Finding/making friends on Lemmy is definitely possible. There are a handful of people I talk to outside of Lemmy every day that I originally met here a couple years ago.

I think it helps tremendously if you can find places to interact with others that are less combative than the news/politics/etc that can dominate the feeds here. If you have personal interests in music, movies, tv, or even just want to have casual conversations, there are plenty of communities for that here. Those places give everyone a chance to “break the ice” on a slightly more personal level that helps develop lasting friendships.

Trust/Honesty

You can’t build anything lasting on lies.

Symfonium is ridiculously customizable and well worth the one time cost IMO, but like you said it requires purchase and through the Play store.

DSub is on Fdroid and works well though it lacks many of the customization options that Symfonium has. It’s kind of like a mobile mode of the default Navidrome webUI.

Those are the two I keep installed at all times because I use them for different things. The other options for Android either had weird quirks I didn’t like or didn’t offer functionality I needed.

https://hexbear.net/post/207585

If you’re using the app, uninstall it. Delete your bookmarks, etc. Make it more than an idle thought to be on the site.

Use the time you would normally spend doomscrolling on reddit to do something productive on Lemmy. Look for new communities to join, reply to posts you would normally just upvote, post something to a community that could use a boost, etc. The place is far from empty but more interaction really helps to drive growth and build friendships.

See you around mate. 💚

if you’re keen to farm data.

I have enough projects already lol.

I wonder how much of that decrease is a result of instances shutting down and their users migrating off of Lemmy to platforms like PieFed and others. The users may not be completely gone, just not on Lemmy.

Good luck mate. It’s a little intimidating at first but it usually boils down to something simple. A slight misconfiguration or minor syntax error can cause pretty significant issues. You might have a look at your logs or try running in debug mode to see if anything jumps out at you.

EDIT: Do you have federation enabled in the admin panel? Also probably worth making sure you DON’T have private instance checked.

IIRC the way it works is by PMing you the API key to get started and you’re failing at that point. Are you sure your instance is federating? I don’t know anything about how fediseer works on the backend but if it’s not able to send you a PM that suggests you might not be federating at all or maybe you’re running a whitelist or something? I’d start investigating if your instance is reachable from other instances and if you’re able to send yourself a PM from another instance.

You’ll have to claim your instance on fediseer and have another instance endorse yours. It’s a system of trust to help keep bad actors from having too much influence over the platform and causing others grief.

Sorry but I’m not sure. Every time I’ve used that tool the setup has gone flawlessly. The first time you use it you put in your instance URL and it should output something for you to add to your DNS records. If you just made the DNS changes it can take a few minutes to several hours for those changes to be pushed out.

https://lemmy-federate.com/

I just post what I’m listening to at !eternalplaylist@crazypeople.online and other people can listen or not. There’s a bot that posts youtube links when you post paid services so pretty much anyone can listen to anything being shared.

!autoracing@crazypeople.online for motorsports.

I’ve been working on a bot to help with serving content to that community but it isn’t ready for deployment yet. Once it’s finished there should be a lot more content being posted more regularly there, but I want to do more testing and tuning before enabling it to make sure it’s not doing more harm than good.

To a certain extent I think the list of goals has sort of defaulted to development related stuff. A lot of the growth across the fediverse is being driven by whatever mass exodus is happening at any given time. There’s definitely a desire to onboard more people more organically but it’s hard when people are expecting drop in replacements for the largest social networks on the planet.

There seem to be a lot of people who are looking for easier ways to introduce people to federated social media as a whole. If you search around I’m sure you’ll find an assortment of posts outlining their ideas about what makes Lemmy/the fediverse harder to use. Maybe that’s a good place to start building a more comprehensive list of what’s needed to grow more on merit and not as a last resort.

If I’m understanding your question correctly the answer is “sort of.” The main community I know of is !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com which sees pretty regular activity but it’s more focused on promoting the fediverse rather than a checklist of goals. That’s the closest one to what you’re asking for that I’m aware of.

ye olde whippersnapper

It’s fine mate, I’m not here to crucify people who want to or have moved to piefed for any reason. People should be able to go where they feel comfortable and welcome and be happy about it. Do what you want and what works for you, of course. All I’m saying is that people should take note of what has happened and why, and do what they can to mitigate that problem going forward.

As long as communities are migrated and redirects are up before the last day of lemm.ee the transition will be miles ahead of what we’ve seen in the past where instances go dark without warning. Communities and users survived then and they will survive now I’m sure.

It’s just a bit strange to see all the people saying how they would’ve helped lemm.ee if they’d known sooner or if more cries would’ve gone out, and then nobody spins up instances to actually DO the things they say.

Ouch. Best of luck getting it back up and running ASAP.

I think the urgency is being blown out of proportion as a knee jerk to really crappy news. There is almost a month to move, which should be plenty of time for new instances to launch and communities to disperse. Even after the shutdown the rest of the fediverse will be able to redirect users to the new communities, wherever they are homed.

Again, I’m not against piefed or against people moving somewhere they feel more comfortable or like more. Those are positive things that the fediverse could definitely use. I just don’t understand why we can’t learn the lesson and move on instead of moving on and hoping it doesn’t happen again before more instances pop up.