I don't know that a lack of users across the platform to support nicher topics necessarily justifies the charge of "echo chamber". They are two different things.

I used to post everywhere.

Every single time that I go through the effort to contribute to another small community i somehow break some fucking rule and my post is removed despite there being 0 activity on that space for days.

Every time this happens, I block the space because it's a horrible experience to try to create content for the fediverse.

It feels the exact same as reddit, and the more mod and admin abuse that keeps happening, the more people will keep leaving and poating less.

Honestly, the next time I get a fucking un replyable automod message on this space that is "suppsed to be better than reddit" I think I am done contributing to the fediverse.

Nah its basically stable. Green is monthly which fluctuates with seasons (more people in northern hemisphere and spend more time online in winter months). The blue line is yearly rolling average and the initial spike takes a long time to work though giving impression of gradual decline.

This is fine. We don't need lemmy or the fediverse to take over completely immediately.

It's a good working prototype that's not a complete ghost town and that's good enough for now. It doesn't need to win everywhere immediately, it's fine if it's a working solution we can point to and new communities can be created if some people decide to and they won't exist in a complete vacuum.

The fediverse has been feeling really good lately. It's actually getting hard to scroll to the end of the frontpage.

Doesn't mastodon have that? You type in a keyword and then you add it as a "user."

Getting too big would attract the bots, corpos, and everything else that has ruined the internet. I'm fine with staying small.

Along with the newcomers comm I'm thinking about making those as default comms that new people are subscribed to.

Gotta balance out the doom.

Yea it is definitely a bit offputting. I'm not sure what the fix is given the world is quite shit right now. Most news is going to be less than great, so I guess we need more non-news content to help drown out the BS.

@rimu@piefed.social is this something hypothetically possible?

Because the only ones that are left post the same shit over, and over again. When people leave because the feed gets repetitive, they also leave the niche that they might have been interested in.

Then you get an echo chamber.

Good idea!

https://lemmy.world/modlog?userId=12629556

You can't ignore PieFed at this point anymore. I think the statistic is skewed without it.

which part, I can't see Piefed in the data

https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats

Piefied is at about 5k monthly users and rising, so that does help a bit. With that factored in the monthly users is probably about level over the last 2 years and comments are going up, although that could be the influence of bots as well.

Based on what I've seen, much of this could be from instances with redundant accounts shutting down.

In other words, a lot of folks can't sustain the burden of hosting an instance long term. That's fine, and expected.

Redundant accounts wouldn't count as active accounts, so if an account was dormant for a year prior to lemm.ee shutting down, it wouldn't register as an "active user" on a monthly check just because lemm.ee was still active.

This doesn't seem to be hoping for unlimited growth but rather that is has stagnated and is even falling. That can kill a community especially when it is as small as it is

Sure.

You'd probably end up seeing very few posts, though. Rather than filtering the timeline it might work best as a "notify me when posts with these keywords appear" function.