How can we make it more popular?
It’s essentially a brand new platform. A tiny dip a month after the initial boom is far from “losing users” and is not indicative of trends. I don’t understand why everyone is so obsessed with growing Lemmy as fast as possible.
Because a lot of the time you lose users because there aren’t enough users.
You also lose users when you’re basically asking your userbase to be alpha testers as you build from scratch. It’s fine, it’s an open source project.
People that are thinking this is some finished, capable competitor already are a little out of touch though. Which is unsurprising, given we’re all in a weird, dark corner of the internet atm.
And even if it stays small, the quality and community here is thriving. Sure, we have our trolls and junk but they don’t have nearly the influence or visibility as…ahem…other familiar platforms.
Depends on the communities… quite often they consist of one or two users (or bits) reposting old or current Reddit posts.
And certainly for more niche topics the communities tend to be dead.
Quite often there is little commenting or conversation.
The communities with the most conversation seem to be about Lemmy and the Fediverse…
But yes there are a couple of decent communities in my Home feed, but the whole needs to grow to get it to a tipping point where it provides an active and diverse (in topics and conversation) community.
Also, a lot of younger users started back to school. But I’m with ya. Let Lemmy grow organically. There are no advertisers or shareholders to appease here. There’s no need for explosive growth.
Fair.
Yeah we don’t need more assholes here. They can stay on the other site.
For the last time, there is no need. We are large enough. 400,000 people is a large town or small city. Remember:
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There are no investors to please
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No stock holders to appease
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No CEO to bootlick
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No ads to chase
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No e-peen to contest
We are free at last. Free your mind from the tail chase of corporate controlled social media.
There are like 50,000 active users. That is the metric that matters above all else.
People that make an account and never post (which is where that 400,000 number you are referring to comes from) means next to nothing. If the number of active users continues to decrease, then this site will be dead, regardless of what the user count it.
There are 50,000 active accounts.
Individuals who are active on multiple accounts (having accounts on multiple sites) count multiple times.
To be fair, that’s true of most social media, including Reddit.
Exactly. This. We’re not trying to get popular.
Lemmy has a good group. It will ebb and flow. People are finding their groups online. If it’s not here. That’s fine. If you enjoy lemmy. Stay! But we don’t need to grow lol
I don’t want us to get exactly popular, but I’d like to be big enough where the nice communities can be big and active enough. I still have to go to reddit for those and it is annoying.
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Meh, if it drops it drops. I’ll never have the relationship to social media I used to, because I don’t want it anymore. If Lemmy can give me a few posts a day of things I might not normally see, that’s enough for me. It doesn’t need to be the next Reddit or whatever. After quitting Reddit I’m getting back into things I haven’t done in years. I don’t need that again.
Damn, this is exactly how I feel. Well said. I honestly feel free after spending over a decade on that god damn website.
Same
Lemmys slow feed is helping me detox from my decade of reddit doomscrolling
Same. I’ve gotten back into hobbies that I had abandoned. It’s really nice
Amen brother. I was so addicted to Reddit i saw the things in the real world like Reddit posts. I’m glad I’m out and I’m not coming back, at least not to endlessly browse or get in any kind of content posting. It’s still great for niche hobbies and solwing lots of issues with hardware, health, unbiased product reviews.
No wonder since most topics on all are:
- Capitalism is bad
- Landlords are evil
- US Politics
- Linux
It’s a huge circlejerk here and there isn’t that much engagement in other smaller communities. And I highly doubt that it will change for the better since I already see that a lot of the remaining people love this little circlejerk and don’t even want more people that could diversify the content. More power to them, I have already given up on Lemmy as a Reddit replacement.
And fuck cars!
Don’t forget…
- Boomers are responsible for all of my problems
- The US is the worst country on earth
Pretty much the same shit you find on reddit. I have no problem with Linux though.
Lemmy and 90% of the people here honestly suck and are circlejerky bastards with shit content but it’s also the only good option right now.
I just made a new community yesterday about objects that looks sort of like private parts, if that helps? !mildlyprivates@lemmy.world
I’ve also got cute bugs and sea critters here: !awwnverts@lemmy.world
And cute bees here: !beebutts@lemmy.world
But for the life of me I can’t get any engagement on my r/legalcatadvice dupe at !cattorneys_at_paw@lemmy.world Maybe I should have used the original name. I really miss that one.
Reddit cat subs are tightly knit with people suggesting other related subs for some content. Being able to say “aww, cute angry black cat - this would fit on /r/stealthbombers” that sort of interconnection is difficult on Lemmy making the tangent discovery, reposting and niche cat subs more difficult.
Without the fairly consistent cross posting (and thus part of the discovery), such niche subs are going to be harder to grow a community for.
It might be a bit more feasible if there was a “cats and only cats” lemmy instance where all things cats are posted (compare programming.dev and startrek.website which are two single topic instances and browsing communities on each makes targeted discovery more feasible).
The other part is that those niche cat subs are filled with “normal” people. There usage stats show most people used new.reddit.com or the official mobile app - even before the api changes. Most of those people didn’t leave Reddit (with the exception of a few mods where /r/cathostage is restricted but /r/cathostages which was created in response has even more activity).
This also gets to a “there aren’t enough fun things on Lemmy”. The flairs of /r/cathostages are fun.
If you look at /r/leagalcatadvice you will see that most of its activity is from crossposted (not by original poster either) into the sub and then people are having fun there.
The software supporting fun (flairs, easy cross posting) and culture are currently working against Lemmy for niche cat subs. Consider that !cat@lemmy.world has 84 users per day and fewer posts per day than /r/oneorangebraincell - it might not be able to support the range of niche cat subs that Reddit is able to.
I’d also point out that Lemmy’s 40,000 active users and 400k total accounts is comparable to the subscriber base of /r/oneorangebraincell that shows 442k accounts… just for pictures of orange cats that share the one brain cell.
I think you have a good point about flairs. The lack of flairs is especially noticable in sports communities. On Reddit, a lot of sports subreddits would have flairs of team logos, which set up for a lot of friendly teasing between fandoms. The lack of flairs in Lemmy takes away the teasing because nobody knows who supports what fandom.
There’s also a similarity between cat communities and sports communities in that there’s probably not enough people to support individual team communities similar to how there isn’t enough people to support more focused cat communities like one orange brain cell.
Thus the reason for !lemmymoment@lemmy.world
i’d rather see a circlejerk over capitalism being bad than people accepting the shittiness
Stop advertising the site as a place to go when you get banned from reddit for being too insufferable even for them.
How about instead of worrying about making it more popular we concentrate on making it better?
Eliminate all the shitty worthless content and spammy replies that people brought over with them from the shit hole that shall not be named and focus our efforts on creating quality content that users (particularly the ones that are already here) actually enjoy and engage with.
That’s my two cents on it anyway.
I agree. More users don’t necessarily make discussions better. 90% of comments on reddit are useless.
That being said you do need a certain amount of people for a discussion, and the more people you have the likelihood of someone being educated in the subject grows.
Reddit started from nothing and became popular over a long period of time. If we set the values we want to express now, if it becomes more popular organically later down the line it will be filled with people who share those values and hopefully will never become reddit 2.0
More upvoting of posts.
I know that sounds a bit dumb/lame, but when I first got here and every post had like 5 upvotes, maybe 20 and then maybe once a week you’d see one with more than 100, it was jarring. Made the place feel empty and without interaction. Which it’s really not, but that was my and I think perhaps a lot of peoples’ first impression.
1000x rule.
10% of users have an account.
10% of accounts vote.
10% of voters comment.
By commenting, you are leaving an impact on the site worth 1000 users.
There’s also a trend of downvoting things ‘just because’. Not sure if it’s bots or just users who are trying to cater their feed by downvoting things they don’t like. But if people just blind downvote with no engagement, I feel like it discourages people from posting. This place needs to be more hospitable than StackOverflow.
My personal rule on here and the other site has always been that I only downvote spam, misinformation, and actively malicious posts
I also actively downvoted stuff that didn’t belong on the subspace
I think it’s bots or trolls because what I’ve seen downvoted has been on topic, friendly conversations and had been just posted. There would be no reason to downvote a lot of the comments downvoted.
Great point. To see if its worth joining a community I check how many posts it has, and then look at the posts to see if anyone actually reads them (votes). Too little activity its not worth wasting my time. i already have too many communities subscribed as it is.
Let’s multiply upvote counts by random prime numbers. 😆
Modern capitalism has made us overly concerned with anything other than constant and rapid growth. This does not concern me.
Lemmy got a HUGE influx of users from the Reddit fiasco. Of course, there was going to be a pull back.
What is going to determine if Lemmy becomes popular is if it has reached critical mass to start growing organically on its own.
as a recent refuge myself. Some random thoughts.
Things that will help, hobby groups moving here. And other interest groups. Not expecting everyone to code, be a privacy advocate, or a political extremist.
Solving some of the fundamental issues around “federation” and ease of use for the average user that just wants to post about cars, hobby, etc
Actually WANTING more users. There is a non small portion that activity is toxic to new users who came from Reddit just to escape.
I really don’t get the growth hostile crowd. Things are barely alive right now and they are fine with more people leaving.
I don’t think the quality of content here has been as high as I would have liked. Over on lemmy.world/c/games, the moderation and post/comment quality are well below below what I would have expected from /r/Games in its glory days. For example, all the highest voted comments on the Starfield impressions thread are karma-whoring single sentence meme responses about pre-orders, “patient gamers”, or piracy, all completely off-topic for an impressions thread.
Are there other games communities to try out that are popular?
I don’t know, I have yet to find a proper replacement for /r/Games. Everything I find is either considerably lower quality, or specialized for a particular game or genre.
Maybe we just need to tighten them? Perhaps a lock washer will help 🤭
keep those jokes coming, they maintain them users happy
Okay, that’s funny.
In other words, lemmy population isn’t just an ever-increasing growth slope, let’s panic.
Would you say its time to crack each others skulls open and feast on the goo inside?
Y’all have goo inside? Mine’s all crumbly and dry. 🤕
Yes.
For me the biggest issue is user engagement and missing communities.
I enjoyed /all to see news and discussion about that news, which isn’t really a thing on lemmy yet.
And i enjoyed small communities for the discussions and posts which are also not really a thing on lemmy yet.
I agree, I get excited seeing one comment in some of the smaller communities and then it’s always that awful tldr bot.
The automatic bot posts need to go away as well imo.
User Slumberlust said:
I agree, I get excited seeing that tldr bot.
The automatic bot posts go well imo.
This post has been reduced by 69%. I’m not a bot.
All this endless nagging of politics, ideology, capitalism, billionaries, tankies, right-wing, left-wing, Desantis and Trump are slowly making me lose interest in Lemmy. You are ruining Lemmy honestly
There is the old cliche that during holiday dinner there is always that one right-wing uncle who never shuts the fuck about politics (these days being during Thanksgiving and how great Trump is). Everyone finds what this uncle is saying is cringe as hell.
Well, that’s kind of what Lemmy is becoming, but for the far-left.
If it is in a political community, it is one thing. And to a large degree, I might even agree with most left-of-center views.
But there is an endless stream of edgy pro-commie and similar posts and a dearth of other light-hearted posts to counter balance it. Almost all communities outside the ones listed above get no traffic, so there’s no point in trying to start a conversation about cars or DIY projects or electronics. Hell, even the NSFW communities on Lemmy are rather lame.
I still have no idea what a tankie is, and I have no idea why the top active posts are always tankie this and tankie that. I’ve tried to filter as many of those communities and users as I can, but now all I’m left with is software developer memes (yes, you have the hardest job ever, we get it) and requests for FOSS alternatives to FTP my Linux repo PowerShell GitHub thingy in privacy.
What Lemmy ultimately needs is original content for people to come back. Reposting memes and links can only get you so far.
