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?
  • jof@lemmy.world
    9·
    24 hours ago

    I agree with this. Leads to communities being drip fed and having small user bases where eventually most people (who are not committed) just end up back on Reddit.

      • jof@lemmy.world
        2·
        20 hours ago

        Well I think that’s the wrong question to ask. I believe it’s probably best to get a handful of communities with a strong user base and encourage more people to come before we start slowly expanding out to more niche communities.

        Take 4chan for example. To this day, I believe there’s less than 25-30 boards. Everybody just funnels down to one of some 30 odd communities, and they post their thread there.

        For Lemmy, we have so many different fediverses and then on top of that there’s communities within each fediverse! Theres multiple ones for news, and politics and technology and memes. And I understand that is the appeal of being decentralized but it also means we never really amass numbers for communities. So, with that in context, I think it would be smart to encourage a strong user base in maybe one fediverse or assortment of communities before spreading out.

        When you have a lot of small niche communities without a large population, there’s just no recipe to keep that community afloat unfortunately.