I’ve BEEN saying this for a while now. How Lemmy users need to welcome new people with interests that are different than their own. People from different generations than their own.

I’ve given ideas how to make starting an account easier. The concept of picking a home instance for someone who’s never heard terms like “instance”, “federated” or “decentralized” can be quite intimidating to start. And if you fuck up, and randomly choose the wrong instance? You have to start over. All your comment history gets left behind.

So people are going to choose the most active instance, trusting the idea that OTHER people know what they’re doing.

I gave the idea that Lemmy needs to adopt standards across all instances so you can push a button and move your account. All your data would come with you.

Instead I was given a list of technical reasons why it would never work. The basis of these reasons came down to “it won’t work because it would be a lot of work”.

I hear a lot of people on here complain about corporate greed, and enshitification, but you gotta admit that they do get shit done.

In 2010 Steve Jobs was reviewing the new iphone prototype. Jobs said he wanted it slimmer, and wanted it airtight. The developers said it was pretty airtight, and there was no more room inside to make it slimmer.

Essentially telling Jobs that his demands were not going to be met because it would be a lot of work. So Jobs stood up, grabbed the prototype, walked to a fish tank, and dropped it in. It sank, and bubbles came out. Thus destroying it.

He said “See that? Bubbles. There’s air inside, which means there’s room inside. It also not airtight. Make it smaller, and make it airtight.” Then he left the room. When it released to the public, the final design was smaller, and airtight.

Not saying it WON’T be hard work to make true account migration a reality, but it IS possible. The developers just figuratively need their prototype dunked in a metaphorical fish tank.

Because until this process is easier, and users are greeted with a friendlier userbase, people are just going to sign up, realize they fucked up, realize the experience isn’t great, and leave. If they have access to reddit, they will leave.

It seems everytime I search for a topic all the results are from a year ago. Which suggests to me that reddit fucked up, users exploded here, gave it a chance, disliked it, and left.

Meanwhile, I point out just SOME of the glaring problems. But instead of embracing the problem and starting a think tank on how to fix it, my posts are instead turned into an echo chamber of how wrong I am. How the ideas will never work, and the problems presented persist to this day.

All because I’m thinking from the perspective of the normie 95%, and not the linux minded 5%. Which really places an artificial self installed glass ceiling on top of you.

Bit discouraging tbh

The decline might be because instance owners have strengthened the account creation process. I remember in “the early days” how there were an insane amount of bots, but now it seems like most of them have been banned or mitigated.

Again the interesting thing is that a lot of other sites have a huge difference in numbers. But they are all saying the same thing, “Active” users are declining or getting close to equilibrium but number of users are increasing. Strange.

I personally think that piefed/mastodon/other servers federating with lemmy might be messing up the numbers in some way. Both pumping up the numbers and making others “go down” in different sites and how they are pulling the data. Like if I respond via my mastodon account, is that a “new” account? Does that make it pop up as an active user? If I dont repost it via the mastodon account for a while, will I now be an inactive account, even though I still look at lemmy with it? Im not sure.