I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
I’ve told people about Lemmy before. I got the same reaction everytime.
“It looks like it’s just people talking about computers.”
And their interest dies. Which tells me there needs to be more diversity of active communities. No one wants to come to a small platform, create a new dead community, and talk to themself.
It’s kind of a chicken and the egg problem though, that happens on any new place, so it’s tough to sell them on that unless they already like what’s being talked about. I think it’s probably better to stick to the fundamentals of the fediverse and what makes it better than a centralized platform. In this phase of Lemmy’s popularity we need people that stick around and build communities, and they can only really be enticed to do that based on the merits of the platform.
We need comments, that is the problem. Small communities don’t get any positive feedback via engagement, which causes them to die as the owner/sole poster feels like no one cares.
Simply link dumping (effectively what most posts are on content aggregators) is the easy part. Seeing even 1 comment inclines someone to open up the post to read the comment, which makes them in turn likely to reply and it builds from there to a hot/active conversation.
If you can just aim to write that first comment on or two posts a day in more niche communities, it will help achieve growth.
Now this I do and I’m glad it helps
Thank you for your service o7
75% of small communities, if not higher, don’t use lemmy-federate to expand the visibility of their community. The user makes the community, broadcasts a few posts locally and then gets sad that no-one replies (because it can only be seen locally). Nor do they make use of [email protected] or [email protected] to advertise.
I use lemmy-federate a lot to help this, but it’s sometimes too late after they set the comm up.
Then again if it’s some guy in his corner doing stuff on his own, is it really a community ?
That’s another good point.
PieFed has at least taken some steps to work on this, with it automatically posting new communities to NewCommunities and auto-subbing the instance to those posted there.
If the Lemmy devs stopped pushing ML propaganda, transphobia, and genocide denial and actually worked on the software, we might be in a better place today.
I have proposed piefed instances be able to opt into automatic federation with other selected instances when a community is made. I think it might work like that now via a toggle. Rimu would confirm.
Obviously smaller, personal instances would opt out of that but for general-use instances it makes sense.
Might be “Automatically add new remote communities” toggle on the admin side.
This is my analysis too. And why, instead of just upvoting posts that interest me, I try to think of something to say about them too. The dreaded “0 comments” is never a good look no matter how we much we tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter.
For this reason I tend to believe that many communities just have too much primary content. Too many posts and not enough comments.
Thought experiment. 2 communities:
Which is the healthier community?
My experience is that it’s more like this:
Not every post is a hit, so if you cast wide you’re likely to get a greater return on comments as something is bound to attract attention. The way the sorting works is that the 5 posts with 3 comments will show at the top and the 0 posts will drop off view, showing an active community.
I’m trying to think of something to say in riposte in order to boost the comment count.
Riposte? What a fun word, I should incorporate that.
This thread is doing well for engagement, go sort by new and comment on something ;)
Maybe we need a sort/filter for posts with 0 comments, like a “Needs Comments” filter… Might be worth submitting a feature request on Lemmy and PieFed?
So saying something without much effort under a post wothout comments actually helps that post to become more populated?
As long as it’s relevant, yes.
If you just posted say “I agree” or “Totally this” I don’t think that would drive any further engagement.
To be completely honest, Lemmy is kinda dead outside the politics subs and some of the tech ones. When I deleted my reddit account I came here and joined some of the communities I was using reddit for: Pathfinder 2e, RPG, memes, anime. Out of all of them I only see an occasional post from memes while the other ones are literal ghost towns.
ive seen less movies, entertainment, tv shows posts than before, when ee was still alive.
Shameless plug.
If you are into computer RPGs (CRPGs), we have a relatively active community:
[email protected]
The JRPG community is also pretty active:
[email protected]
See, the 3 newest posts being 3 over a day old being considered fairly active is one of my issues with Lemmy/fediverse. My whole subscribed feed is like that. Open app, check feed that’s not exclusively doom and gloom politics, and nothing has moved since I checked it the day before.
they should link to each other in the sidebar so people know how to find them
Lemmy communities could benefit from a webring concept.
You’re right! That’s perfect! that’s what i was looking for, now i have a name to it. thank you. i think it would maybe work well enough if the sidebar could link to related communities?
I appreciate so much when communities do this. Often the mods are extremely lazy though and don’t bother, or if they do then they do not keep it maintained.
In fairness, some apps seem to do everything in their power to actively hide sidebar as much as possible, for some reason, burying it behind MANY clicks and adding the need to also scroll down sometimes quite large lists of options too.
People seem to forget just how technically far behind Reddit we all still are on the Threadiverse. Nowadays, PieFed even has some features that Reddit itself lacks (bc many of their “features” added in recent years were for increasing their revenue stream, rather than anything that the users themselves wanted), but even PieFed has several broken components.
So if the goal is to make a better Reddit, while keeping it free, and also getting there quickly… well, that’s just not realistic, some compromises are going to necessarily end up being made.
Waiting in my instance to update to Piefed 1.4, I will add World of JRPGs to the sidebar once that happens.
Yep.
Even the politics stuff, it seems to lag behind reddit by a half day or so.
sometimes a 1-2 days.
Yeah. I lurk reddit via a redlib instance - so I can browse content but can’t log in or of course comment. Often I see some situation unfolding and want to discuss it, but there just isn’t any relevant posts on the fediverse.
Agreed. If news headlines and Linux are your jam you’re all set already. That’s enough to keep me coming back but I aggressively join new communities as they’re made to support them. I only post rarely though, do I only do so much as of now