…relative to Reddit’s size?
I see so many posts and comments voicing disappointment with Lemmy’s lack of massive expansion.
I too want to see Lemmy gain more users, but I do not want it to grow to Reddit’s size. If Reddit is the yardstick, I’d say that a population that large attracts a lot of negative behaviours; degeneration of discourse, amplification of echo chambers and hive mind behaviour, etc…
I started on Reddit in 2010 and found that by 2016 things were really bad in comparison. A fun and engaging site was experiencing an obvious devolution that persists to this day, accelerated by Spez’s enshittification of the platform. Obviously the fediverse insulates us from that occurring here but I think you get what I mean.
Do you you think Lemmy is too small? I don’t. I’ve been here since the great migration last year and have had a really good time. I see a lot of familiar names in the comments on a daily basis. It actually feels like a community here. I guess I just don’t understand the fixation on the size of Lemmy’s user base. Curious to hear your thoughts.
[EDIT] Thanks for all the responses, everyone! Lots of perspectives I hadn’t yet considered.
Give it some time and you will see what Lemmy is capable of.
They are used to the short-term goals of stonks.
The more people there are, the more popular it is with the working class. Instead of being a niche community, you can meet non-tech people that know about Lemmy.
Lemmy is good as is; slow growth is better, IMO.
I want the world to use open source tools.
Like others already pointed out, it’s not about the size per se. It’s about the small odd communities of specific interest that we miss. These usually only thrive with numbers.
Then again, I used Lemmy for over a year and didn’t get a single death threat. I went back to check my Reddit account and had two in my inbox, I didn’t use the site since the exodus. Soooooooo, yeah. You win some you loose some.
People just want what they gave up and what they know, it is that simple.
It highly depends on what you’re here for. Some communities have gathered enough active members to expect a continuous influx of posts and comments.
The strength that Reddit has built over the years is that many niche communities also thrived and turned into a rich repository of knowledge that was searchable. Lemmy isn’t there yet, if you’re into fishing, knitting, Japanese chess or sourdough baking.
But it also doesn’t need to be a perfect drop in replacement for Reddit, it’s probably fine if it remains something different, slightly fringe and a friendly place that doesn’t require massive amount of servers and moderation staff.
Japanese chess
For anyone curious it’s also called Shogi.
And if there is a lemmy community for it out there let me know. :D
Edit: I think my client bugged out with an off by one error but might be corrected
I chose this example because I’m an avid Shōgi player :-)
There is a community on my instance, but nobody ever posted anything. Maybe I could post a couple of Tsume from some books I have, or some castling strats.
On Reddit I went to specific subreddits and things were bubbling there, on Lemmy I pretty much have to stay on All to get any active content. I really don’t want Lemmy to reach eternal September, but we definitely need much more activity and a much larger user base than we currently have.
Same here. On the upside, "All“ on Lemmy has a much higher quality than what Reddit had in the past years. I really enjoy my daily doomscroll on Lemmy.
Reddit took over a decade to get to that size, it’s not a fair comparison.
Reddit also didn’t have Reddit to compete with, which certainly makes things harder.
Well, there was Digg, then Digg imploded.
Yeap, but Digg was still pretty early in it’s life and was very much catering for tech nerds.
Reddit is basically the home of all communities these days, its swallowed what used to be individual forums from around the web and put them into a single place.
Building those new communities across multiple lemmy instances also adds to the complexity.
I’ve been having a nice time with Lemmy having ditched Reddit last year, and considering the changes that happened or have been conceptually floated over that time I’m happy with my choice.
One thing I would like is for the Lemmy framework to make it easier for the network to be “wider” than “taller” as it grows. By this I mean a wider array of separate domains with operators each with thriving niche communities, rather than a few tall generalist servers and a handful of outliers, and a fragmented myriad of inactive communities that are hard to find.
That is exactly the problem with Lemmy. Far too many niche communities with next to no members. That does not work. There are not enough people to have 5 separate communities about X.
Thanks. A topic we regularly discuss on [email protected]
Subs which are huge in other places don’t exist here. So growth is needed.
The flagship communities are quite alive, but the niche communities have not really taken off. I am talking from both the absence of such communities, and my experience trying to migrate !fluidmechanics. The subreddit has around 10k humans (or bots).
Because the communities I care about are getting less than one post per month.
Come join us at [email protected]
And at [email protected]
I just miss there being more variance in the voices I see in the comments. On Reddit, the size made it so that you were pretty much always seeing new commenters, and seeing a lot of different discussions. But here, I mostly see the same ~50 regulars across all the communities I subscribe to, and almost all the same discussions being had.
Overall I still prefer it here, but more users and more active communities would be nice, too.
As a mod of three niche Soulslike communities, one of which that probably has less than 10 active users at best, it’s really hard to put out quality content and keep a community alive all on your own. I had to resort to a bot filling two of the communities with regular posts so there is some semblance of life in the communities, but reception has been mixed so far and the engagement didn’t grow as much as I had hoped.
Unfortunately, I don’t see any other way for these communities to be sustainable if like 95% of users on here are lurkers. Plus, I’m not the best fit for moderation and pumping out posts asking for engagement constantly since I’m a lurker at heart myself.
‘All’ is pretty good, though. It’s where I spend most my time on Lemmy.
Feel free to join on [email protected]
Am subscribed already, haven’t really checked it out yet. Thanks for the reminder
I think itd make more sense to not have /c/ommunities dedicated to certain games, just post that stuff on /c/games
I get the idea, but I think general all-purpose games communities are just too general
Maybe one community for Soulslike that you would promote on the weekly [email protected] thread would be a good compromise?
I already did that for all three communities back when I created them. Reception for the last one was quite good, I thought!
Feel free to promote them weekly, there are always new people joining
Gotcha 👍🏻
The smaller population overall isn’t a bad thing, but it can really be felt in smaller or niche communities. Reddit’s huge size is a plus in this regard, because chances you can find at least a semi-active community for just about any hobby or niche interest.
Yeah, I’d actually forgotten about it since I’ve been here for so long but the joke “there’s a sub for everything” is actually completely true and one of the things I miss, even if it’s an inactive community you can 80% of the time find a subreddit with a few dozen posts to check out. I used to just hit “random” until I found an interesting one. I feel like I’d cycle through all the communities on my instance in a couple of days.
That being said I love the small feeling here compared to Reddit and if I had to choose between “small community with conversation” and “unlimited dopamine trickle tap” I’d rather it stay as it is
The smaller subreddit are still good on subreddit, as long as they have a good focus. They are effectively their own little communities
Yes. I never had too much trouble on reddit, but I only stuck to specific subreddits and stayed away fron news or politics.
Yeah, my reddit account is exclusively for the communities around a couple mangas I read. As soon as the SpyxFamily and Akane-banashi communities here reach comparable levels, I will gladly jump ship.
