A post from 2 days ago presented a graph that showed an important variation in the active userbase: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/52565659
Using the daily rather than monthly view on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120 shows a much stable line (especially if you take into account Piefed's growth: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120 )
Going through the comments in the other posts, a few recommendations that can help with the overall experience
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use different feeds: either using different Lemmy/Mbin accounts (one account per type of content), or Piefed personal feeds, but being able to browse different feeds such as "Good news", "Hobbies", "Art", "Life advice" help to see more content than politics and tech
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discover communities: subscribe to !communitypromo@lemmy.ca, !fedigrow@lemmy.zip and !newcommunities@lemmy.world to add active communities to your feeds
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go to general communities rather than specific ones: the current user base only allows so much specialization. Your favorite city builder community may not exist, but !citybuilders@sh.itjust.works does. !stationery@lemmy.world and !pen_and_paper@lemmy.world may be inactive, but !journaling@sh.itjust.works is not.
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use a client that allows for comments consolidation: I don't remember which mobile apps does it (Sync, I think?), Piefed has that feature built-in too. It allows to see all comments on a cross-post in the same view: https://piefed.zip/c/privacy/p/928874/worst-in-show-ces-products-include-ai-refrigerators-ai-companions-and-ai-doorbells#post_replies
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report toxic users and avoid communities that do not handle your reports: quite a few comments mentioned that issue in the other thread. Mods can't see everything, reporting helps to keep the atmosphere of a community enjoyable.
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use a client that implements keyword filters: quite a few mobile apps and alternative Lemmy front-ends do, Piefed has it built in. It can really help avoid the "doom and gloom" overwhelming your feed.
Finally, a few communities recommendations for lighthearted communities
Well, I agree that there are some specialized comunities for people that want to believe in 1 idea. Like Lemmy.ml. And if you don't want to be the part of a brainwashed herd, you either leave by yourself or get banned. This is normal. I am talking about the active platform wide banning regardless of comunity. I don't see such thing on Lemmy unless you are really harming the platform like mass spamming or sharing dangerous software. On Reddit you no longer can have a normal conversation, since you can get banned not only by a toxic mod but also by shitty AI system. And then you cannot even expect for the appeal to be normally processed by a human, since either they are also being reviewed by AI or the workers are too lazy to properly work(which is quite relatable since there are thousands of appeals and not enough workers because of a greedy management).
Due to the decentralization on Lemmy, even if you get banned from even 2 or 3 instances, you still have a lot of parts of platform available for you. While on Reddit your ban affects you and your account dramatically. Especially, if you are not paying them for the pro version.
Reddit is worse both overall and on average, agreed. I will say that Lemmy.ml is extremely well-known for mass banning people even from communities that they've never heard of, so it's more than a little bit like Reddit, though as you say with the federated model someone can always go elsewhere, and still see the same content.
There are some slight ways in which the Lemmy implementation of federation is very authoritarian, like how it does not send you any kind of notification that your content has been removed, or even that you have been banned - people simply have to discover that on their own (and oftentimes never!), months to years later. And there's no modmail to be able to ask questions why, plus the modlog most often obscures the name of the mod anyway, so you can't even DM them, nor, as you could on Reddit, can you ask them in the same post that has been removed from the community yet still exists for those who have the URL, since Lemmy not only deletes the post in that case but offers a confusing generic error message as if the post never existed in the first place.
So believe it or not, Reddit actually offers some (very few but somewhat foundational) more rights to people there than Lemmy does here!!! Lemmy offers supreme rights to someone wanting to spin up their own instance and be an admin (though CSAM brigading is a constant threat), and also offers special privileges to mods as well, but normal everyday users have far less protections. It is up to each person to decide which "rights" they value most - there is no right here to not have your content deleted by a bot btw, though it is far less common on the Threadiverse than on Reddit, I hear.
Overall I think it's better here than there, though as the OP graph shows that seems to not be an opinion shared universally by all people looking for a threaded conversational platform, since we are losing slightly more people than we gain, slowly getting smaller over time (now at ~35k active users, down from the peak of ~55k at the time of the first major Rexodus).
Mods on Reddit can ban you and ignore anyway. But, agree. Some functionality on Lemmy still needs to be. I hope that developers add it within few years.
Agreed except that given its history, I strongly doubt that most of it ever will be. The developers of the Lemmy codebase made the software for their own desires, and it functions perfectly well as far as they are concerned, fitting in very well with the authoritarian nature of lemmy.ml where even mods seem cowed to barely do anything and instead the admin is the strongest initiator.
I have simultaneously both great respect to them for having made Lemmy as FOSS while also I realistically acknowledge that they do not have the same goals in mind that I and most Westerners do about the rights of individual people vs. that of the State. In their own words:
(In fairness here, they did later recant on that position, after great public outcry, to remove the hard-coded filters for swear words like "fuck" that were baked into the code at the time. Though Nutomic is absolutely correct in the general sense at least: if people want something that the devs do not want, it is not necessarily the devs responsibility to provide it? Similarly for changing the prioritization of which features to work on first.)
Therefore even without knowing the future plans of either platform, I can practically guarantee that you will see such features added to PieFed, probably multiple years before they show up on Lemmy. In fact it's already started a year ago now where Lemmy's "instance block" that still allows users from those supposedly "blocked" instances to read, vote on, and reply to your content, plus send you DMs, even triggering notifications, whereas PieFed allows you to block all users from an instance. PieFed's version works, while Lemmy's was promised for years and then never did, and at this point I assume never will.
And in a second example, PieFed just changed how deleted posts are handled: the user controls their own content, but not the content of others, so e.g. if they ask a question they can delete that question, but they can no longer delete the answers delivered to that question by other people.
Sorry if I am salty but I have lost hope in Lemmy. And I am putting all my hope instead into PieFed:-).
Okay, got your opinion. Thanks for info.