It seems strange that these two curves so closely match eachother in shape.

When 6month active users drop that means 6 months ago a user stopped using the platform.
When monthly active users drop that means a month ago a user stopped using the platform.
So this would suggest that there is a correlation between user attrition 6 months ago and last month.

…I am drifting away from Lemmy myself.

Political communities are echo chambers like Reddit, in a different color. Discussing tech or helping others is better, but still feels like talking in circles.

Wholesome subs like /c/SuperBowl are sublime, but I mostly lurk there.

Information hygiene is awful. Big subs upvote tabloids and Tweets to the sky, as long as they align with their beliefs. I just saw a discussion on a not-obviously AI generated photo with the community sentiment of “misinformation? Who cares. It’s a pro-lefty meme, so spread it.”

Anyway, all this scrolling and impulse commenting eats time. I get the same feeling of shouting into a black hole that I get on corporate social media.

Much of this is my fault, though.

I have several niches I intend to make original posts for, but never do.

It’s somewhere in the giant pile of my IRL executive dysfunction :’(

While (I think) I totally understand what you are saying here…

… Yeah I’m honestly fine with lemmy just being more or less a tiny cluster of neo forums.

I like the cozy.

At the same time… from I guess a less selfish perspective… yeah, this is the exact time an alternative to Reddit and other corpo social media needs to be popularized.

But, somewhat alleviating myself from that… I don’t really know anybody that I could ‘word of mouth’ spread lemmy to, that I haven’t already.

And I’m too crippled to put stickers on really anything outside my own apartment, lol.

Every person that keeps saying it’s good that there is no one here sounds like scrooge in my head going,
“Good, all to decrease the surplus population”

I’m feeling very burnt out. Lemmy is kinda an endless stream of political doom and gloom. For context, I’m in the US and already stressed out by our political situation. But I don’t come here to see more doom and gloom. It’s getting to the point where I think I need to get off for my mental health.

Then there are all the people who if you don’t agree exactly with their opinion they downvote you to hell. You have left leaning politics but not my flavor of left? Downvote! You hate enshitification and big tech privacy practices, but you use a single piece of software that isn’t FOSS? Downvote!

It’s so exhausting. I absolutely hate Reddit but I miss going on there and just laughing at how someone’s TV is too high. I miss laughing at how some restaurant serves food of shovels instead of plates.

And that’s not even getting into the lack of content. That part I understand requires users like myself to be as active as possible. But it’s hard being active when I feel so burnt out from the other stuff here.

Tbh, idk if these issues are specific to Lemmy or just the internet as a whole. I can only speak to the slice of the internet I find myself in. But I just wanna see people that are excited about things: photography, 3d printing, weird keyboards, etc. And that exists here, but it’s drowned out by all the doom and gloom.

I agree! There is not enough people here

Goes to ‘All --> New,’ here we go again…

Come on everyone, let’s do our part. The only way to get less doom and gloom on the main page is to engage with the stuff you want early. Like it was mentioned by others, that primarily means comments not just upvotes

I’ve always been more of a lurker/commenter than a poster, but posters are what Lemmy needs if we want more users to come. People need to want to come to Lemmy for content.

In my experience, the best poster on the platform is the person making the comics on /c/unix_surrealism, in that sometimes I find myself wanting to check the comm to see if there is anything new.

And this will be disagreed with heavily, but the second best posters are the memers at Hexbear. I just think they make the funniest leftist memes (so political content, sorry people who are tired of politics), and they’re the only instance that actually has a site culture, with their own in-jokes and history/lore.

When Reddit was young, that was a big part of it: Posts that went viral among the community and became in-jokes/lore. Comment chains (as much as I grew to hate them). And original ideas for content (AMA, TIL, AITA, etc.). There was a kind of culture to the site (that’s mostly been diluted now).

That said. I like Lemmy perfectly fine at the size it is, even if it doesn’t fully replace Reddit. Though it’s concerning to see it declining.

Hot take: the biggest issue is actually ever entering a community and seeing zero comments. Most reddit addiction stems from wanting to read comments, so I think people should add a comment to something if they’re upvoting and they see that the thread has zero comments.

Nothing eliminates enthusiasm like seeing 0 comments on every post in a community, especially if that community is driven by bots.

To the user mines!

I actually don’t mind a smaller community of more intelligent people. Too much riff raff and the quality degrades.

I’m doing my part. I can’t stop making communities and having debates.

Tell your musician friends to find me here:

https://lemmy.world/c/IndepthIndie

Actually, you know what? I’ll give a free guitar lesson to the first 10 people to make a post in that group.

I completely agree. To attract more users, you not only have to create higher quality content, but also content that elicits an emotional response from users, as they well know at Reddit. On Reddit, it is bots that are constantly posting controversial topics. On Lemmy, fortunately, it is humans who can participate in more controversial discussions to attract more humans. For me, as a Linux and Firefox user, controversial discussions include comparisons between Windows vs Linux, Firefox vs Chrome, etc.

This is quite concerning indeed.

We should start by being better at retaining what we already have.

Every person is valuable now.

This site is seemingly for hardcore left-leaning people. Center and right wing are censored, banned, without violating rules, just like reddit mods. So it’s no wonder people are leaving.