This, a hundred times this. Chasing big numbers like posts totals, upvotes, MAUs is what ruins communities. Slow the fuck down! Make communities for people, not bots and investors!

Idk what to tell you. I mostly like what you repost from Reddit, but saying all this is absolutely making the situation worse. It feels like you could make some simple changes, keep posting most of what you do, and make a lot of folks a lot happier.

I want combined thing - take everythign good reddit has, but also produce own original content (which btw own content could be garbage too).

I don’t think it’s semantics when you’re lumping in “reposting” with “content creators”. Your post seems to imply lemmy’s moderation stifles content creators, when the posts that moderation actions are being applied to are mass reposts of reddit content, not actual organic content created by lemmy users.

I do run some bot accounts already. problem with bots - most communities just ban them outright even if there is no human content anyways. which I found hilarious, they would rather die.
but I indeed found that some communities well receive them.

I do run one bot accounts already. problem with bots - most communities just ban them outright even if there is no human content anyways. which I find hilarious that they would rather die.
but I indeed found 1 community that accepted bot and not banned and I had to create 3 communities myself. but generally people would rather ban bots than allow bots.

btw sanitation is not a bot account, im not talking about sanitation.

I too wish Reddit would federate, but that’s not happening, and forcibly doing it yourself doesn’t really seem to be accomplishing your goals.

I don't start threads because I prefer to engage in conversations that are already happening. Writing a thoughtful, contextual reply takes infinitely more human effort than running a script that copy-pastes a Reddit headline.

We don't need millions of users spamming Reddit leftovers to attract 'native content'. If new users show up and find out that 80% of their feed is Reddit reposts, they won't see it as a good place to stay, they will see it as a sort of RSS feed to Reddit. And if they want to engage with Reddit's original content, they will go back to Reddit and discuss it there.

You say Reddit has excellent content and we just need to curate it, but your actions show the exact opposite… You clearly don't ask yourself (and neither does your automation script) if what you're about to repost is relevant to that specific community, or if it will add any value. And when the community admins stop you from spamming useless or valueless 'content', actually curating stuff, you get frustrated.

And no, I never said more users means lower quality content. I'm saying more activity is not the same as higher quality. These are two completely different statements. And no one is saying they don't want more content either (as you mentioned in quotation marks in your edit to OP). What I (and many others here) am saying is that we don't necessarily want more content, we want good content. Why is that so hard for you to understand?

you dont have a standing. contribute then you can say something

I've got my own gripes about Lemmy but moderation is not one of them.

Reddit has a massive problem with overzealous moderation and content being modded simply because one individual mod doesn't like or disagrees with it. Haven't noticed any of that on Lemmy.

And I disagree that moderation is preventing Lemmy from achieving critical mass. Its gotten this far with its mod system. It feels way better populated than even a year ago. It will never have the commercial reach Reddit has but I've no doubt it will continue to grow.

You're making this way more personal than it needs to be.

I don't want Reddit. I want some of the content and discussion density Reddit has, without Reddit's platform, moderation, and corporate control. Those are not the same thing.

And yes, I am curating it. There are age limits, score thresholds, duplicate checks, community rules, and filtering before anything gets posted. You can dislike the result, but calling it an unfiltered barrage doesn't make that true.

If you think the volume is too high, that's a fair criticism. If you think certain posts are low quality, downvote them, block me, or argue for rate limits.

But jumping from "I don't like these reposts" to attacking my personal worth is exactly the kind of hostility that makes this place harder to grow.

Fuck the haters! If you think this will bring more people to the fediverse and you enjoy doing it, i encourage you to keep going! I do think you'll have to be ok with blocks and bans but it sounds like you are finding places that want it which is promising. You just gotta find your space!

"It feels way better populated" isn't the same thing as actually growing.

That's the part I keep coming back to. Lemmy's MAU has been hovering around the same relatively small level for months now. actually down from a year ago YOY. lemmy is contracting.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
^ its an objective fact based on raw numbers lemmy so nicely provides. we are down 2k MAU year over year.

The current stats literally track monthly active users, and we're still talking about roughly tens of thousands of people, not sustained breakout growth.

And the wider Fediverse has the same retention problem: FediDB currently shows 14 million total accounts but only about 1.17 million monthly active users.

So maybe your personal moderation experience has been great. That's completely valid. Mine hasn't.

But "it got this far" isn't evidence that the strategy is working. If the goal is critical mass, years of stagnation and mostly empty communities are evidence that something isn't working.

Yeah can defo see the harm in letting bots overrun actual communities but i do think this type of thing has it's place. I feel the fediverse is still very new and has so much potential. It'll be interesting to see how it develops!

oh I have ideas ;)

jerkface
0 posts, user for 3 years

I understand the distinction. We disagree on what counts as "good content."

You're assuming that because something came from Reddit and was submitted automatically, it's inherently lower value. I'm not.

And again, this isn't a copy-paste script blindly mirroring Reddit. There are multiple layers of curation: score thresholds, freshness limits, duplicate detection, community-specific rules, content filtering, and AI evaluation. Relevance to the specific community is literally one of the things being evaluated.

Could that filtering make mistakes? Absolutely. So can a human moderator or someone manually choosing posts. If particular posts are bad, downvote them, remove them, or tell me the filtering needs adjustment. That's useful feedback.

But there's also a chicken-and-egg problem with "I prefer conversations that are already happening." Someone has to start those conversations. If most users prefer commenting rather than submitting, where are all those conversations supposed to come from?

That's the 90-9-1 problem I've been talking about. Most people consume, fewer comment, and very few actually submit content.

And the results matter. Lemmy has hundreds of thousands of registered accounts, yet only tens of thousands are monthly active, and many communities remain nearly empty. We can't simultaneously say "people prefer joining existing conversations" and then treat supplying things for them to discuss as inherently harmful.

I'm completely open to arguing about quality, volume, thresholds, or relevance. Those can all be improved.

What I reject is the idea that automated = spam and manually submitted = good. Quality should be judged by the content, not by how many mouse clicks it took to submit it.

I've built several web businesses that actually make money, so yes, I tend to look at things through the lens of whether a product is working and what trajectory it's on.

And from that perspective, Lemmy right now feels like a skeleton of what it could be. That's not "valuing numbers above everything." It's recognizing that hundreds of thousands of people have tried it, MAU remains tiny, and huge numbers of communities are barely alive.

You can make fun of the "C-suite" language, but retention and growth aren't imaginary concepts invented by Reddit executives. They're how you tell whether people actually want to keep using something.

I think Lemmy has enormous potential. That's precisely why I'm arguing about this instead of just leaving.

Then again, this entire posts makes it quite clear you don't seem to have any ability to read the room.

Assuming they even read their own post.

You can make fun of the "C-suite" language, but retention and growth aren't imaginary concepts invented by Reddit executives. They're how you tell whether people actually want to keep using something.

I think Lemmy has enormous potential. That's precisely why I'm arguing about this instead of just leaving.

Honestly, this is such a Lemmy comment.

And highlights one of the problems here , toxicity.

Instead of engaging the poster at the problem, you just attack them personally. For some reason, this sort of behavior seems to be amplified here, moreso than Reddit.

I agree that stagnation is a problem, but you're comparing Lemmy's growth with that of multi-billion dollar platforms with ridiculous marketing budgets and fully staffed marketing teams. That's unfair (and unrealistic) because Lemmy is a community project that has to grow on word-of-mouth alone. It will grow much slower and with periods of stagnation because that's the nature of the beast. And if there's stagnantion that's our fault for not shouting loud enough.

Also, you're taking your negative experience and trying to pin that to user growth. I can see your point but I disagree that moderation is a major factor.

OP has been getting called out for this from the start and it wasn't always aggressive. Instead of adjusting to that feedback (if they even saw it - not like they were active in the comments), they doubled down and added more subreddits to the bot.

Then they made this unhinged whine basically saying "Stop complaining, you morons obviously don't realize how great I am or what's best for you"

Yeah...I get why they made it personal

Ah the tired old thing we need the fediverese like x.

Mastodon tried to do it.
now you with lemmy.

people on fediverse doesn't want cross posted stuff. They want stuff from actual people and those poster interacting with the post.

This moderation you are upset about isn't as much of a problem.

You are trying to speed run reddit here and it isn't going to work. Just work with what lemmy offers and eventually people will come but it is going to take time.

do we need a never slop meme here?

feeling is mutual

But that's exactly why I'm proposing a solution that doesn't require a billion-dollar marketing budget.

Reddit is doing plenty of negative marketing for itself. People are already frustrated with the platform, moderation, API changes, ads, corporate decisions, etc. Lemmy doesn't need to manufacture that dissatisfaction or outspend Reddit. The potential users are already looking for alternatives.

The problem is what happens when they arrive.

If they open Lemmy and find inactive communities and little content around their interests, word of mouth isn't going to fix that. They leave.

I'm proposing a way to bootstrap those communities with relevant content, give people something to discuss, and hopefully turn some of those lurkers into commenters and eventually native posters.

Maybe moderation isn't the main cause of stagnation. I'm open to that. But "we just need to shout louder" won't help if people arrive and don't find enough reason to stay.

But "eventually people will come" is exactly the assumption I'm challenging.

Lemmy has been around for years. Hundreds of thousands of accounts have been registered, yet MAU is still tiny and countless communities are barely active. At what point does "just give it time" stop being a strategy?

And again, who is "people on the Fediverse"? The people who are still here? Of course the current users disproportionately like the current culture. The people who tried it and left aren't here to tell you what they wanted and thats 95% of users - they are not here anymore

I'm not trying to speedrun Reddit. I'm trying to solve a very basic chicken-and-egg problem: people want human conversations, but conversations need something to start them.

If organic posting alone isn't producing enough of that, I don't see anything sacred about waiting another five years and hoping it suddenly does.

I doubt you’ve made multiple profitable businesses if you can’t even make your own arguments and just copy paste LLM output between comments. Not that it matters if it is somehow true.

Prioritising growth is practically antithetical to decentralisation and the fediverse in general. If the growth takes longer, so be it. Lemmy has grown in the relatively short time I’ve been here. Noticeably so and a majority done without shitty bot posting and AI posting. People who join here typically hate that shit and the glorious algorithm TM. Again you’re attempting to conflate the growth/health of Lemmy with serial bot posting and AI posting. The former does not require the latter. The majority of internet sites grew without the latter. The majority of people here don’t like the latter and don’t think the former is worth it. No amount of jank LLM output, because to you’ve had to make it argue your perspective for you, will change that. Anyway I’ve not going to waste further time on this with someone too lazy to formulate and type their own response.

You can reply to replies. You don't need multiple top-level comments.

0% of that comment was an attack on the person

what chicken and egg problem. we have the eggs we are just waiting on them to hatch.

You talk about how many accounts are here like some techbro that wants to line go up. It isn't going to happen.
It took linux years to get where for people to see as a solution for their everyday computer and still more edge cases that need to be solve.

you can't solve everything by cloning a product, you been seen as an inferior especially if you cross post stuff from another social network.

organic is the only way to get things working to attract people that is the unfortunate about these things.

You very obviously used Gen AI to write this. People are here to interact with people, not bots. Otherwise we'd be on Reddit.

Good post. Very true.

The answer is for new instances with set moderation rules promised to be equally enforced, with a set of appeals ending in a jury trial of members of that instance for a moderation decision.

The current feudal nature of lemmy makes it just as policed as reddit, just instead of protecting the rich oligarchs it's often bad faith arguments trying to misunderstand on purpose to get someone banned. Or just for going against majority opinion. In a couple cases because world news related instances hire zionist moderators.

I'm a human using a tool. The argument is mine, the opinion is mine, and I'm right here responding to you.

The Linux analogy proves my point. Linux didn't sit around waiting for the eggs to hatch. People identified barriers and aggressively fixed them.

Drivers sucked? Fix them. Gaming sucked? Build Proton. Installation sucked? Make it easier.

And let's not pretend Linux grew purely "organically." Billions of dollars and enormous amounts of engineering have been poured into Linux by IBM, Red Hat, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Valve, and plenty of other corporations.

Lemmy has empty communities and poor retention. So fix the problems.

"Organic is the only way" isn't a law of nature. It's a strategy. And after years of stagnant MAU, we're allowed to question whether that strategy is working.

I don't want line-go-up. I want critical mass so communities aren't fucking empty.

The irony is that you're arguing decentralization requires accepting slow growth, when decentralization says absolutely nothing about growth rate.

And "Lemmy has noticeably grown" is anecdotal. MAU is measurable. If the numbers are stagnant, saying it feels busier doesn't change the trajectory.

I'm also not claiming automation is the only way Lemmy can grow. I'm saying it's one tool for solving the empty-community problem. If you have a better scalable way to get thousands of mostly dead communities active, great. Build it.

As for AI, yes, I use it. I also write software to automate repetitive work. That's kind of the point of software.

Attacking the tool I used to phrase an argument is a lot easier than addressing the argument.

Still took linux years. You sound like it needs to happen yesterday.

Cross posts isn't the answer. People see that as an dead community.

It would probably help if your AI can check if a post is labeled as OC (I guess a simple local language model should be enough for something this trivial, maybe some edge case detection for manual review) and re-label it as a repost.

I think you're completely confusing the barriers to entry.

Linux had to overcome hardware compatibility, drivers, software availability, installation complexity, gaming support, OEM deals, and decades of Windows dominance. And even after billions in corporate investment, desktop Linux still isn't mainstream.

Lemmy is a fucking website. Click a link, make an account, start using it. The barrier isn't remotely comparable.

Getting Lemmy from 35k MAU to meaningful critical mass should be infinitely easier than getting people to replace their entire operating system.

And an empty community looks a hell of a lot more dead to me than one with relevant posts waiting for people to discuss them.

This is literally the first time anyone has raised the OC labeling issue with me. And yes, that's easy to fix. I can add a check for OC labels and either reject those posts or correctly mark them as reposts.

This is exactly the kind of feedback I'd rather get: identify a concrete problem and I'll fix the tooling, instead of jumping straight to "ban the account."

Took years

A community with just post and only one person posting everyday is more dead than an empty one

You're ignoring the 99% of people who consume far more than they create.

An empty community gives them nothing. A community with one person consistently posting relevant content gives lurkers something to read, vote on, and eventually comment on.

Will one poster make a thriving community? Obviously not. But you need something there before the other 99% have anything to engage with.

"Keep it empty until organic posters magically arrive" is how communities stay empty.