Following https://tarte.nuage-libre.fr/c/fediverse/p/194717/we-need-more-users I decided to explore data a little bit more. I’m not the biggest fan of growth-as-as-target so I wanted to see how much the people were participating in the discussion.
The data
I took the data from the API explorer in https://api.fediverse.observer/ with this query:
query {
monthlystats {
date_checked
softwarename
total_posts
total_users
total_comments
}
}
Then parsed the json with this https://jqlang.org/ filter:
jq '.data.monthlystats | map(select(.total_users > 0 and (.softwarename == "lemmy" or .softwarename == "mbin" or .softwarename == "kbin" or .softwarename == "piefed"))) | group_by(.date_checked) | map( {date_checked: .[0].date_checked, total_users: ([.[] | .total_users] | add), total_posts: ([.[] | .total_posts] | add), total_comments: ([.[] | .total_comments] | add)}) | map({date_checked, posts: .total_posts/.total_users, comments: .total_comments/.total_users}) | sort_by(.date_checked) | map([.date_checked, (.posts | tostring), (.comments | tostring)]) | .[] | @csv'
(As you see I filtered for the threadiverse. I also did the same with all software, I’ll put the graph for that in comments)
Then did a good old’ chart
What to think of it
I don’t know. Users’ activity is on the rise and I find it nice
The amount of furry / anime content on the front page might be putting off some new users
I don’t see this on mine. Isn’t NSFW enabled by default?
This is why I don’t generally believe in all being a good “starting” view for new users. Local would probably make more sense until the user has subscriptions, and then defaulting to subscriptions once the user has joined communities. This would mean an always active feed to start, prioritizing the “local” community for users to participate in the instance they belong to, while also not bombarding them with content from the firehose.
My 2 cents, probably easier to say what to do than to do it though, being a programmer myself. 😎
yeah i think when a new user signs up on an instance, they should be automatically subscribed to a certain list of communities that fit the vibe of the instance. like when you sign up to a memes community, you get automatically subscribed to all meme communities even from other instances.
the instance admin would have to maintain a community list for that.
I’m not saying it’s necessarily NSFW content
I am literally on a furry instance, I subscrube to most furry and a lot of anime comms, and I don’t block NSFW content; I rarely if ever see furry or anime content on the front page and yet I see this said a lot on Lemmy.
Where is it? Where is all this furry content? I specifically requested it and it doesn’t exist. 😬
For me, it’s rarely ever furries. Usually it’s the waifu posts that get the hammer from me, mostly because I scroll this thing in public and around people I know.
yeah there’s always gonna be some users who would like more furry/anime content on the front page and those who might be put off by it
IMHO the best way to do it would be to recommend specific instances to potential new users. i.e. if you know they like furry/anime content, recommend lemmy.blahaj.zone, if you know they like programming memes, recommend programming.dev, etc …
lemmy is basically NSFW because of this, yes. the amount of furry anime porn that reaches the front page is crazy.
i don’t get why it being pushed, but I suppose it’s just the userbase is very active and passionate about that stuff so it rises to the top.
how comes i never see it? did i block it accidentally?
you’re on a different instance
I’ve been blocking communities and posters as they pop up. It works until someone spins up a new instance for it, but then you can just block that as well.
yes, i can.
but it’s problematic if I have to do that every day. It’s almost a daily part of my use of lemmy.
I don’t want to have to block stuff as a part of my daily use.
this is actually the reason I don’t use tiktok or instagram. because my user experience was block block block, everytime I used it. And it never stopped shoveling the shit I didn’t want to see into my face. and a lot of it was pornographic clickbait crap.
i liked it back when it was smaller, but around 2020/2021 both platforms decided to shove tits in my face non stop. and i wasn’t on those platforms for tits. I was on there for my hobbies, but it kept pushing porn on me. so i stopped using it entirely. i still use youtube because youtube isn’t constantly shoveling porno shit in my face.
that’s kind of what lemmy feels like. except it’s with furryies, linux, etc. even when I block stuff more of it keeps popping up. i want to see more generalist content related to general interests, not content from people who are fetishists.
i have been on lemmy over two years. my first 1.5 years i hardly ever had to block anything, because shit content i dont’ like wasn’t flooding my feed. when i first got here it was just a lot of general news/science/information and link aggregation about nerdy stuff, which i really liked and why i liked reddit. i know there was furry porn on reddit from it’s inception, but I never had to see any of it unless i went looking for it specifically, like a lot of the fetish stuff on reddit.
Try PieFed. The reason you keep seeing furry content on Lemmy is that you are forced into browsing “All” in order to see some new content, but then you don’t like some of the new content that you see.
On PieFed with categories of communities (instance-defined Topic areas and user Feeds that are user-customizeable and shareable) you can have your cake (have a tight Subscribed feed, e.g. without being subscribed to any politics communities if you wanted) but then also eat it too (news & politics content is but a click away, or movies & TV).
Combining together comments across all cross-posts also helps a lot with community discovery. I haven’t searched by All in a long time, unless I just felt nostalgic and wanted to, but there is no longer any need with this new model.
piefed is full of memes. i hate it.
i also am annoyed at having it constantly shrilled at me. i am thinking about blocking it.
I would also have shared any solutions I was aware of using Lemmy, except that after using it for 3 years, I know of very little that can be done about it. Just to be on the safe side though, I will note that you could theoretically use the Subscribed feed rather than All? That will show exclusively content that you have subscribed to, hence zero furry memes (unless they somehow wormed their way into the wrong community, in which case feel free to report them).
Fwiw I did not downvote you here: sharing your experiences is very relevant to this conversation. That said, we are just trying to help you find what you are looking for, and your comment does include inaccurate information.
e.g. out of the top 15 communities on PieFed.social only 3 have memes and the rest are much more information dense. Also viewing PieFed.social without an account, I see only a single meme in the top 15 posts shown by default. Also it’s chief developer shares your distaste for “low information content” posts and has several tools in place to help limit them, like the ability to filter not only communities one by one but also by any keywords contained within them, e.g. “memes”. Thus even if you used a 3rd party app, you would still have this automated filter in place. This is because PieFed is not merely another Lemmy instance but an entire reimplementation (from scratch) of the ActivityPub Protocol, i.e. it is software.
But I am not trying to shill it to you anymore, just wanting to correct your statements. I hope you find what you are looking for. Note that it will take some effort on your part to understand the reasons why things happen and what aspects of the tools that you choose to use are under your control - e.g. you could move to an instance that defederates from meme content? (I do not know of any, but in theory you could, or perhaps start up your own if nothing else.)
Have a good day.
Without trying to shill it to you, it has the same content you would see on lemmy.world. It’s no more memey than lemmy.world.
that isn’t true. anytime i have gone there it’s WAY more memey. it looks more like mastrodon/twitter than reddit.
I am not interesting in meme platforms.
This makes no sense. How you interpret the design doesn’t come into it. You know piefed.social (the largest instance) shows the same communities as lemmy.world, right? Show me a meme community that apparently only exists as viewed from piefed.social.
You might be seeing it via card mode rather than compact mode.
Pro-capitalism garbage is putting me off, yet is everywhere. I like that it’s different, not everyone wants the same things