2026-10-04 06:10 UTC
Replies (34)
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@Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 2026-10-04 06:15
I don’t like the title cause there’s a decently sized userbase here, but the article is good. If the article was something like “Why don’t more people use Lemmy?” then I would share this on Reddit, but as-is most people will just read the headline and skip it.
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@Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2026-10-04 06:18
everytime an instance, or a community goes down or recieves too much drama, they scatter to other platforms thats why. some went to piefed, and others.
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@PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 2026-10-04 06:20
I don’t use Mastodon or Twitter either. I never understood following specific people and prefer following topics instead.
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@PixeIOrange@lemmy.world 2026-10-04 06:21
I think its okay the way it is. Too much attention leads to many reposts, karma farmers, bots, now AI bullshit etc.
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@flamingos@feddit.uk 2026-10-04 06:21
Does anyone else find the font on this uncomfortable to read is that just me?
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@tal@lemmy.today 2026-10-04 06:23
nobody I’m somebody!
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@susieq0044@sh.itjust.works 2026-10-04 06:36
Just you wait. Growth will happen in shocks. Basically people probably haven’t heard about Lemmy yet.
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@missingno@fedia.io 2026-10-04 06:41
I have to be that guy and point out that the Threadiverse isn't just Lemmy, and microblog-Fedi isn't just Mastodon.
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@Cornballer@lemmy.zip 2026-10-04 06:50
Reddit started out small too, you know when it was actually good.
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@MyOpinion@lemmy.today 2026-10-04 07:11
I use Lemmy every day!
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@Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 2026-10-04 07:14
Lemmy ist for talking about topics, mastodon is for following brands and entering parasocial relationships.
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@eremophila@lemmy.zip 2026-10-04 07:25
If everyone used lemmy, lemmy would be reddit
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@Infrapink@thebrainbin.org 2026-10-04 07:32
sue 2: Users could agree on one community. Or (a functionality Lemmy doesn't have), similar communities could be grouped or linked together. Instead of choosing between Linux@lemmy.ml and Linux@lemmy.world, users could follow a combined “Linux” topic. Doesn't PieFed do exactly that?
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@zecg@lemmy.world 2026-10-04 08:28
33 people participated
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@MimicJar@lemmy.world 2026-10-04 09:04
Finding communities can be confusing: There can be multiple communities about the same topic on different servers: For example: Linux@lemmy.ml and Linux@lemmy.world I agree that finding communities can be confusing, but I don’t think the problem is the naming. For example on Reddit if you wanted to talk about video games you’d look at /r/gaming. However over time, since that was a “default sub”, it became a bit of a mess and instead /r/Games was the community to have real discussion about video games. But of course over time that too became a bit of a mess and /r/TrueGaming was the best place to talk about video games. In fact for a long time /r/True was a common way to find the better community. Of course the name of a community might be confusing to an outsider. On Reddit if I’m a fan of Game of Thrones there is /r/GameOfThrones, but what if I’m looking for something a bit more meme worthy, well that’s /r/freefolk. And that’s true even on Lemmy. What if I want Star Trek memes? Well that’s !tenforward@lemmy.world I think discoverability is something that can be improved. Of course at the moment so many communities are so small, so looking at all of them isn’t really much of a problem. You can usually find what you’re looking for.
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@Evotech@lemmy.world 2026-10-04 15:05
I use Lemmy
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@masterspace@lemmy.ca 2026-10-04 14:25
Just gonna throw this out there: Lemmy is a bad and dumb name. It’s a joke about users being lemmings this subtly denegrates the user on every usage this implies the app/product itself isn’t that serious and sounds kinda childish It’s not a satisfying word from a pronunciation standpoint. How many other company or product names can you think of that end with that ee sound? Reddit, Twitter, Threads, they all end with these conclusive consonant sounds. Lemmy sounds like it’s trailing off while whining. At best it conjures up images of rat like rodents.
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@aesthelete@lemmy.world 2026-10-05 03:45
who am I? am I nobody? …yeah I guess I kinda am
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@Zizzy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-10-05 02:50
A lot of people do use Lemmy. I dont get why so many people think something has to have literally everyone on earth using it or its dead. You see the same thing in games, too. Id rather there not be a singular monolirh even with lemmys fediverse design. The internet was better when it wasnt this way.
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@percent@infosec.pub 2026-10-05 00:19
If I had to guess: the culture here seems unusual, and unwelcoming — sometimes even hostile — to diverse opinions (i.e. people who aren’t similarly unusual). I haven’t met many people IRL who would fit in here. For some visitors, that’s okay (I don’t fit in here, myself), but I think most people would just move along and forget that Lemmy exists. Being federated, Lemmy is technically capable of being more diverse. It’s a bit ironic that it still ended up being like this. Also, some images don’t load. I just ignore those, but still people might be put off by broken UX
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@atro_city@fedia.io 2026-10-04 10:33
"nobody", nearly 50k people. Asking people on mastodon if they use lemmy also doesn't make much sense to me. I don't use mastodon because it's not threaded, people on mastodon probably don't use lemmy for a similar reason. I'm not sure how many people use both threaded and unthreaded platforms, but it feels to me like the two layouts attract different people.
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@dance_ninja@lemmy.world 2026-10-05 04:02
Boiling it down to 3 things: Content Scale & Variety - Lemmy has a lot of content but it’s very tech/political heavy. It doesn’t have much to offer outside of that domain. Meanwhile, there’s a whole shitposting subreddit dedicated to an NFL conference – I don’t even closely follow professional American football, but it’s glorious. User Experience Friction - You can’t just sign up, you need to pick a server. You’ve already lost a significant amount of people in that step. User Base - There’s nice folks on here, but some really sour the experience for the rest of us by being straight up hostile if we don’t agree on every little detail.
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@im_fine_sandy@nord.pub 2026-10-04 08:07
The real answer, that we all know but dare not speak, is that it’s miserable here. Once you’ve blocked the tankies, porn, and militant dweebs, it’s wall to wall politics and titty memes. I’m here because I’m also a miserable asshole.
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@dropdrip@lemmy.ml 2026-10-05 04:24
Let’s state plainly: the title is false. I use lemmy; you’re using lemmy; the other commentators are using lemmy. There’s a concept I’ve been mulling over for a while–and economists probably have a term for it of which I’m ignorant of–that is that free software fails in capitalist market economies. I expect that statement to create a knee-jerk reaction. The truth is free-software is everywhere and as computers become ever more embedded into our economies free-software’s presence will only grow exponentially. It’s often the foundation for computerised economies. Free-software enthusiasts understand that its become endemic to the economy. However businesses and consumers still ignore it even when it might be prudent to select or fund free-software. To ignore it seems contradictory to a lot of ideals. A capitalist business should use free-software as the monetary cost is zero: it’s a free product. Revolutionary organisations should adopt free-software is it aligns with their ideologies. Yet we know they don’t. These actors are acting irrationally. Free-software lacks something that is a prerequisite to participate in an economy: capital. It has no money to propagandise itself. To phrase it another way: it has no money to buy ads. Without ads it doesn’t exist to entities who do have capital. In Australia Reddit.com brought ad-space inside shopping-centers. Commercial software has revenues from which a portion can be spent on advertising and its through this advertising that growth can occur. The reason why lemmy has a small user-base is because it has no revenue streams. It’s an economic sink. If we were to imagine that the user-pool was to dramatically increase what would actually occur? I imagine many instances would be overwhelmed with traffic, knocking them offline. For those that remain a lot of traffic would be perceived as spam. There is no revenue stream that’s attached to that user-base. If there was you would–absolutely!–see lemmy’s user-base increase as there would be a profit incentive: more users would equate to more profit. The current reality is that more users equates to more debts. The market for ‘internet-forums’ has already consolidated into the big-players we know of. Maybe someone could take lemmy’s code and usurp the established vendors. That behaviour is already underway now; it’s why we have a multitude of lemmy instances. Maybe the next titan of ‘internet-communities’ will be running a lemmy stack. Not all operators are hosting lemmy with ideology/charity being at the fore. Some site operators are asking themselves, “how can I monetise this?” From my perspective the issue isn’t why people don’t use lemmy, it’s why is hosting so expensive? The prerequisites to self-hosting (whether it be for personal use or for an established group or organisation) are costly. One has to pay rent on a DNS, static-IP, hardware and data connections. These prerequisites are commercial in nature and are priced as if every buyer has a revenue stream from which these rents are payed from. If an individual/group wants independence and decides to self-host they’re taking on these rents that have been priced at commercial rates. Those are the monetary hurdles. There’s an intellectual hurdle too: a group needs to have members that know how to administer and maintain servers. The prerequisites are rather burdensome. It should then not come as a surprise that a group of young people who play vide-games with each other elect to have their community on discord, or whatever commercial-entity takes on the economic and intellectual burdens. These commercial entities hide the complex nature of computer systems and the economic relationships that exist. In exchange they’re chasing speculative profits. They have revenue coming in from which they can apportion to advertising and paid programmers. They have the incentives to grow. In December 2018, Discord announced it had raised $150 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures, and Technology Opportunity Partners. Lemmy is reactionary software. It pines for the day’s of webmaster superiority… Where a webmaster ruled a personal fiefdom and brought and sold other fiefdoms. Users should be able to host and maintain servers for themselves and their communities. Economic rents and knowledge-specialisation are high hurdles to overcome. If they are overcome they’ll find a wasteland where users have already been captured by existing market players—not only that! They’ll exist side-by-side commercial vendors that pay to have their software blasted from every ad outlet they can afford. The enthusiast or ideologue has sparse capital to attract new users away from their existing ‘digital-home’ whilst the current players have enormous war-chests and if non-economic forces somehow push new-users towards them (e.g. something ‘viral’) they have insufficient economic resources to accommodate them. I would advocate for technology like GNUnet, i2p and hyphanet (GNUnet being my personal favorite). Software such as those abolish the major economic-rents that would otherwise be required for the ‘clearnet’. (DNS rents are unjustifiable and I would like to direct readers to the OpenNIC project.) However the intellectual burden is increased. I would like to take a jab at the idea that Reddit (or whatever third-party is used) takes ownership of a community and their user-generated content. They certainly do, but the community leaders voluntarily gave it up. They also neglected their responsibilities. There’s no reason why users couldn’t have a local-mirror of their community even if it is hosted on a third-party platform. That would negate the reality of a third-party purge and therefore the ‘destruction’ of their community. These communities are irresponsible with irresponsible users. How does one make an irresponsible user responsible? I don’t think it can be done.
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@lokalhorst@feddit.org 2026-10-04 11:51
The people love algorithms, even if they don’t admit that. Reddit and the other platforms invest a lot of money to make people more addicted, and it works. Lemmy on the other hand… well people quickly engage with lemmy.ml and think what the fuck is this place
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@kepix@lemmy.world 2026-10-05 05:06
must be a suprise, but people dont like kgb propaganda and linux nerds
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@Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 2026-10-04 08:22
The UX still has a long way to go. I’m very tolerant of shitty tech and like a struggle, and even I am often like wtf. Signed up to piefed.zip the other day, and the default feed is just horrendous Most users will just quit instead of trying to figure out how to fix it manually. No proper onboarding
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@Dead_or_Alive@lemmy.world 2026-10-05 05:27
In my opinion the following: Minority of very vocal users who get angry if you don’t share every point of their world view. Honestly you can just block most of them. Limited active subgroups - There are only a handful of active subs the rest are just dead. Which leads to… Limited content, posts stay in my feed for a week at a time before being replaced. I often block posts I like just because I’m sick of seeing it in my feed. Shitty moderation - mods here are way worse than Reddit. I’ll be honest I miss old Reddit, Lemmy feels like an apocalyptic wasteland but it’s still better than most alternative. It’s kind of nice I don’t sit and consume content as much as I used to.
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@CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world 2026-10-05 05:55
Hey, I’m here! wtf just going to ignore me like that??
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@nullspace@lemmy.world 2026-10-05 09:09
Lemmy as a name is very poor branding. It’s almost as bad as Mastodon.
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@retromustache@thelemmy.club 2026-10-05 13:51
I’m a 31 yr old dude that just found out about this along with what the fediverse is. When I found out, I was researching this stuff so it took me some time to understand it all and I still don’t think I fully understand it all
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@stopforgettingit@lemmy.world 2026-10-05 15:50
217 comments on this in 24 hours says to me that there must at least a few people using lemmy
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@inari@piefed.zip 2026-10-04 06:15
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@artyom@piefed.social 2026-10-04 06:17
I mean the sad explanation is that they simply don’t care. They’ll complain all the livelong day about the problems but they’ll never leave. That much was clear after they killed the API and everyone protested for a whopping 2 days.