it's just gone, other than the fact that a couple of the stories I wrote were reposted by news sites.

Well then I'm one of the special few. 🤓

Beyond that, there were a bunch of people watching and posting upticking Lemmy usage stats. I recall it being tens of thousands (mainly joining Lemmy.world), but those who stuck around was much smaller. Unfortunately when I joined, the messaging around Lemmy & federation was poor and there were a lot of ghost-town communities.

There was definitely a massive migration, at least seen from lemmy's side, check out the graphs at Fediverse observer. Within a two month span (May-July 2023), the number of total monthly lemmy users went from 47 000 to 1 700 000. That's a 37-fold increase in two months. The number peaked at about 1.9 million in august the same year, with about 130 000 active monthly users (up from about 1 000). In the same period, the number of online lemmy servers went from 80 to a peak at 1396 (a 17-fold increase).

In reddit terms, the migration wasn't massive, they lost on the order of a hundred thousand users. Still, over a hundred thousand users leaving a platform within a couple months is probably near-unprecedented in internet history.

Thats not true. There was. Go take a look at the usership numbers.

HOWEVER, lemmy admins, especially dot world, dot ml, were being shit at the time^1^ and poured icecold water on the whole thing. Instead of using the opportunity to build out and embrace lemmy, it pretty much sealed its fate as a "halfway project". Seriously, go look at the numbers. Lemmy had an opportunity to "be the thing" and it blew it, and it blew it because of cultural reasons. And lemmy has continue to blow it since in this same manner. Admins and mods, instance in-fighting and drama, defederation: all of them have combined to slow/ halt the growth of the project. And in network based systems like social networks, even tapping on the brakes slightly is a deathnell. I mean look at how people like @PugJesus@lemmy.world or @return2ozma@lemmy.world have been treated. The decline in usership is a direct consequence of Admins and Mods expecting to be able to use their roles for the implicit projection of their political identities and how they think people should be using social media. And it killed lemmy.

There is a secondary and also very important issue which could (have) resolved this, in that Lemmy has some serious design flaws. And the number one/ two being (it could be considered one issue) is not having the ability to migrate a profile, or a sub to another instance; alternatively, we need a way to merge/ branch/ fork/ whatever/ communities. I think Mbin was an effort to hopefully address this, but it too now lays dead.

The problem can be described as follows, and during the reddexodous, the problem came up consistently. A curious user from reddit comes to explore Lemmy after getting burned by Reddit. Maybe they really like motocross racing. So they go to look for similar communities here on lemmy and find... nothing. There is no motocross community. There might be a dirt-biking community or a motor cycle community, but its far too small to support a tiny com. And so maybe the user makes a com for this. But its just them posting, they try for a while, they burn out. Its unsustainable.

The problem here is that networked systems, and social network systems in particular, need a critical mass to be able to function as a community. Small communities end up as vestigial dead end. Likewise, each lemmy instance is built to act like an entire reddit replacement. They're built to effectively be an "entire reddit" also federated with "other reddits". So instead of one c/politics, we end up with hundreds spread out across many instances. Mods and Admins implicity use their power to filter down the modes of discourse they find acceptable. Battles are waged, people who contribute substantially burn out. The top 1% of people actually contributing (re, not typically mods/ admins) get shit on for doing the work of keeping a community alive. All of this contributes to the issue of a lack of critical mass. So it can't be said its all social. Some of it is design. But its mostly a social issue and it comes from the petty authoritarianism of moderation (mostly).

A potentially better option would be to implement a git style "fork/ pull/ branch" system for communities, potentially also with the ability to "tag" content or posts. So you have one big "news" community. And posts get tagged for the different types of news (sports, weather, political) and when there is sufficient critical mass, you could "fork" that community. However, lets say you only forked for motocross tagged sports news, and its not sufficient to have a community around, that com could get pulled back into "motor sports" and even maybe into "sports" if there isn't sufficient activity. Likewise, an instance could "clone" a com when an over zealous admin or mod goes rogue. Take the @PugJesus@lemmy.world issue. They just didn't have it in them to build up a com for like, a fourth time, after getting shit on time and again.

I genuinely think the design limitations could be addressed.

And I think the social limitations could be addressed as well. I think a system of voting based on Karma based contributions to a community, especially around rules and moderation, could very much soften/ fix many of the non-admin related social issues. Being a moderator should be considered a privilege and a duty, because it comes with the ability to very much "steer" a community. c/Politics is a great example of how poorly this can doing and how wrongly it can be done, from the 2023-2025 time period. Honestly this one moderation team is probably responsible for more destruction of the ability to grow lemmy than any other, and its principally because they engage in a kind of implicit, technocratic approach to an agenda based moderation. And users like @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world , they werent even wearing a mask about the matter. They were explicitly moderating many of the largest coms specifically for forward their own zionist perspective and agenda. And this was allowed to continue for years and did real and everlasting damage to the communities here, scars and faultlines still persisting to this day.

But that social issue is one we could deal with technically. We should introduce democracy to lemmy and the fediverse more generally. We should be able to vote about who moderates the communities we participate in and contribute to. We should be able to vote on what the rules are and how they are implemented. And those votes should be weighted by those who contribute substantially to those communities. Its utterly doable. Its something we could fix.

1: And some say, remain so to this very day.___

There's quite a few of us. I see it referenced often.

Will say I deleted all my comments and logged out of reddit as a protest, though I still browsed old.reddit.com up till they started forcing logins a month or so ago.

Only moved over to Lemmy after that.

It's not like it was officially organized. A lot of people left Digg for reddit way back, too. Same situation: escalating corporate censorship and string-pulling, people go where there's less of it.