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 do want to talk about my hobbies and local happenings in my Canadian city.
Shit, there’s not even an active community on lemmy for New York. The Toronto one on lemmy.ca is at least somewhat active, but not very lively. If lemmy can’t even get a critical mass for the biggest metro areas in North America, we’re never going to see communities for even medium sized cities.
Yup, discouraging seeing a post you want to see others engaging in, but it only has three comments and was posted 20 hours ago. Also annoying to see an interesting political post get brigaded with users who don’t want to have a civil discussion, in some instances.
Reddit ceased being a link aggregater when it added comments and self posts , “content aggregater” is a more accurate term, although it is really a modernized version of internet forums.
The best contents posts on reddit are all originals in comments: Ask*, buying guides for hobbists, various fictions like writing prompts, nosleep, and AITA. People have made successful YouTube channels by solely reading out these reddit comments and self posts, it’s lazy but shows where the value of reddit really lies. Somebody even made a movie on the GME stuff. (This is also why I will NEVER admit to lurking reddit or this place in public.)
Instead here we just get the worst part of reddit posts here like politics and memes.
Again, if you actually want Lemmy to take off, stop wasting your time and your energy arguing politics and start writing high quality Lemmy original contents here.
Finally! This link aggregator bs was going on my nerves already and I blocked all politics and news since most of it us rage bait imo.
You’re absolutely correct. We need the juicy stuff that gets people talking without bashing each others heads in. For this, we need people who make communities, post stuff and attract other creative folks.
I made a tech community since I am a tech guy. Everyone who wants this place to thrive should make a community and/or post something of value every day.
Going in with the aim of making Lemmy “more popular” is not the best approach. There are going to be surges of people signing up for new accounts, trying it out a bit, then leaving, especially when Reddit does something major in its poisoning of well. But the goal shouldn’t be to try to keep everyone who ever creates a Lemmy account.
The best thing to do is build the communities here that you are interested in. Do what you can to make them lively and active. This, combined with client improvements from Lemmy developers, will lead to steady growth and more community participation.
Going in with the aim of making Lemmy “more popular” is not the best approach.
This (and the rest of your excellent post) reminds me of a fantastic quote from a letter J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote to his younger brother:
“Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one’s living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.”
Similarly, Lemmy being popular is not a specific aim which we “may learn to attain.” Rather it is a description of the adequacy of the content. Build the community we want, the popularity may follow, or it may not! But to try to make a popular website “is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.”
Found it while listening to the audiobook for American Prometheus, and it was when I realized I was going to seriously enjoy hearing snippets of Oppenheimer’s writing. Dude was brilliant in so many ways.
The best thing to do is build the communities here that you are interested in. Do what you can to make them lively and active.
The question as ever remains, though, how does one go about this without coming across poorly? That’s always the tricky part of trying to form new groups and communities, because it’s not quite marketing but it’s in a similar vein to get things going, and it more often than not reads as at best mildly uninteresting or at worst offputting and annoying.
Exactly. There’s always a loss in user base after an initial rush. What’s important is we lose the ones who are harmful or spread hate in the community.
The only way to make it more popular is by having more content. Unfortunately we haven’t reached the critical mass number of people that keeps people interested.
But going back to reddit doesnt feel the same anymore either. I dont know how but the people there have changed. They upvote less. They complain more. And doesnt join in on my crappy jokes. 😟
I stayed off of Reddit near totally the first month or so and have been visiting it more again lately and there is a definite drop off in quality all over the place.
Yeah, gotta admit to jumping back onto it a few times - purely because of the wealth of information. But I do have to agree with you that the quality of chat seems to be declining.
Lemmy is definately a better quality place to be, but if people don’t post - only to a fraction of communities, it’s in danger of becoming too focused on just a few topics.
What I don’t understand is: some niche communities started getting interest, then the interest waned - did people leave, did they go back to reddit (and why after leaving) or did they find a better place to go (if so where)?
I’m sticking with lemmy for now - with fingers crossed!
See I get that but I also feel like Lemmy in some ways has more hostile discourse. Too many people with incredibly entrenched opinions about something incredibly niche who then proceed to shout down anyone who doesn’t partake in that niche.
Like at least on Reddit the aggressive circlejerks tend to align with mainstream thought. Like you don’t have to point out things like Linux isn’t actually perfect and there are reasons Windows may be better in some circumstances or that invading a foreign country because of something they might hypothetically do is not a nice thing to do.
It used to be that way on Reddit before they changed the algorithm to force old posts (older than 12 hours and then 24 hours and so on) to fuck off from the front page. It’s also a problem that multiple instances show you the same post repeatedly, so a popular post on the front page stays there for a whole week and you will still see it even if you scroll past it.
Lemmy devs simply do not address the issues of the platform.
I’m probably wrong but I think because it takes a lot more user effort to navigate Lemmy and find your communities, and those communities can be spread across many instances.
It’s just easier for those that are interested in the community around those interests to use something like reddit or a specific forum site.
Lemmy is mostly tech dorks, which isn’t a bad thing but that leads to the tech and programming communities dominating the feeds. Also I think people who have been using Lemmy for a while vastly overestimate the appeal of the platform and also tech literacy of the general population. It can feel intimidating and uninviting.
Heya, I was just doing a search for something and your comment popped up so thought I’d let you know we do actually have some quite decently active craft communities. !woodworking and !knitting for example. Join us, the more the merrier! :)
Problem with threads (for me I know) is that I ended up following most of the same accounts i follow on Instagram and they post almost exactly the same content, so it becomes kinda pointless.
Most people are content consumers, not creators. It looks like the exodus was largely that if users so…
The problem is that quite a few content creators become entrenched using their platform and they don’t want to move on. Just look at all the journalists and human rights advocated still using Twitter. Now they’re being doxxed and their platform destroyed but they still won’t leave.
Popularize the apps that exist. I couldn’t figure out how to browse it in a Reddit-like way until I tried an app. That was all I needed to make the switch.
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.
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.
Yep. The graph above shows the significant drop in active user, meaning there’s gonna be even less engagement if this goes on. The drop in total user maybe due to some small instance just vaporised, which usually caused by lack of active user on that instance and the admin just pull the plug. After all, why spend money on something people don’t really use?
The country instance i’m in, for example, had goes from 30± daily active user earlier last month to 12± daily active user, likely due to people migrate to bigger instance, or gone back to reddit/somewhere else. With most admin team missing or barely active, including the head admin, this instance will vaporise as well.
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