I can’t say for certain but the fediverse is prone to behave unpredictability at times. You’re probably better off thinking about Lemmy as a collection of websites rather than one central hub like reddit or more traditional sites.

Instances go up and down all the time as well. Sometimes when a site goes down for maintenance (and probably other things like sync issues) the subscriber numbers will fluctuate because a bunch of them are on a site that “doesn’t exist” for a short time while it’s being worked on.

Everything you do on Lemmy takes longer than what you’re probably used to on a more traditional website too. Your posts to your local instance should be instantaneous but sometimes it can take minutes, hours, or even days for those actions to fully federate to other places. This is true of posts, replies, votes, and subscriptions.

There is also defederation which can cause the behavior you described. You are on one of the largest instances on Lemmy and some people have soured on it and its users. It’s entirely possible some of your subscribers were on an instance that defedderated with lemmy.world or something.

TLDR: You are likely overthinking the impact of bots and putting too much importance on subscription numbers. Make sure the community you care about can actually reach the people who might be interested and hope for the best.

Only slightly related but maybe you’d be interested -

I put together a help post for new Lemmy users on my instance describing how to find and join new places on Lemmy. Maybe these resources will help you understand more about how Lemmy works and how you can get your community off the ground.

https://walledgarden.xyz/post/1600683

Bots are not nearly as widespread on Lemmy as they are on reddit. You’re letting your frustration with a slow growing community turn into “old man yells at cloud.”

The main use of bots is for federating. They join communities but don’t interact with posts at all. Even that requires an instance admin to set up so it’s not like there are thousands of them or something. Bedsides that the rest of them are mostly news and information shares.

Lemmy is much smaller than reddit and has more barriers to entry and community growth. Expect it to take months to get a community off the ground.

It seems like you don’t actually understand how to get your community posts to more people.

Lemmy doesn’t spread content to all other instances by default. The whole process is pretty clunky and takes far more effort than it should to promote new places.

Have you announced the community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world or anything? Discovery on Lemmy leaves a lot to be desired in its current form.

Won’t somebody save me from myself!

Can you point us to some disagreements the people in your instance have had with moderators? Do you have any specific links for us to view? If censorship is happening I’d like to know more about it.

No because there aren’t any. There are very few active users on WG and I have no desire for it to ever become very big. I originally created it for myself to experiment with and I don’t really promote or advertise the instance itself even though people are welcome to join.

The people who have joined tend to share common interests so things have mostly remained the same as when it was just me. The “walled” part of WG is more or less the application process itself, since it removes easy access for troll and bot accounts.

I’m an instance owner (it’s very small) and the only thing I don’t tolerate is hate messages and subversive spam (“www,BuyGoldHere123,Spam,me”). I haven’t yet needed to delete anything my users created.

I’ve seen some of these spam posts in our communities before but always from outside instances. They are very easy to keep under control and I wouldn’t consider that censorship, just garbage removal.

Ironic instance name for one you’re implying is uncensored.

I think it’s quite fitting for federated social media.

What censorship?

Plenty of people are delighted when the community they forgot they subscribed to months ago suddenly has new content!

Thanks for this. Both are new to me so I added them to the help post.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

Lemmyverse will let you search every community hosted by Lemmy instances that share data with it, which is most. If you set your home instance before you start clicking links they’ll open on your home instance so they are easier to subscribe to.

Here’s a recent post I put together with some more resources:

https://walledgarden.xyz/post/1600683

Edit- Also worth mentioning the Voyager interfaces offer a solution for this.

It’s reddit. You can do anything you want as long as you love the taste of boot.

What a shot!

This is an excellent point. Thanks for taking the time to add this!

If you’re using the Boost app, there is a toggle for it. You can find it by going to your profile and hitting the “Edit” button.

How would Lemmy identify who the bots are

They are meant to be self reporting/labeled by the creator. There is also a setting for that in the account page.

Note that these options will be slightly different to change on the webui but it can be done even if you aren’t a Boost user.

Maybe your instance is federating with someone new that does a lot of bot posting? Sometimes all it takes is one person on the instance to join a very active bot community and next thing you know members are seeing a ton of new bot posts.

Editing to add- On Lemmy you can turn off viewing bot accounts completely in your account settings if you don’t ever want to see them.

Always nice to have more music in the rotation, thanks for posting!

Constructive criticism or meaningful suggestions should be welcomed imo, and when opinions differ reactions like yours are some of the best. I appreciate that you aren’t hellbent on everyone fitting in the same box! Seriously, thank you for the civil interactions!

Footnote- I typed out a long-winded post about fediverse philosophy and decided this isn’t the place for it. Maybe in another thread.

There’s definitely merit in what you’re saying but I’m also fine with it staying how it is.

The idea is that it should be easy to share what you have on, but we’re all using different services. IMO the easiest thing is using Lemmy’s title filling feature which is the song name by default with Spotify links. I believe the other services like YouTube and tidal work similarly.

Many of the posts in that community are made by members while they are working, which also makes me hesitant to enforce title rules on them. Quick and easy posts are easy to blast out when all you have is a second or two. Maybe in time as it becomes more than just a handful of people posting it should be revisited.

FWIW I’m ok with the communities I create never becoming popular on Lemmy. Most are created for a small group of friends to mess around on where other services don’t fit the bill. I’d much rather have fun posting when the mood strikes than worry about fitting a particular posting guideline. If like-minded people happen to join in, awesome. If not, we were having fun before and we’ll continue to have fun without them!

There’s been a decent amount of activity at !sessionjams@sh.itjust.works and the music is always all over the place. Popular music, obscure music, non American music, pretty much everything depending on the day.

Pleasure to meet you comrade.