Would be nice to see more OC content and even the bit more artsy attempts, like BW photos, polaroids and such, the kind of content that you can still find on tumblr or some reddit subs (bwnudes, bwerotica, etc).
We often browse all platforms for inspiration but this dry repost from redgif and the same pictures from the last 20 years is kinda vibe killing, might work for some tho, it’s not much to “lure” more people because, as we see, it can be easily found everywhere else. So why would they “install one more app”.
So in general the community needs to grow with more genuine content creators, but it’s kinda hard upscale without getting flooded by OF spam machines (like on reddit).
How to recruit? Good question.
The positive: we get way more upvotes here compared to reddit because of the less noise i guess. Not so many comments tho, except our only fan here Pirate_Barnes 🥰
I’m guilty of upvoting and not commenting, I’ll have to make more of an effort because you always post great pics of yourselves 🙂
Thank you for the love 🥰
Where is it going -> porn
Where do I want it to go -> porn
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I think first, there’s a decline in the general Lemmy userbase. Partly, this is because of unaddressed Federation bugs that have persisted now for weeks without being publicly addressed. That’s driven a lot of contributors away, which has feed on effects across communities. That’s structural and beyond LemmyNSFW, but affects us.
Second, here at LemmyNSFW, poor community moderation. There are dead communities admins will not address because of top mod ownership rules. But that so many subscribe to dead communities shows the decline. Reddit prunes unmoderated communities for a reason.
Mods also let creeps post horrible comments and don’t filter them out or ban abusive users, and this has driven away contributors. Especially amateurs and OF creators. I’m of the opinion they are bread and butter here and driving them away reduces overall value of the site. So while I’m into the kink side, I want c/gonewild to thrive.
Third, there are the serial downvoters. Admins thought requiring people to join communities in order to vote would solve this problem. No, because their goal is to suppress contributions overall, so they just join to downvote. This is why you see a top community like c/anal or c/blowjobs wither with no submissions. They’re killed early on. And that drives away contributors. Whether that’s contention over the top page or just a desire to see LemmyNSFW fail, I don’t know. But IMO downvotes only express aggression and don’t help curate content. They serve to drive away contributors.
We need more contributors, not less. And the decline in contributions says something is seriously wrong. It’s like a reverse Tragedy of the Commons, where instead of overgrazing by all, we have a few trampling the commons out of spite.
Finally, there is the lack of rich media. Only pics and RedGifs, both limited. And gifs get converted to webm, which don’t autoplay or loop in LemmyUI. Another Lemmy issue, beyond the site here, but is one cause of declining interest IMO.
This is JMO and is said with all due respect and deference to the community and site admins.
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I don’t know motives. I can’t read minds. But that it drives away contributors is something I’m pretty sure of.
The three are not exclusive to each other. All three add volume. Porn needs volume. Quality is what the user like, which like porn tastes are diverse.
Maybe I’m just not looking in the right spots, but I’d like to see more engagement. One of the things I enjoyed most about Reddit was that the comments were generally pretty lively, even if it was just folks being horny. Here it feels a lot like screaming into the void, people see posts and votes are cast, but there’s not really any conversation. I get that nobody wants to be the guy in need of horny jail, but I feel like something as simple as “that porn star is super hot, have you seen her in X?” or “she has a great figure, but only posts mildly on Instagram” would be a nice way to this place feel less dead.
What I miss is normal nudes, the subreddit. The place for unposed nudes to show different body types, anybody, no boners and no advertising for your paid site; with a “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all unless poster asked specifically for critique” comment policy.
Also nakedprogress. I miss the nonsexual nudes sites I guess.
Other than that, I don’t think what else I want is possible, all NSFW sites are just guy driven with nearly everything for men’s taste. That I don’t think can be adjusted if the audience is overwhelmingly male.l, it’s not a problem with lemmynsfw, just a state of the world thing.
I think it’s going OK overall, growing slowly and organically seems the way to go.
I really miss the normalnudes community too and the nakedprogress communities were always so supportive.
Other than that, I don’t think what else I want is possible
Out of curiosity, what exactly are you looking for if you don’t mind me asking?
Oh, just a space more balanced between men and women. I wouldn’t have any idea how to draw in more women, really have no idea even if my own preferences are typical.
Just so I’m clear in interpreting what you’re saying, are you implying that there is too much male content or that you would like to see a better 50/50 balance?
I think it’s mostly just because lemmy in general is more filled with men, and men are the market for most all of the pro sex world, so almost all the content is made specifically to appeal to men, and some of it incidentally appeals to women (or some of us) but not on purpose.
Unfortunately that’s most of the porn world in general and not a Lemmy specific issue I’m afraid 🫤 The smaller, techier community certainly skews that a bit further too.
As a bi man I know what appeals to me, but having women come around even if it’s just to leer isn’t ever a bad thing and would probably be healthy for this place. Do you have any specific kind of content that appeals to you that you wish you could find?
You mean appeals like a turn-on? Back in the days of print magazines, we used to have a porn addled friend who worked at a sex shop, had an enormous collection and would bring us boxes of porn, and every time he showed up, he’d say “And Forums, for the ladies!” I think he was pretty spot on. I do enjoy nudes, all genders, but more in a happy or interested way not usually much of a turn on? Except for the ones with implied power play, man in charge, or the 2 bi men 1 woman ones, those are hot. But mostly stories are where it’s at.
I guess my issue is that other than ideological reasons (reddit alternatives are good) there’s nothing that NSFW Lemmy does better than anywhere else i go.
My niches/kinks/preferences aren’t represented or are actively denigrated in the bigger NSFW communities and the smaller more niche ones don’t have the activity or quantity of posts to make this place a “must visit” or introduce me to things i haven’t seen before
Instead of becomes an app i only remember to check every week or two, compared to something like Mastodon, which i use daily.
then when i try to submit something to a community the Sync app gives me an “this image cannot be uploaded” error with no further explanation and i decide that posting the 5-10 images i found actually isn’t worthwhile after all.
I’m really glad this place exists but I’m struggling to participate in it
My niches/kinks/preferences aren’t represented or are actively denigrated in the bigger NSFW communities
Did you try FetLife?
Oh I’m sorry, i meant specifically “photos and illustrations of the kinds of women i specifically like tend to get downvoted here on NSFW Lemmy and the niche communities aren’t active enough”
The corresponding Reddit subreddits are active enough that i don’t have have to visit any general purpose subreddits.
IRL I’m happily married. Spouse and i are pretty open minded about porn/hentai/NSFW
Ah ok it was just a suggestion. Because on fet pretty much anything goes, no kinkshaming :) But yes Reddit is still pretty good for some niches.
It’s indeed sad that it happens here sometimes though it’s more people downvoting in the hope to see less of the content in their feeds. I don’t think that actually works because the amount of content here is so low that you get to see everything anyway unless you block the sub communities.
Yup. Not enough content. Too many debates.
Also nothing unquie.
It’s porn. Keep is simple. More is more. Let’s the place evolve into niches rather than force it and control it at the get go. It’s like worrying about macros when there is a famine.
I would recommend uploading to carbox or redgifs and pasting the link into the post, even on the subs on reddit mod that’s what I tell people. The site image hosting solutions on both lemmy and reddit aren’t great.
I personally like catbox because you don’t have to make an account.
Additionally, growth takes time, some of the kinks with the platform will be slowly worked out, and more people will come, our usersbase since the initial dropoff of users has slowly being going up for the most part.
About a decade ago, Reddit was also a site you checked every week or so. I think our growth is already faster than those old days of Reddit, and it may take a year or two for things like better more users, better mod tools, better post algorithms, and more stability in apps to show up, but for a social media network that isn’t for profit, lemmy us doing very well and will continue to get better and better and thrive more and more
I’ve noticed a pretty glaring trend of OC posters creating an account, posting for a few days, and then disappearing never to be seen again. Posting studio and model content found on the corners of the internet is fine, but in the end it doesn’t actually drive much engagement, which is essentially the primary purpose of a link aggregator site. The primary content people engage on are going to be things that a person has taken the time to create themselves or something with a clear gimmick, like the ifyouhadtopickone or kink communities.
Personally, I’d say that the reason we’re seeing people drop off the site shortly after joining is because of the overall community at large. When anyone from the Fediverse can just drop in on a whim and comment something disparaging to someone who went out of their way to post themselves it really doesn’t feel great. Combine that with the fact that if you’re not a professional model or Onlyfans producer, you’ll be downvoted pretty heavily even with the rules changes in place.
I try my best to go out of my way to comment on anything I reasonably can and I don’t know if I can place exactly why, but the instance feels both simultaneously hostile to post and to comment/engage in at the same time.
The downvoting on pure amateur content seems quite aggressive. But perhaps that’s a matter of building the right community or communities for that particular aspect. Wife and I love sharing content but it’s not always going to be hyper-produced. Can’t think of a real solution but it might end up driving us away. I’m sure we are not alone on that sentiment.
Don’t judge me, I am a tech geek --and hopefully this doesn’t break any rules but, I’ve been working around Lemmy itself trying to figure out how to get some basic analytics for myself. Got some interesting --and perhaps obvious data points that I am looking forward to continue see develop as we share more OC material.
Positive Sentiment by Community is just a weighted average between up / down votes. It essentially shows me which communities are more/less welcoming to OC content produce by my wife and I. That’s all.
Perception by Community just distills the above purely on
upvotes / (upvotes + downvotes)represented as a %Engagement by Community on the other hand is the total of votes
up + down--I am working to include comments by anyone except the OP as well. This one, IMO, is the metric we should be watching to gauge true engagement.Cheers!
There does seem to be a problem with a lack of empathy with people wanting to share something that’s deeply personal. And I think you’re right that federation kind of works against those posters. Not all instances seem to have good manners when it comes to other people’s sexuality.
In the end that comes down to moderation. I don’t mean to imply that mods and admins are doing a bad job in any way, but they’ll always be fighting a losing battle. The manpower and tools just aren’t advanced enough to deal with it all before the damage is done.
I know you mentioned it in another comment and I’ve mentioned it before in the past, but the instance overall always feels like it’s having an identity crisis and doesn’t know what it wants to be. Sexuality is a very broad spectrum and the nature of that means that most people are going to find the sheer existence of certain parts of that spectrum that don’t include them unsavory or offensive.
Before anyone grabs a pitchfork, I’m not saying it should be a free for all and predatory things like pedo and beastiality absolutely need to be banned, but if you’re someone who isn’t into kink or gay or whatever else then there’s always going to be friction with those that are. Personally I’d say the instance as a whole needs to take a more specific stance on what it wants to host for this specific stage of growth.
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Restricting access would probably not be successful. It would just fragment and wall off significant sections of the already small communities.
The majority of OC posters on reddit also only post a few posts. I think our proportions are similar to theirs. I don’t see this instance or the fediverse as less empathetic than reddit or any other large social network users.
I think the doom and gloom is overstated.
Of course we should always strive for improving mod tools and banning bad actors.
I think that if you aren’t beating reddit on the empathy metric then you’re not doing at all well. I was struck forcefully by the opinion of the OC poster on the downvotes debate who said:
When I started posting here our content was heavily downvoted, even in communities appropriate for it. This was very discouraging. It made us feel bad about doing something we should be doing for fun.
And then you’ve got various other people talking about things like the lack of downvotes devaluing upvotes, which to my mind is just childish nonsense in the same vein as the existence of trans people devaluing masculinity and femininity.
The sheer glaring entitlement of people that are not sharing anything wanting the right to make people feel a bit shit about themselves…
Reddit has hundreds of millions of users and the platform is highly active, making it suitable for pros to submit work for profit. Or as a means for amateurs to break in and see if they can build an audience.
Reddit is a business plan for many creators. The large audience there gives submitters incentive to put up with the horrible abuse they face from poor moderation and terrible users. And still, as you note, OC creators flee. Comparing our relative numbers of fleeing contributors per capita as being similar to Reddit isn’t the win you seem to be arguing for.
Look, when some of the largest communities don’t see posts for weeks, that’s a sign something is wrong. We have disincentivized contribution to the point where stagnation has set in. That’s a clear sign some change is in order. What that change should be, I don’t know. But simply refusing to accept these clear signs as doom and gloom leads to refusing to recognize a problem. And if you don’t see a problem, you can’t act to fix it.
We saw a decrease in users when there were mass downvotes, we changed how downvotes worked and since then we’ve seen and increase in activity.
We’re talking about implementing automod features, not sure how soon that’ll happen, but it will definitely happen.
Another thing that disincentives some people is the lack of filtering of rude comments, if a comment is rude or downvoted on reddit it is automatically hidden, so maybe that is something we can look into for when we implement automod
Just know that we’re not just sitting on our laurels doing nothing, the mods and admins are constantly talking about how to improve this community
That all sounds like progress.Thank you and the team for your hard work!
