First and foremost, before the usual argument happens, I know that more is not necessarily better.
Having said that, it would be better if lemmy’s userbase were much bigger. There are many, many, interesting communities that are basically dead. We need a bigger userbase to drive some content to those communities.
If person A wants to discuss topic X, but there are barely any people with whom to discuss topic X, person A will go back to the usual for-profit corporations to do just that. This is obviously not good, for obvious reasons: just look around.
And an equally important point: for profit services, such as reddit, need to die. The userbase create the content and a select few get rich from it? Fuck them.
So the question is:
- In your opinion, what can we do to increase the userbase?
Less politics, less news, less “I’m mad about this so you should be mad about it too” rage posting/armchair activism, less “ist’s and ism’s”. Less preachy shit about capitalism bad, communism good (or maybe .ml should just be blocked by default?). Less bitching about Reddit (I swear, I’ve heard less about friends’ exes than some people bitch about Reddit here). Less “hurr durr power tripping mods” circlejerking.
More content about cool stuff, hobbies, amazing feats, movies, books, TV shows, etc.
This place has much of the latter but it’s completely overshadowed by the former to the point you have to almost dig for it. Even blocking the overt news, politics, and political “humor” communities, it still seeps in to comics and memes and unrelated communities.
There’s still plenty of good in this world, but you’d never know it from looking at what’s always topping the feed here.
And a new user checking this place out is going to be immediately hit in the face with all of the former and probably not even see the latter.
There are certainly plenty of communities that aren’t dedicated to doomscrolling. They do need more activity though, plain and simple. I can’t single handedly solve the issue of the All feed having so much of that, but I do try to regularly contribute to communities that are more varied, and I suggest to you and other users to do the same. Lemmy is a much smaller userbase and can’t rely on the same proportion of users to contribute content like reddit.
Here are just a few communities I like to visit regularly, and contribute to any time I have a good contribution that aren’t full of doomscrolling content.
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I see a lot more shitting on .ml than on reddit. I think that’s what needs to stop. If you don’t like it, fine, use another instance.
.ml is a default instance…which is filled with tankies. It literally turns people away. The devs wanna have their own little tankie instance is fine but gaming the system to make it appear as an instance to join like 95% of the time is going to drive people away.
Programming.dev has been hiding a lot of those kind of communities by default, others could as well:
https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/
But even with that fairly substantial hide list, I agree, we do drown in news and politics.
Ooh, nice. +1 for your admin team. Maybe my instance would consider doing something similar. It is a topic-based instance after all.
Yep. When I visit Lemmy, it tends to feel like a dark place. I don’t think news and politics should be dialed down to zero, but the overall negativity here is a bit heavy, and likely a deal-breaker for many exploring Lemmy for the first time.
For comparison to another decentralized social media platform: Nostr generally seems like a pretty positive place. The people tend to be friendly, and it’s quite common to see them saying “good morning” to each other for seemingly no reason (aside from having a nice morning, I suppose). Conversations generally seem civil and mature. Unfortunately, there’s LOT of Bitcoin stuff to wade through over there.
I disagree with you that we need less of anything. We have about the right amount of news and politics. Now we need ~100x of everything else, so that it doesn’t seem so ever present. Lemmy doesn’t need less of anything, it only needs more.
People post politics to communities that have rules against it, and the mods do nothing about it. Lemmy needs moderators who do their jobs. The political issue is a moderation issue.
Completely agree! You should create a new community with the moderation style that you enjoy. I’ll probably even join, tbh.
That is what subscriptions and the local timeline are for. The “all” should show whatever is getting the most attention.
The issues you are seeing are due to the small userbase. With a bigger userbase, your local timeline would be fuller. With a bigger userbase, you would be able to see plenty of content in non-meme communities and non-politics community.
“All” is what new users typically see. Or see immediately after clicking from “Local” if that’s what the instance is set to default to. New users do not have any subscriptions, and if they’re just browsing as guest, they literally can’t subscribe or do any kind of curation.
First impressions are important. Someone comes here brand new and the first impression is typically that of an angry mob.
So to get a bigger userbase, the “default, guest experience” needs to provide a good first impression. This…preachy/angry/politics/news flood is highly likely to just turn them away and not even bother trying to curate to find the good bits.
I agree. First impressions are important. Perhaps there could be some “click here to change timeline” in the UI?
But again, this is mainly an issue due to the small userbase. With a bigger userbase, the memes and politics would not be so prevalent, hopefully. We would have smaller, text-based communities taking some of the attention.
You seem to be ignoring the problem, which is that the default guest experience of lemmy will filter out all the people who would solve the problem. “Increase the user base” only helps if the users who join aren’t depressed doomers.
You could mitigate the problem of the small userbase with our current userbase, by just, for example, posting more of type X and less of type Y. That would be one answer to this post: what can one do, individually, to increase the userbase.