this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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Fediverse memes
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Memes about the Fediverse.
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Lemmy doesnt have any proper discussions though. Its just memes. Personally i have to check reddit to actually get proper content to learn something from.
But still, Lemmy is at least not big tech!
There are great discussions here.
The problem is that we have too few users, so most topics you'd want to discuss aren't going to have existing thriving communities to chat with you. All of Lemmy put together is dwarfed by single reddit communities. for niche topics.
I'm not complaining, because the barriers to entry and lack of popular awareness keeps the user base here smarter and more interesting to talk to. But for the good of humanity I do think we need open tech like this to get widespread adoption, and it's going to take a long time. Reddit had almost two decades' head start.
And looking at a timeline, at this point in Reddit's history a few years in, the most popular subs with the early adopters were politics, programming, abe science. Sounds familiar, lol.
I saw bluesky take off and get millions of users right away. Appearently they have 38 million users now.
I guess advertising works... :p
It is the barrier to entry - most people probably stopped on "choose a server".
I did a few times before I figured it out.
The concept of Lemmy being servers was easy for me to understand (thanks MMOs, I guess?), but having to jump through hoops to actually sign up with many of them was the primary difficulty. Nobody wants to have to write an essay on why they should be accepted to a server.
I wrote one sentence
Bluesky isn't open tech. The masses will flock to low barrier to entry walled gardens. They can have them.
It's sobering to consider how tiny Lemmy is. Both the Linus Tech Tips forum and the Crackberry forum are bigger and more active than all of Lemmy together.
Back in the day, even something niche as the Blitzbasic forum was bigger than Lemmy is now.
It's probably a good thing too, since both performance and in the way moderation needs to be done on Lemmy is so inefficient that it's right now already at the point where instances are getting closed down because they can't handle the workload and cost.
Lemmy being small works for me. Reddit is horrendously toxic now, so I'll occasionally lurk, but refuse to interact with it. I don't want Lemmy to become Reddit.
Not true! you can get into arguments with random people about Marxism AND Linux!
...and Star Trek.
that's what .ml stands for, right?
100% accurate
You can even meow at a transfem :3
Meow
Meow
Woof
Mrrrp!
I don't think there's anywhere online where Marxists with arguments can't find you
Honestly I like the conversations here, it reminds me a lot of the old internet.
FLAMEWAR
WAHHHGARBL
There are serious discusions, you just have to find them. Mostly news and technology articles, but there could be more.
The thing is it's super hard to start a niche community due to a fundamental issue with federation. Which instance do you start the community in, and how do people find it?
With reddit you just needed /r/[obscurehobby]. In lemmy you need to check all the instances, and you may find a different versions of the community, but all of them are dead with like 2 posts from 8 months ago because they never got the critical mass needed to catch on because the community was split.
Reddit also has the problem that if someone makes a community and starts moderating like a dinghole, it can be hard to get people to join one with better moderation.
With federation you can have the same name multiple times, so when people search "[hobby]" they can see all of them.
Then you could have a merged view of all the [hobby] from different sources, and if a mod who arbitrarily decides to interpret the rules unfairly or err on the side of permanent bans without discussion, warnings, or recourse, you can at least still interact with other [hobby].
https://piefed.social/communities
Piefed search is your answer. You can filter by activity. It also has feeds too that are topic themed.
I'd actually argue its way easier now to start new communities on the Fediverse than Reddit, for a variety of reasons.
That kinda highlights the problem. Search "scuba". There are 4 separate communities:
There are 39 total posts between them, but the one tied with the most posts has zero active users. The one with the most comments ranks 3rd in posts and only has one active user. The one with the most active user only has 2 comments according to the search.
If I search the same term on sync while signed into .world, I get different communities and very different user counts for those that are in both searches:
None of these communities are really active. But between them they would have had have the user base to get it going. Finding a community and getting the critical mass needed for it to thrive is made much harder with this amount of fragmentation.
Oh I agree, that's why some users push for consolidation of communities into one single community. I'm just noting that abandoned communities on the fediverse are better presented on Piefed as if there is an active community in the topic you're looking for, it will be obviously visible ahead of all the others.
As for reddit, there's not really much left to make on Reddit anymore. Almost every name is taken and sat on by moderators - and it's pretty hard to meaningfully advertise any new community.
Not that I think Scuba Diving has enough base users on the Fediverse to begin with at this point. Most of those users subscribed are likely abandoned accounts.
It's the reddit community I most consistently miss. The community there is huge and very active, as are spinoff subs like underwater photography.
But I decided to leave reddit in 2023 with the API changes, and I've resisted going back. I like Lemmy, but I feel like I just have to keep my feed set to all, whereas on reddit I had a highly curated list of subs.
What sort of discussion are you seeking? I'm spending most of my time in the comments, droppin truth bombs on dey heads.
Be the change you wanna see. They set this up to be as user driven as possible. You can start communities, discussions, all of it. I started a Zombie community to have somewhere to discuss my take on season one of Fear the Walking Dead. Not much engagement yet but ya gotta start somewhere. It'll never take off if everyone who isn't permabanned keeps slipping off to reddit.
One thing I find satisfying is noticing how much more intelligent people are here than on reddit. It speaks volumes regarding the types of people who get permabanned from [insert any scathing adjectives of your choice] Reddit.
There is discussion but the userbase's interests arent super wide so at the moment its techy and politicsy. Which is fine at least we arent following reddit which started out with racists, atheiests and child porn.
I've recently been checking out reddit to see discussion on a few topics not covered here, MMA and beyond all reason. I'm shocked by how low quality the comments are. I can open a 900 comment thread and not see a single comment that discusses the thread topic or discusses anything.
Honestly, that's not accidental. Reddit's a hot mess right now..
Once the IPO dropped last year, the algorithm started steering users to the least productive, most rage-bait inducing content. I was on many art-related subs and within 6 months, my feed pivoted to the political feeds.. MurderedByWords, LeopardsAteMyFace and others. The AppleHelp and VintageGaming and VintageApple where I had the best, most in-depth conversations all but vanished from my home page feed.
Oddly enough subs like anime_titties (which was non-US based global-only news with the sub's title used to keep the 50-cent Army from seeing it as the Great Firewall doesn't like anime_titties) also went down my feed list. Then mystery subs with really rage-inducing content like NewsHub which was lots of middle-east and Gaza related stuff appeared - and I hadn't ever visited that sub.. stuff that I han't even heard of showed up.
NGL, I fell right into it. It's slick, that's for sure.
Eventually the rage-bait posts got me.. I had started to get snarkier and snarkier and the mod-bots bumped me yesterday - within a minute - of making a metaphorically mean post. I spent the evening on old reddit getting at the unarchived content I'd posted and manually deleted it. Then managed to get to the delete account page and left. 14 years. Oh well.
The AI they're using isn't as well trained as they think, (hence the Reddit stock tanking in the past 2 weeks) and of course Steven MIller (the real POTUS right now) is looking to go after the mainstream social media sites.
It's getting a bit schizophrenic, what with the fear of the Trump Administration meddling on one hand and the algorithm on the other driving engagement by highlighting the EXACT strident content that makes it a target.
Oooooffffff. Fun times ahead.
There's no lack of people willing to have discourse. No one is asking the questions.
People go to Reddit with hard questions (an other things) they want to crowdsource
People don't come to Lemmy with it, but other than not knowing which tech forum to ask it in, there's no reason they can't.
!showerthoughts@lemmy.world
!asklemmy@lemmy.world
I agree with the criticism of the content, especially since we solved a lot of these problems on reddit years ago, but as I’ve said on here before, we need a critical mass in order to achieve the kind of platform we’re looking to replicate. If lemmy keeps growing, it might come. Acculturation might not be possible though.
But Lemmy isn't growing. In fact, it's declining: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=1000
(When looking at these stats, remember that the post and comment counts are all-time comments/posts that are available at that specific day on the platform. In June 2024 there were more total comments than now, and in November 2024 there were more posts than there are now.
And all numbers are including the NSFW instance.
We're growing slowly but at least we are growing.
I don't agree. Do you mean that you require us to do it or are you just not engaged in it?
!movies@piefed.social
!casualconversation@piefed.social
!science@mander.xyz