2y ago

Why is my Lemmy experience feeling so lame? UPDATE

I've subscribed to a plethora of communities that really interest me and actually have posts and discussions in them, but I have to go to the specific community to see this. My "Subscribed" feed only contains a few of the same posts that I've seen for weeks in Hot, the same posts from even longer ago in "Active", posts from the same communities as the ones in "Hot" in New and no other communities, and pretty much only posts from the Meme's community I unsubscribed from when sorted by "All". I also see a majority of posts barely have upvotes or comments on them at all from the "bigger" communities. Is this just the growing pains of this site? Am I still doing lemmy wrong? Is it the instance I've chosen to join?

UPDATE I want to thank everyone who posted and gave me helpful advice on this matter. It turns out that there are still lots of people here on Lemmy with me, I just couldn't see you because I was sorting my feed incorrectly. I'm excited that there are more people here and I'm excited to continue to contribute to Lemmy with you! Thank you all for the help, I really appreciate it. The solutions are to continue to subscribe, contribute to my favorite communities, and sort by top day, 12, and 6 hours. It really helped liven up my feed!

141 comments

The Hot timeline becomes stale if the lemmy server isn't restarted every 6 hours or so, which takes 10 seconds but can't be done on larger instances such as lemmy.world because it kills the queue of outgoing activity.
This is a known bug and is being worked on. For the time being you should try with "top 6 hours" and "top 12 hours" sorting.
- I appreciate the sorting suggestion! I'll try that. I understand that Lemmy isn't as big as Reddit, but I swear there are more people than my feed is leading me to believe.
  
  It's been hard to look at all these posts about how big lemmy is and how fast it's growing, to watch the scale-up issues, and keep in mind just how much smaller it still is than reddit. According to https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats the lemmyverse is just now closing in on 2M users (from 750k last month), but only 70,000 of them are "active." Reddit claims 50,000,000+ daily users and 400M monthly. That's essentially 1000x larger than lemmy - that's the difference between seeing your favorite band at a stadium concert or your local pub.
  
  All of us reading this post feeling the same way can do our part by posting and commenting. If everyone who thinks they're the only ones here start talking the emptyness disappears
  
  Specially sorting by 6 hours is important :)
- That's great information. Thank you so much!
  
  Dito, thanks a lot for the technical background which makes sense @Wander@yiffit.net . I was also running into this staleness of the timeline and was wondering,
- If that's true it should really be stickied by am admin. That's crucial info.
- Huh, I thought Lemmy was dying, posts are so stale.
  
  That was my main reason for posting this question, to see if I'm alone in this site with just a bunch of bots posting. All these responses have given me hope!
- Do you have a link to the bug tracker for the restart problem?
You're doing Lemmy wrong, and it's not your fault. People keep saying "instance doesn't matter" - sure, you can interact with anything all over the main lemmyverse, but the best experience is to find a home server with a community that feels right. Subscriptions and the sorting will get there, but right now ALL (or maybe even local) is a way better experience
Here's the servers I checked out:
Lemmy.world
What I signed up on. The most people, the most content, civil community. Moderation is there, but you mostly feel it by the sense of civility. They keep getting targeted and they're experiencing a lot of hiccups, but they're the biggest source of content right now. Feels to me at this point
(Sh.itjust.works)[Https://sh.itjust.works/signup] About as close as you can get to freedom of speech while keeping out the aggressive bigots. I think one of their rules is along the lines of you can drop n-bombs or argue for whatever you want, but not use slurs against actual people. That says a lot... But they're great for shitposts and are experimenting with democracy at !agora@sh.itjust.works
(Beehaw.org)[beehaw.org/signup] I'd describe it as a safe space. Heavy moderation and curation of content. Those kinds of places feel uncomfortable and tense to me so I find it hard to give it a fair review. Not my thing, but they claim to be closest to Reddit... I'd give lemmy.world that title, but it was a big site and I was constantly searching out the medium sized subs.
(Lemmy.nsfw)[Lemmynsfw.com/signup] A stable server that will show you plenty of sfw content, and the community is welcoming. And of course, there's the obvious...
(Blahaj.zone)[https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/signup] The flip side of why I go to sh.itjust.works, lots of queer shitposts. I like the memes, I like the people, not so sure about the admin... She's been stirring up a lot of drama the last few days. Maybe there's more to it, I've mostly just seen her posts that look a bit power-trippy from a distance. I've also been waiting for that to happen to see how we as a community handle it, so
(pawbs.social)[https://pawbs.social/signup] This is my main home server now. A while back I came to realize furries are always big early adopters of every new tech, they're super welcoming, and they don't care if you're not a furry so long as you don't care that they are. I like the art anyways so it doesn't bother me. A lot of tech stuff too. They are most definitely furries though, and you'll see OwOs and all that comes with that. They're very chill, until someone isn't, so if you can't handle that you're going to have a bad time
(Lemmy.ml)[Lemmy.ml/signup] The original devs instance. They're going through some stuff with their domain and definitely anticapitalist, but after digging for evidence and talking to them they're far from extremists, but the constant stream of people heading over to there to pick a fight, the site was on edge when I went there a few weeks ago. A good place if you're into good faith debate on economic and governmental systems
lemmygrad.ml was a more extreme version (literally someone came in to start a fight in every thread i saw) they're understandably pretty wary. Their ideas are out there, but they're definitely not pro genocide and don't worship Stalin (at least as a whole).
Lemmy.ml I wouldn't pick until they get their domain issue shaken out, but I included them because after an afternoon trying to get to the bottom of it (the only proof of anything I found was a mastodon post about someone very vague about what was said and ending with "unfortunately the conversation was deleted"), so it seems to me they've been getting misrepresented. I'm very open to more concrete details though
(Dbzer0.com)[https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/signup] They sail the high seas. Less content, but what was there was pretty interesting if you're into tech, security, or digital rights
Those are the sites I remember off the top of my head after exploring around, there's >2k instances (although about 100 were populated by users when I went through the data dump a few weeks back)
If you're on Android, I'm doing bug fixes before launching my app very soon, and iPhone build is coming once I can get one to test on. I pushed back the launch to pack on features, I've got keyword filtering, you can explore servers without changing accounts, it saves your place, hides read posts, it offers URL replacement (I accidentally went to Twitter for possibly the last time today and YouTube yesterday, the logo change was worth it but nitter is less jarring).
You can interact with Lemmy links, collapse comments, post with a control bar that doesn't float around, save drafts, and it's all in a dark material-design style (but with way less cards). There's still a lot to be done, but after bug fixes and optimization v2 will be focused around combing feeds and accounts to get just the right mix. Eventually I've got eyes on pixelfed and maybe even things like friendica - the beauty of the fediverse is how amazing a foundation it is to build on
For today, there's still occasional bugs and jank, but at this point I can say it's pretty stable when the servers cooperate. I'll be covering for more and more of it through the client as time goes on, but for the last 2 weeks I've been using it exclusively. My friend convinced me I need to wrap it up and put it out there and get feedback, so
Check out !flemmy@lemmy.world if you're interested, I just posted some screenshots (it will get prettier, but hopefully it's good enough to not be distracting)
- Thank you for posting this! I realize it's just your assessments of these instances, but I've been interested to see summaries of what other instances are like, since I'm not completely satisfied with Lemmy.world. Having read your descriptions though, I think I'll stick with it a while longer.
  
  Alternatively, lemm.ee, sopuli.xyz or reddthat.com could be interesting alternatives, pretty generalist too
- In my instance, we use Arch.
  Jk. We're pretty chill although we're too small to be anywhere popular. We like memes but not really overrun with it. The admin and the owner are nice and relaxed. Not much content since we're just a small group, but some members are pretty active in their communities.
- Great instance review, thank you! FYI your markdown links are broken, switch the brackets, links are [like] (this) not (like)[this]
- Thanks. I needed this
- Saved this even if only you have a good description of the major instances.
  Thanks for this!
- Lemmy but twitter instead of reddit.
- Thank you for taking the time and writing out such a detailed response 🙏
- Commenting for dot
- 👍
Content aggregation is a WIP around here. Reddit had very similar issues in its early days. Give it time.
- The amount of responses in this post have been extremely reassuring. I honestly just felt like I was using the site alone with a bunch of bots lol
  
  It's a bit of both. No, the place isn't empty, but it's still not populated enough for content to aggregate as well as it does on Reddit.
  Content aggregates based on how the users vote. The more votes there are, the more data the algorithm has to work with, the better it can sort content.
  Think of it like a waterwheel. On Reddit, the water comes in like Niagra, that wheel can power a city. Here, it's like modestly sized, gentle river so you've got less to work with.
  Simultaneously, the waterwheel here is still somewhat under construction, whereas Reddit's has been a well oiled machine for many years now.
  In both cases, time will fix it. Just need a little patience.
  
  As others have said maybe it's a sorting issue. I can scroll for hours getting new content with comments on it
- Big companys dump millions into a perfect algo to milk engagement and ad views. Right now the priority seems to be security and stability before moving on to features. Lemmy blew up pretty much over night. Its going to take time and volunteers to improve.
Sort by 6 or 12 hours is super important.
- This is the way
Here is what I do. First, sort by Top Day to see what I missed. Then sort by Top 12 hours to reveal newer stuff. Then sort by Top 6 hours, Top 1 hour, any finally Sort by New until I run out of content. At that point, it's time to put down the phone and do something else.
- I pretty much sort by new most of the time. There is less noise in the system right now so you do not have to wade through so much toxic BS. That also means that you actually run out of genuinely new content pretty quickly. Viewing new posts has some nice side effects in that comments get good engagement much more often and you get to have a real influence on whether something gains traction.
  
  I try to comment on new a lot too. Even if it's nothing substantial I figure people are more likely to add something if there's already a comment. Someone could have a really interesting take but if they see 0 comments they might not even bother.
There's just not as many people here as there is on Reddit. Things will be slow for as long as we don't have large numbers. Best thing you can do to make things better is engage frequently and spread the good word of Lemmy
- Thanks, I'll keep trying to do my part to grow my favorite communities on Lemmy.
I felt the same way, but it's mostly due to lemmy's still premature sorting algorithm. Sorting by New, Top Hour, or Top Six changed my experience drastically. There's still issues like posts having not enough involvement through comments, and duplicate posts from similar communities, but overall it's much better after about a month in.
I feel your pain! Sorting by Top 6 Hours is my current go to, mostly because I only scroll every few hours or so. Additionally, I start by scrolling through "Home" then transition to "All" if I feel like it. If you use the voyager app, there's a new function to hide read posts, which could be helpful to you, as well!
- That "top 6 hours" tip is great, thanks for sharing
I've been preferring new or top X hours ago, then just choose the X for the last time you visited.
- Okay, so here's my first problem with the Twitter rebrand
  
  100% legit criticism.
- It would be nice to have 2,3,4,5 hour options as well. Adjusting it manually in the url does not work.
  
  When I joined there was nothing shorter than top 24h so maybe in the future they'll add more.
I'm just seeing a wall of the same crap about Reddit and Twitter most of the time. I need to learn it better, and I think the technology has room to grow. The userbase exploded, and a lot of people have their own ideas of how it should work.
- I was going to say the same thing. I’ve been doing what others recommended (sorting by Top for last X hours) and I see so much about Twitter & Reddit, and to make it worse, reposts of the same link that got upvoted a lot in different communities. I really wish there were a way to filter these posts out in the Lemmy settings (like Mastodon filters), because I’m tired of seeing the same rehashed discourse about those platforms over and over again…
You're not going to like what I'm about to say.
You're part of the problem. You can fix it though.
Ready?
You need to make original content for the communities you are apart of and stop expecting others to provide you the conent you want. Because if that's what everyone did, then there would be absolutely nothing here.
That's just the way it is right now. There's not enough original content creators on Lemmy yet.
What does original content mean? It doesn't mean reposts from other websites. It doesn't mean articles from other websites. The original content was already posted by the writers of the articles, on the original website. It doesn't mean comments you make. My comment here isn't original content. It's a reaction.
Original content is something you make. You baked some sourdough bread? Post. You made a chair from wood? Post. You made something out of leather? Post. You took a nice photo? Post. You made some digital art? Post. You drew a sketch of a building? Post. You did "insert hobby"? Post. You're a collector of this niche thing? Post.
The truth is, original content can be hard and time-consuming. It takes a certain mind to want to post original content. If everyone here would make just one original content post, I think that would help make Lemmy a better social media site.
Be the change.
- Your ~~rant~~ post is ill-placed, because I'm trying to do that. I've already posted and commented multiple posts in communities I enjoy trying to garner attention and content. But i'm also a busy person who's trying to live with a family, children, and a budding carreer. I understand I need to be a part of the community and I am doing more now than I ever have on Reddit.
  EDIT: I also wanted to add that this post is not about me complaining about a lack of content, it was a misunderstanding of the sorting algorithm. After posting this, I got lots of very helpful advice to help me use Lemmy's sorting better and my enjoyment of Lemmy has improved immensly to the point of where my experience on Lemmy is no longer lame.
  EDIT 2: I must have misread your post because it was not condesending, but more motivating. I appreciate the sentiment and redact the condesending part, but stand by the rest of what I've said. I deleted the entire second paragraph because I was defensive and wrong in its entirety. I appreciate the sentiment while affirming I am trying to contribute more while my life is still very busy. I apologize for getting defensive.
  
  You're right, I didnt look at your profile. That was my mistake. My comment wasn't intended to be an attack on you. It was more of a generalization of a problem of Lemmy at the moment. I should have gone out of my way to look at your profile and to better phrase what I was saying so that you and others wouldn't feel as though I was making a personal attack. Sorry about making you feel attacked.
  
  This type of 'post or you're the problem' comment really gets on my nerves too. If no one replies, people won't post again, and if a sub is nothing but single posts no one's coming back.
  It's great you're putting in the effort to post, and people should appreciate that. I'm autistic and I can't post. I can give incredibly detailed information in response to a post or a comment if it relates in any way to any of my special interests. And I do. And so do people like me. It's why you can find the answer to basically any question on the internet. These 'post more' people need to cool it, because the reason people like content like this is depth and engagement and it's not going to happen without people engagine with the content too.
- Is there a look at my turd sub, because that's about the level that 99% of users will contribute to IF prodded. Beyond that, the "it's you, your the problem it's you" argument will not produce change. It's simply a numbers game. Need to get enough users that 1% producing content is still a lot of content. Awareness / marketing tactics can help. Mention Lemmy on reddit boards and threads or whatever the kids are using, (instabook?). Oh, also someone needs to get some money and get some famous people on here. I could give a damn what they say, but the youth hang on their every word. Get that rapper guy or one of the telltubbies or something talking about Lemmy and you'll get people to flock.
  
  That isn't true. It is not a numbers game. Reddit didn't start off with numbers. Facebook didn't start off with numbers. Tumblr didn't start off with numbers. Twitter didn't start off with numbers.
  They all started small. Growing gradually. People stayed because they enjoyed the content and the community.
  Hype and influence only attract a certain type of person. Fools. That will just create an inferior community. You'll have a digital Fyre Festival that way.
  Artificially inflating numbers creates a community with no respect of the community itself. There's no thought in that. When you put no thought into something the results aren't good.
- "Hey man. Just uhhhh.... you know.... paint some walls with colored rainbows and ponies and shiz. That'll make the world better."
  (You)
  I mean, I know that complaining won't change anything, but holy bimbles in my dimples, you are really suggesting this guy to just ignore all the porn and start adding some "healthy content" in? There is this thing called tendency... and if a certain community/place/etc has some "furry porn" in? Then its not him that'll (magically) change it "for the better". It'll not make the "furry porn apologists" (suddenly) stop being degenerates. Its one guy versus a bunch of porn-addicted, degenerative individuals. He doesn't stand a chance. Your post is just plain "wishful thinking".
- It's not that easy to make stuff. I find myself pretty creatively dead. I have communities I'd love to make content for but I'm a talentless waste of breath.
- Instance war, ideology clash resulting in censorship, random rules on different instances.
  That is also the cause why some people are reluctant to contribute.
My takes: 1. Lemmy is small yet, so, few content. 2. A lot of propaganda accounts. You need to block communities and users. 3. Once in a while a small community make it to the top, so you found about it and subscribe to it. 4. Little by little your feed gets better. 5. Human nature, you can't escape from it, you know, that quote about how stupid is the average person and so. 6 Accept the limitations and enjoy the platform. PS: I do like all the silly memes.
Turn on “hide read post”! It changes everything
- I did that and it confused the hell out of me, half of my instances communities were empty all of a sudden
Once clients add "mark read on scroll" this may go away, too.
Sort by "best" is coming to Lemmy, in case you didn't know.
- That's great
I'm shocked you have had any discussions at all, quite frankly. Step outside of the some of these more visited subs and you see threads that are many days or weeks old with 0 replies. And lots of them at that. It doesn't make you want ot contribute because you know you won't get any replies either, so that kind of perpetuates the problem. You need a certain critical mass of visitors to a sub to get it going and sustain itself.
Also, I too have noticed that the same threads appear over and over again, days later. I can't imagine there is such little traffic that more posts aren't getting posted, but who knows.
- What are your interests, if I may ask?
I feel you. Hot just doesn't work like it did on Reddit. I get swamped with posts from the most active communities and some old posts. It doesn't give me a nice spread of all my subbed communities like Reddit did. Also when browsing all it gave randomly showed me like 10 posts from some long nosed dog community. Did it twice so I blocked that community. Probably not on them, but just an issue with the Hot algorithm.
- Keep in mind Reddit gets a frillion votes a minute. Votes are the data the algorithm uses to aggregate those pages, and they've had years to perfect how it does that.
  Here we just don't have the data yet. "Hot" doesn't work well because, for all intents and purposes, nothing on the site gets above lukewarm in terms of votes.
  
  Hot shouldn't be a set number of votes though. It should all be relative so that it can scale with the site. If 100 up votes in an hour would constitute hot today it wouldnt be the same if the active users doubled at some point. So to call anything at best lukewarm now would be incorrect when talking in the fediverse.
I like to sort by top of the hour. Gives you recent posts that you can still engage with but is more filtered than "new".
What, you don't like all the crazy fury porn? Cuz I mean, if you don't like fury porn..... Ya there's a lot of it.
- I have, thankfully, seemed to have avoided a lot of the furry porn. If you like it, more power to you! I'm thankful I can avoid that kind of content!
  
  I've blocked, so, so many communities browsing all. It's wild.
- I haven't seen much fury porn. Nobody hatefucking 'round here.
I've never really used it (I'm not very into micro blogging), as someone else said Lemmy is to Reddit as mastodon is to what Twitter used to be
It's a more complex system of federation than Lemmy, my understanding is that Lemmy is more tightly federated, but mastodon has additional mechanisms to spread posts through the network.
I might get more into microblogging when I add kbin support I might get into it - I've found learning enough about something to write code for it often ends with an appreciation for the thing. If that happens I'll do a similar server experience post somewhere
I have to sort by "New" because "Hot" is almost always broken. I get posts from two years ago :/ If I sort by "New" however, some of the posts are pretty... eh?
- So, essentially it's 4chan's Bump system?
- Hot sorting algorithm is bugged at the moment. Older posts don't cool down until the server is restarted so they keep popping up. It is currently fixed for the version to be released.
  More technical info here and here.
I sort by new comments and that does pretty well.
I'm glad you got something out of it, there's all sorts of resources for finding servers, but very few have more than the server description on them
I like reviews, because while your interests may differ from the person, you get a read on them and through that on what they're reviewing
Maybe one of these days I'll make a community for this, if we standardize the format we could use it to do reviews on individual servers - it would be a great way to help people trying to pick a server
I had the same issue with Lemmy, so I use Kbin more these days because it seems to be better at getting interesting posts I haven't seen before. I'm sure the Lemmy devs will get to it though.
- @Xylarthen
  @SPOOSER Getting the algorithm right is a challenge. Reddit struggled to get a balance of both interesting topics while keeping spam off of the front-page. Kbin/Lemmy will have the same problem. Kbin seems to do a better job than Lemmy IMO, but it still lets too many memeposts/shitposts on the front page. You still have to block the worse offenders.
- Kbinites rise up!
I keep getting months old posts in my hot feed. It's weird.
But yeah, Lemmys missing on some "power posters" like Reddit had.
Ugh... Thanks for the catch, that's one less bug making it to the beta.
The frustrating thing is I specifically remember looking this up when I was writing the function, because it was weird to me that images were the opposite order
My renderer handled both though, so I might not have noticed for a while
Nuh uh, you're lame! Lame-o!
.
JK!! I am on kbin and as others suggested to play around with the settings, otherwise just engage to your hearts content !
I feel the same way because i have no friends :'(
This place is lame because it’s somehow even more obsessed with politics than Reddit. It’s draining to go to a social media site and constantly be subjected to negative headlines.
- I'm subscribed to a few meme communities, a few news communities and special interest. I browse on Subscribed and if I see no fresh posts I look through All for a bit. If I see nothing of interest/new then I stop lurking for a bit and come back later.
  If you're seeing too much xyz, it's because you're subscribed to too many xyz communities.
  
  The problem with browsing Subscribed is that the subs I'm interested are dead/have very low activity. The problem with browsing All is that it's infested with politics and negativity.

141 comments