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?
Can we pool some money together and advertise somewhere or put stickers at coffee shops in big cities. Some of my other thoughts are to have influencers plug it, put adds on blogs especially hobby blogs and niche blogs if that’s who we’re trying to attract.
I mean for me it was a recent decision to delete for-profit and algorithmic social media. But that was internally driven as I realised they were making me more miserable and I couldn’t stomach the advertising anymore. But I’ve always failed to replicate that feeling in other people who are stuck in a mixture of sunk cost fallacy and boiled frog status, no idea how to do it consistently.
waiting for more reddit purges? thats sadly is the only way. other ways, reddit just have all the communities that lemmy doesnt.
currently reddit is very careful about massive purges now, they are just doing background ones, even if they increased thier filtering and sensitivity of bot? detection. they want to avoid bots being to pervasive on site to make it seem like its mostly users.
If I want to read discussion about a new movie or game that all seems to be on reddit, so I guess the lesson is to try starting that sort of thing here and hope it picks up. With a smaller user base you have to accept that individual posts may not get any traction though. I do think having discussion other than Linux and whatever Trump is going on about this week would help to grow the platform.
Honestly variety is the spice of life, and keeping up with the zeitgeist is half of why people like to be online. I think this is a very good point!
cultivate the niche hobby subs, thats really all that reddit still has going for it because it reached critical mass.
Honestly, not just the niche hobbies. We have no real community here that the masses can enjoy. I can’t give a good nfl instance, NBA instance, etc. Most of the shit presented to me is autistic blah. While it’s entertaining for a minute it’s not something that I need to see all the time, and it’s the biggest amount of posts I see. I’m about to go over to digg for a while because there isn’t much here.
Yes. That is one of the things that keeps people coming back. I have been doing stupid stuff with Linux and posting it here hoping people will join and push it further.
has to start somewhere, makes one wonder how reddit caught on enough to become established.
iirc StumbleUpon took me to reddit for the first time, not really organic website discovery services now.
Leak the funhole.
Stay upprayed fam.
Thank you for sharing your leaky hole content.
Try to be welcoming and kind.
We should start making little comics about how people who aren’t on Lemmy all go to hell and put them in random places.
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.
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.
That is what subscriptions and the local timeline are for. The “all” should show whatever is getting the most attention.
“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.
I think the most valuable thing we can do for the fediverse is to contibute by posting in communities we care about, thus helping them be active, and engage in posts made by others in general. In short, don’t lurk, don’t be passive.
I think the most valuable thing we can do for the fediverse is to contibute by posting in communities we care about
I saw this same thought posted about 2 weeks ago and it made me realise I posted lfew replies and scrolled a lot. That person suggested if people see a post with zero responses they likely scroll past (myslef included) but even if the post has 2 or 3 responses, people will be more likely to perhaps engage
I now respond more, even if like this response, it’s just a +1 type response.
Honestly, I think we have way too many communities. Cull them back to a small set of fairly broad communities: Arts, Tech, Politics, etc. Once those are active enough, then start to subdivide as the sub communities grew to a sufficient size to self-sustain.
What happened instead, was people tried to create all the same communities that reddit has, without the people to sustain them, and now it looks like a ghost town.
I run two niche communities but I’m fine with them being slow because I don’t particularly care about the mod position - I just wanted a space to post two things I like
I think those are different in that you don’t need discourse. You can post away, and if no one responds its not a big deal. But other communities, especially ones that people might go to for help or advice, getting zero responses to a question is spirit crushing.
As a user, It would be nice to be able to consolidate.
This is true. During the big migration wave to Lemmy about 3 years ago, a lot of people came over and started niche within niche communities with the idea of making straight up 1 for 1 copies of very niche subreddits. I’ve even inherited moderation on some of them.
I think the best way forward is to try and backfill by posting a majority of content to some of the more main communities, and then crossposting to the more niche ones. This makes the more general and I think more important foundational communities active, and it gives a trickle of content to the already existing niches. Not being afraid of crossposting and then in general posting more is a good answer.
I personally dislike the cross posting in lemmy, as it results in seeing the same post 3-4 times in a row, which is kinda annoying as well. I believe piefed does it better (dunno if anyone can confirm that?).
Is this the right place to discuss PieFed? I think PieFed did the cross posting and fragmented communities problem nicely. You can create your own feed too.
It’s part of the same family, so I don’t see why not.
I’ve not experienced piefed first hand, but from what I heard it joins Cross posts somehow? Lemmy you can create your own feed by subbing to communities, is piefed different?
This is true that crossposting is messy, but I think it is the best current solution. Crossposting means it is more likely to show up on the feed of somebody only subscribed to one of the communities, which might remind them that the community exists. Crossposting also means that when somebody stumbles upon a community it at least has the appearance of a pulse.
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.
So how many communities should there be exactly?
About tree fiddy
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.
I mean I run [email protected]. It’s only active because of me. I make up the majority of the posts. But when I do post, I get activity.
I agree to an extent. The problem is that an interest in a specific topic does not translate into an interest in the broader topic. Personally, if we only had broad communities on the level you suggested, I’d likely not use Lemmy at all, because then I’d have to spend too much time scrolling past the majority of posts or adding filters.
Honestly, I think we have way too many communities.
I disagree.
The one of the major things that Lemmy lacks compared to Reddit is all of the smaller random hobbyist communities.
Those niche communities work on reddit because there is a huge userbase to keep them alive. If you create them here, you get an empty community that looks dead, which discourages people from posting.
Having an active “hobbies” community going first, and then later splitting off the “knitting” community when it’s clear that there are lots of knitters means that you don’t get empty dead communities.
You can’t force the niche community into existence, it has to grow organically.
Ripping communities away from moderators to merge them is going to drive them away.
Yeah, the ship has largely sailed. But also, there are lots of communities that are empty and also functionally unmoderated, so some could be removed.
Unmoderated is different. Many aren’t though, even if low activity.
Does become a bit of a philosophical question though doesn’t it: Is a community really moderated if it has zero activity?
Also, I somewhat object to the framing of “moderators owning communities”. I don’t own the community I mod, I serve it. If it was a ghost town, and closing it down would prevent people stumbling into it and wasting their time, I would be completely in favour of it.
Of course by inactive, I mean no activity.
I run [email protected]. 90% of the posts are by me. I forced it into having a presence. It however does get engagement when I post.
This is true for many communities.
Mention and link to it on Reddit when it is especially relevant
Honestly I’m happy the Fediverse doesn’t have the Reddit user base. I’d rather try recruiting people from various forums on specific topics to the Fediverse. Like homebrewing (alcoholic beverages) is still happening in independent web forums that I think would be neat if they got federated, but I don’t think they in turn are interested in a Fediverse user base.
Now that you say it, it would be nice having a “linker” between Lemmy and a web forum, like a log of the Lemmy threads.
Piefed has spme nice crossposting with anything activitypub. And integration with mastodon hashtags.
I think there are some web forum backends that support hooking up to the Fediverse.
deleted by creator
fucking is on plenty of peoples’ minds all the time regardless of their job lol
also, sex worker solidarity!
Reducing the amount of doomsday content on the front page, which I’m trying to help out with by starting [email protected]
