Blaze (he/him)

  • 24 Posts
  • 47 Comments
Joined 16 days ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2025
  • Blaze (he/him)@piefed.ziptoAsk@piefed.social•Are some questions here just to simulate activity?English
    2·
    8 hours ago

    Replying here for your edit

    Yes, I like that. I wish the Piefed communities were to pick up on that approach. I think it’s excellent and often leads to above average quality.

    Beehaw probably went a bit too far by defederating LW and SJW. A lot of users on LW and SJW are valuable people, cutting from all of them at the same time seems a bit much.

    I often feel the content in the high volume quality drowns out the other stuff. For example I’ve completely missed the post in the Fedigrow community you linked, because other things showed up for me and buried it.

    You said somewhere else that you use New as a filter. Have you tried using Piefed feeds to be able to track different topics separately? I have a “movies” feed, a “privacy one”, and that allows me to keep an eye on everything posted on that topic without having that content buried in the Subscribed feed.

    Yeah I know. But I feel this place shouldn’t be full of conversation starters. The important thing are the conversations themselves. And people like it if they’re genuine. Which isn’t entirely the case here.

    It’s also important to keep in mind that we can’t expect a single poster (LadyButterFly) to keep this community active by herself. I understand that cm0002 posts aren’t ideal, but at the same time they allow to relieve a bit of the pressure that a single poster has.

    I am the only poster on !lego@piefed.social . It makes me question regularly if it’s still worth it to post there, as it seems I’m the only person on the whole platform bothered enough to post about that topic. “Shouting in the void” is a regular issue for single poster on a community (https://lemmy.zip/post/14347368 ), and I would prefer to avoid that to LadyButterFly.

    If you are interested in raising the quality of this community, could you maybe try to post here once a day? Then we could probably consider discussing with other people whether we should change the stance against questions repost. If not, it would probably be better to keep them.

    I’d rather have just the interesting articles.

    We probably all would, but that’s where the crowdsourced voting is supposed to help. If you want to have a more active approach, you can try to post on !fedigrow@lemmy.zip to see if other people would like to start a “curated technology” community with you, and see if there is interest?

  • Blaze (he/him)@piefed.ziptoAsk@piefed.social•Are some questions here just to simulate activity?English
    2·
    9 hours ago

    My point is more, we’ve been trying to do it this way for like one and a half year now. And I think it doesn’t work. As we can see in the numbers, the approach we do, leads to stagnation. It’s been pretty much 45k users all the time and it never grows. That’s likely because we do things like we do.

    Interestingly enough, if you look a bit back there was actually an influx, from 45k to 55k, from March to April, mostly when people were looking for non-US alternatives

    https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120

    Since then, we’ve been back to the 45k numbers. If we ask people why they left the platform (I’ve did it a few people who were announcing they were leaving), the main issue they have is not even the lack or saturation of content, but the duplication. With many communities being the same, but on different servers, it’s difficult for a new comer to know where to find posts and content to read, without even talking about replying.

    As you’re aware, that’s something that Piefed has corrected, so that could help a lot with adoption.

    My speculation is, if we’d do it differently and had a substantially better atmosphere, more comments, less news and less of the same content from other platforms, we’d start to grow. Instead we follow the old approach and we know that makes us flat out at 45k users, which isn’t great. I mean we’ve tried it for quite some time now. If you ask me, I think it’s clear it’s just not going to do it.

    I suggested it in another comment, but feel free to try to influence communities into having a better atmosphere. Report comments or posts you think are inappropriate. The general issue you might face is either mods not willing to change their rules, or not willing to share powers. My personal stance on it is that we are actually lacking moderators. It’s a tiring job, and we currently don’t have the best tools to do it. Again, another topic where Piefed can help.

    That’s why it kind of pains me to see we just import AskLemmy content and don’t just dare to be better and have confidence in us.

    Are there any specific questions you wouldn’t like to be asked? I keep an eye on the community, and I rarely see anything that looks like it should be removed.

    Also, this community doesn’t have that much volume compared to the LW and lemmy.ml versions, so it’s probably not too bad for now. We can always revisit later if we see it’s becoming too much.

    We could probably also benefit from a “Hide post” feature, the way Lemmy does it. It could help people customizing their experience: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/762

    Thank you for your kind words!

  • Blaze (he/him)@piefed.ziptoAsk@piefed.social•Are some questions here just to simulate activity?English
    1·
    10 hours ago

    Copy pasting my answer to your other comment in the !fediverse@lemmy.zip thread as that already addresses a few points.

    I think what we need is foster a nice atmosphere. Genuine human conversation underneath posts with above average quality. That’d grow Lemmy and make it a better place. (And instead we dump more posts/noise, and we can see where we’re headed with that.)

    Beehaw wanted to have this kind of very curated approach, their communities aren’t much more active that on non-curated instances.

    If you want very in-depth conversation, maybe try to revive !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca ? It seems to fit your requirements.

    You talk about original content, it is not contradictory to have both OC and reposts from elsewhere. A thing to keep in mind is that people posting OC will only do so if they get enough reactions on it. !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works used to be quite busy when it first started, but the main mod who used to post a lot hasn’t been active for a year, probably because there weren’t enough people here to justify posting here on top of Reddit.

    People upvote memes, the ragebait of the day, simple truths.

    It depends. I post about things I care about. My latest post was about a new movie coming, there were 68 comments: https://piefed.zip/post/153138 , and it was a legit conversation, even though it was a repost from a new movie poster. Reposting existing content isn’t contradictory with having genuine conversations.

    I’m pretty sure we’re the minority here. Most people seem to like it the other way around. (Need…more…posts in everyone’s timeline.) I’m pretty sure it’s also a big part of the equation of why Lemmy always stagnates and we’re stuck at 45k users. We’ve been doing it the “re-post” way a long time now, and we can see the results of that. We shove around content because of some reasons, but we should come up with original and genuine content instead.

    It’s a multi factor issue.
    To have genuine conversations on a certain topic, there need to be at least a minimum userbase interested in that topic.
    With 45k MAU, we can talk about generic topics. The more userbase we get, the more niche topics we can have.

    When I talk about Lemmy on Reddit to try to get those additional users we need, the first issues they have with the platform is the political stances of the devs, and the fact that a lot of communities are still hosted on the hosted instance (you’ve read cm0002 comment, so you’re aware).

    Lemmy has a bad reputation due to this, and while this will remain true, this will prevent us from getting more people. That’s also why Piefed raises a lot of hopes.

    Last potential example of growth: a niche community moving.

    Db0 had a large influx of users (625) following a post on Reddit about their instance: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37167077

    !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com is mostly reposts with news about piracy, not a lot of OC content, but it being out of Reddit is enough for people to use it.

    Now about this comment

    But… now people say “Here, you need more content”, come here with their garbage truck full of ideas and posts they picked up at other places and dump them over my head.

    Are you referring to the community we’re in? As we discussed before, a question can be a good conversation starter among other people, even if the person posting it isn’t that involved in the follow up conversation. Of course, if it’s a personal question or asking for advice, that’s a different story, but even then other people might be in the same situation and chime in about their experience.

    If it’s another community, I’m curious as well.

    I sometimes post 6 comments or so a day and sometimes I don’t get a single reply.

    I had a look at your latest comments. Seems like a few of them that never got any reply were on !technology@lemmy.zip, which usually has a lower engagement ratio than the LW version. Maybe comment mostly on the LW one for now? Not ideal for decentralization, but perfect is the enemy of the good, and that way you’re more likely to get answers.

    My feed now has more things than I can read in a day.

    You’re lucky in that sense. I’m not that interested in tech, memes or news, so as you can guess the relevant content for me here is limited. Which is why I would like other people to join as well. !movies@piefed.social is basically someone else and me posting, it says a lot about how low the interest is in other topics on the platform as a whole.

  • Blaze (he/him)@piefed.ziptoAsk@piefed.social•Are some questions here just to simulate activity?English
    2·
    10 hours ago

    Edit: Btw since you’re here: How do people who post a lot handle notifications or the comment section? Do you come back and engage at times, or are these posts more fire and forget? I genuinely don’t know but I assume it’d be thousands of notifications if you had turned them on?

    Piefed helps a lot with that. Usually I will read the first 10 or 20 comments, then disable notifications. At that time, usually the ball is already rolling, and other people will keep the conversation going.

  • Blaze (he/him)@piefed.ziptoAsk@piefed.social•Are some questions here just to simulate activity?English
    2·
    23 hours ago

    You’re on Piefed, so thankfully when posts share the same link, the comments from all crossposts are showed in the same place, so that already helps with the duplication of communities.

    That’d grow the place in my opinion.

    Both are required I would say. You need someone to post the article or ask the first question, and you need other people to comment. As you said, you are here for the comments, but someone needs to create the post in the first place.

    Trying to make me engage with content to grow someone’s platform or community, or use me and the users for some motivation is very close to what Reddit and other platforms do.

    The main difference is that here there’s no single plaftorm. The communities that poster posts to are spread on LW, lemmy.dbzer0.com, lemdro.id, piefed.social, etc.

    People can move communities to other instances if they want to. It’s a quite different situation from Reddit. Nobody here is making any profit from interactions.