Tl;dr: I think we have too much “empty” content and noise here and it drags down the place for 2 years now. Does PieFed include an approach to change the situation?

I’m sorry, this is going to be a bit of a rant. And about PieFed’s role in the “Lemmy” community and more broadly, what I think the place should be about. Feel free to skip this, unless you have a good amount of time to waste to read my long post and you want to think about the future of the community here.

To preface this: I’m mainly here on the Threadiverse for the comments. To have meaningful conversations with people. That could be the charm of this place. Yet, that’s regularly not what happens here.

The high-frequency posters use Lemmy to dump the news of the day and re-post memes. And that’s okay if people want that, I myself try to cut down a bit on news shaped by social media, so again it’s mainly the comment thread underneath that I deem useful, not the post itself, since we have the news at a bazillion other places and it’s not what sets this place apart. (Plus I think following the outcry of the day is corrosive and usually less informative than it seems, so I went further and actively unsubscribed from many of the big communities here.)

And the now more meaningful (to me) part isn’t huge by any means. I comment on things and write answers to questions, some communities work very well and it leads to a conversation or I can help someone with their Linux woes. Half the time at least I type something into the void and it feels like I’ve wasted my time since I don’t get any replies, maybe one or two upvotes at best and not even OP engages. So I wonder why they even made the post. Clearly not because they want to talk about something.

I think the interesting part of the Threadiverse needs to grow so I can have meaningful conversations here. When I look at the user count of Lemmy, I see how it stagnates at about 45k users for 2 years now. Sometimes we get an influx of a few thousand users but we’re not attractive to them, so we always lose them again. And the place just stays whatever it is. I think not really attracting people and at the same time losing that many people constantly (who actively volunteered to have a look at the place) tells us something.

I think we could do better than that and set the place apart from countless other platforms in many ways. But that seems to a minority opinion in the bigger Threadiverse. The Lemmy devs regularly say it doesn’t need to grow and it’ll maybe grow organically (which it doesn’t). Most users here tell me we need to dump more posts in an desperate attempt to kickstart engagement. I think we’ve tried that for 2 years now and it clearly doesn’t work. On the contrary, it’s kind of empty (or fabricated) content and I’ll find out once I try to engage, that these are lower quality, less engagement than some other posts. And it actively drowns the few people talking to each other in added noise. I think the idea to address the issue this way is exactly why Lemmy stagnates and why we always lose all the users that come here, sign up to have a look and then leave again, because this isn’t what they’ve been looking for. (And this is a multi-faceted issue, we have some other drama and issues here as well, but this post is long enough, so I’ll skip that here, feel free to add your perspective in the comments.)

Now this week I’ve complained a bit, since I saw piefed.social communities with really high-quality conversation. And then the same people come, determine we need more content, and they dump re-posts of the lemmy.ml equivalent over their heads. And then I’ve taken tens of minutes out of my day to reply to posts elsewhere (not a piefed community) and give a nuanced perspective, only to find out it’s unmarked Reddit re-posts, and I’ve basically wasted my time. It wasn’t a genuine question in need for my answer, I was betrayed, tricked into increasing the number of comments underneath something that wasn’t even genuine. When I could have spent that time interacting with high-quality conversations instead, which definitely exist as well. It’s just that those people drain that. And I can’t even tell which is which.

So it actively takes away from quality content. And I end up with a feeling like with the Reddit content bots, fabricating engagement. Which I dislike and specifically avoid. And it makes the entire place feel kind of empty to me, despite the many posts we have each day.

I think first of all people really need to stop dumping posts in an ill-conveived attempt to help. It’s a misconception. We need more comments here, not posts. Yet they do the opposite and their user profiles rarely have comments, just hundreds of posts. If you want to grow and foster the place, add comments.

PieFed

That’s my perspective, feel free to tell me how it feels to you. I’m definitely not against posts, just against fabricating them, and focusing on an unfit approach instead of doing the right thing.

Now my question: Does PieFed want to address that issue (if it really is an issue to more people than just me)? Is PieFed just a piece of technology, connecting me to the same community, just with an arguably better approach? Or does it go further? Push towards a certain atmosphere, change the community and behaviour? Do we do higher quality communities on piefed.social or are they basically the same thing as the ones before, just on a different domain? Do we go as far as to kick the re-posters so at least the posts aren’t just exactly the same?

That’d be mainly social engineering. And I’d really welcome if we had ideals and a clear vision of where to go. We kind of have that. In contrast to some other Fediverse software where I can’t see a clear vision.

And then we have technology. We could devise tools to address it. And PieFed already is about providing better tools to address some things. We have an ambivalent view of concepts like Karma. And algorithms to steer attention. I could try to address this with software. Calculate scores and devalue everyone who dumps posts and doesn’t contribute to the conversation. That’s likely going to give some advantage to conversation itself and foster genuine engagement. Do we want to do that?

And as a bonus question: What’s with the entire voting system? Seems I deem different things interesting than what’s popular. And that’s all the scores underneath posts and comments tell us. So it’s of little use to me. A post with 5 upvotes could be as interesting as one with 250 of them, and that happens each day to me. Once I switch the sorting method from “new” to something else, what it does is make lots of interesting content disappear from my feeds.

References:

• Are some questions here just to simulate activity?
• Please be Advised for Help Farmers
• Content jacking/reposting is a problem on Lemmy. and this comment highlighting how what makes other places “great is the community and not the posts.”
• Statistics for Lemmy on the Fediverse Observer
• PieFed features for growing healthy communities and PieFed Features
• Moderation & the design of social platforms

I’ve “flaired” this “Feature request”. Mind this is an opinion piece containing my perspective (and preaching). I’d like to hear your’s and request the name PieFed to encompass a clear vision, to be not just technology but a broader approach to shape the nature of the society we want to create. And put in lots of effort to actively lead us towards accomplishing more than we do today.

And I definitely need some good ideas and tools to turn my feeds into something that caters to my own needs and wants. If there’s some overlap with other people, we could talk about some specifics.