That all sounds like progress.Thank you and the team for your hard work!

Hi! Mod here there. Would love to see your contributions! Or anyone’s for that matter. Thanks for noticing!

Here’s a lemmy dev’s essay selection. Now, to be clear, I’m fine with the reading list. I’m all for reading. And I support his right to espouse whatever political beliefs he wishes. But I understand the central Lemmy devs do espouse these beliefs, and the .ml sites are hardline political sites with little allowance for divergent opinion. It’s easy to get banned there. And they defederated for a reason.

https://github.com/dessalines/essays

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.

Users who block do so out of personal interest. That is, there’s something they don’t want to see, so they remove it from their feed. This is as intended. Therefore, those who persistently downvote have different reasons than simply not wanting to see something. No, either they’re voting tactically to benefit their own submission, as OP suggests, or to suppress the existence of whatever content they’re voting on. In both cases, these are the bad actors you refer to. Because their interest in voting is not to curate but to destroy. That particular community, or perhaps the site itself.

I think there are people on Lemmy who wish to see NSFW content entirely removed from the network. We saw an immediate defederation by the .ml communities, for example. These are closely linked to Lemmy devs, who seem to have an ideological purpose behind creating Lemmy, .ml standing for Marxist-Leninist. Now, ironically, Marx and Engles both wrote in support of women’s economic and sexual freedom. I think Engles in particular would have been pleased at the idea of women doing with their bodies as they wish, even if that was exhibitionist on a platform like this. And it should be noted, the Leninist October Revolution led to a sexual liberation movement in Russia that was only suppressed by Stalin after he gained power.

I don’t think devs and the .ml community have read deeply into the original sources they espouse. But regardless, I think there are some people who want to see LemmyNSFW fail. And they’re actively working to achieve that end.

I don’t know motives. I can’t read minds. But that it drives away contributors is something I’m pretty sure of.

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 ate 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 /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.