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.
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.
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.
I know you're relatively new around here and there's been a lot of discussion and changes regarding downvotes in recent months. They were completely disabled for a while, but currently you need to be a subscribed member of a community for it to register. You are not alone I'm your feelings regarding user behavior. I appreciate that you're sharing yourselves at least!
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.
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.
We're working on the hostility aspect, it's slowly improving, and we're slowly getting more OC posters, it just takes time.
As an admin I see more and more posts in general and more OC posts every day. Our growth is slow and organic, and until there's larger roadblocks on reddit it'll probably stay that way, but given reddit is going public this year, we will most likely see some of those road bumps start to happen.
Until then, the admin team and mods are working to get her to reduct toxicity and make it a good place to post, we've even implemented some bespoke code to prevent mass downvotes, and we're talking about implementing some sort of automod. We will continue to improve the experience as best we can and we will continue to slowly but surely grow.
I disagree with the first of your statements. I think that where it's going is in three directions which are pulling against each other.
Direction one: a feeder platform for Only Fans for people that crave interaction with the models
Direction two: a low effort, low engagement platform where a small number of power posters upload a lot of links and content for people who don't engage with the communities other than voting.
Direction three: People that want to build an active kink community but aren't calculating on the fans of the other two directions flooding out their content. Also, from my observations, these people have relatively little to offer fans of the other directions.
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.
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 would like to see two things. First, more porn. It's on the right track but keep it going. Have some of the more niche topics be more popular.
Second, more discussions like this. Ask BDSM has around 5 posts. Yes this group has some. But more respectful and good discussions is something I'd like more of.
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
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
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
This isn’t a feature of the instance specifically but a feature that really helped me find new NSFW content. In certain Reddit apps I was able to filter by only NSFW content and in one there was a random NSFW subreddit option. It was so helpful to be able to easily discover new content. No Lemmy app has implemented anything with a NSFW focus.
I agree, discoverability of these these types of things needs to be better. Perhaps we can implement something like that, or have a community of the week or something. This is a very good point.
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.