Isn’t this ok? I’m not saying it’s better… just OK?
I don’t know if this is just me but why is there always a race to be the “most popular/larger platform”?
Isn’t this kind of race to be the most popular the reason why a lot of platforms/companies/jobs/games/etc are suffering today? Growth for the sake of growth and forcing something to be more popular just because it needs to be more popular is just kind of sad.
It’s not like “corporate fediverse/lemmy” needs more users… At least this is my opinion.
Most recently lemmyloves.art. Exploding heads shut down. waveform.social was DDOS’ed and decided to shut down. And then there’s the vlemmy.net disappearance. I’m sure there are many others.
If the total user count is based off the users on the instances, instances shutting down would reduce the total number of users.
On fedidb.org/software/lemmy one of the charts is total instances. It recorded 1312 instances in July and 1249 in August.
Lemmy seriously needs better federated search. The fact that you need a separate website to find all the communities is just silly, especially if you’re on smaller instances, which everyone seems to encourage.
Honestly, the main problem for popularity’s sake is the un-diverse userbase.
It’s a bunch of techy redditors, the same way that many other services that splinter off from reddit are. Almost all the communities are literal clones of reddit ones. So for someone who wants a similar style of place and doesn’t have a hatred of reddit corporate built-in, why would they not go to reddit, which has the same kind of userbase but with 100x the users?
Honestly, other than “Open Source Master Race!!!111!!!111”, there isn’t any reason, especially not one that the average person will care about.
Another one, and I fucking HATE saying this, not enough zoomers dragging their friends along. This place feels like a place for the 30-something instead of the 20-something. Which isn’t bad, of course, but in terms of network effect power it is, because peer pressure is huge for social media.
But, separate from all that, do we actually want it to be that kind of popular? Maybe we should stay under the radar for the most part. Keep it from becoming stale and condescending like lots of Redditors can be. Keep the advertisers from sinking claws in. Maybe that’ll be better for the site as a whole than needing ads to support a service 100x the size.
I worked for 12 hours today. When I came home and browsed ALL, it was exactly same posts as there was this morning. That’s a problem for getting return visits. I have resolved to take some of the energy I spend on comments and dedicate it back to posts.
When I came home and browsed ALL, it was exactly same posts as there was this morning. That’s a problem for getting return visits.
Yes, that’s a problem. What you can do to help yourself:
uncheck “Show Read Posts” in your settings
switch between feed algorithms (‘New Comments’, ‘Active’, ‘Hot’, ‘Top Hour’)
subscribe to more communities
unsubscribe from big communities if they dominate your feed
Most of these actions have drawbacks.
The biggest issue here from my point of view is, that none of this works out of the box. It requires will and capability to tweak your Lemmy. More often than not, the solution might simply be to not return visit.
An actual solution might be something like: Assign a relevancy score to each post. Posts with higher relevancy are more likely to appear in your stream. When a post has been shown to you, it’s relevancy drops (at least for relative streams like ‘Active’ and ‘New Comments’. Absolute streams like ‘Top Hour’ might need a different treatment). When you visited a post, it’s relevancy drops a lot. This could help populate your stream with fresh content (of which there is no shortage!). When a user scrolls past a post one or even more times, they probably aren’t interested in seeing it, so the post should not be shown in the future.
You hit the nail on the head. Revanced for Sync means I can browse reddit exactly as I did, and I lost interest in Lemmy pretty quickly after installing it. Lemmy is nice but feels too much like the reddit of old which was all tech/nerdy stuff and atheism apologists. It’s nice but it just lacks the diversity that, over time, made reddit unique.
It’s nice but it just lacks the diversity that, over time, made reddit unique.
Yeah, it lacks the userbase that allows for one to ask a hyperspecific question about a very niche topic, and near-instantly get a good answer from an expert on said niche topic.
I find lemmy waaaaay more condescending and less spontaneous than reddit.
I still think it’s a better platform in many ways, but the mere fact that “moral superiority” is a prime reason for joining guarantees that it will be condescending.
Yep growth doesn’t come all at once it goes up and it goes down, just like stocks. Social media platforms experience increases in users but also decreases in users. Though looking at the graph it just seems that people are less engaged, rather than leaving, the sharp dip is an engagement, not such a sharp dip in overall user count though.
Memes are always the lowest common denominator compared to more community specific oriented posts. A meme can be digested in 5 seconds or less so people are easier to upvote it and move along.
Compared to more specific posts that usually requires you to read the whole post or visit the link to truly digest and then decide whether you want to upvote it or not.
I have been pretty comfortable here because I’m into nerdy things and most of us here are nerds. In fact, the only people that cared about reddit locking down the API were nerds or people jumping on the bandwagon because it was the next big thing. Others didn’t care and just wanted reddit back and a lot of people that were here in the beginning went back to reddit. We will probably grow overtime but there’s no point in wondering why lemmy isn’t more popular, just participate in the communities you like.
Yeah. It just feels like we need about 50% more users to help populate things a bit more here. Mastodon feels much more active/full to me, probably because it has a year or so already, and Xitter has done some many things to help drive people to alternatives.
I’m pretty happy with Lemmy as it is, but would certainly welcome another influx of people
there’s no point in wondering why lemmy isn’t more popular, just participate in the communities you like.
I think we can and should nerd the shit out of this.
A good nerd can understand why a space is appealing to nerds but less to others, and adjust it accordingly to fix that.
Let’s move this tech from “it works great if you know how to use it” to “it’s great and I have no idea how it works”. Remove server talk from join-lemmy.org. Auto-assign instance for newcomers so they don’t need to care. Make switching instances easy and seemless so it does not matter they did not care. Make links and IDs work cross-instance out of the box. Complete documentation (there’s a wiki which could use some love). Things like that. Improve user experience until using something else feels like a pain.
I overall completely agree with your comment, just wanted to nitpick on this one “no point” point. I think this is important, even for the nerds.
This is normal for any platform that gains a burst of users. You’ll have significant attrition, but probably end up leveling out at somewhere higher than you started.
If you think about it, it’s very hnlikely that every new lemmy user would stay
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