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

  • Surp@lemmy.worldEnglish
    244·
    7 hours ago

    I’ve been here a few years now and I can say Lemmy’s got issues. You can’t come on here and have a good time anymore when all it’s about is trump trump trump and Linux Linux Linux it gets old. I wanna escape from reality a bit sometimes and there’s few areas to subscribe to that gives any joy anymore.

    • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 hours ago

      On a long enough timeline, every Lemmy thread eventually becomes one of the following:

      1. ACAB

      2. Trump bad

      3. FOSS good

      4. Reddit bad

      5. Socialism (generally, via vanguard party) good

      6. Tankies (i.e. #5) bad

      Not that I disagree with most of the above, but we need some normies in here to balance things out, so invite them and don’t demonize them. That’s made trickier by Reddit banning people for talking about the Fediverse/Lemmy, so you have to be clever about it.

    • limelight79@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      4 hours ago

      Yeah part of the issue here is that there are so few users that the more niche topics just don’t get a lot of traction.

      For example, I help mod the Washington Capitals hockey team community, but mostly it’s just two of us talking. We recently decided to stop posting game day threads for every game, because there’d be one comment in them (usually me), if we were lucky - and we were the last NHL team community to end the game day threads; most stopped long ago. The overhead just wasn’t worth the reward. We decided we’d focus more on the general Hockey community, hoping to build that out a bit.

      (We didn’t give up entirely - we posted a sticky thread that is for all games, and we’ll make a top level comment for each game in there, asking people to respond to that comment for that game. If they don’t, not a major issue. This way we still have the forum for the game discussions without having to worry about posting it every time.)

      • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
        3·
        3 hours ago

        THIS is the way. Build up general communities first, then the niche ones will come later. Kudos! :-)

    • myguess@lemmy.zipEnglish
      21·
      3 hours ago

      I just got on to lemmy and im already over all the political news in here.

    • TheTestHuman@feddit.orgEnglish
      32·
      4 hours ago

      Im new here and the part you talk about feels the same as reddit at least here I feel like im not supporting that clusterfuck by being an advertisement target.

      • Krauerking@lemy.lolEnglish
        1·
        21 minutes ago

        Yeah even reddit is fucked these days.

        By the way note there is not always an easy way to find communities naturally so I would recommend thinking of some key words and searching for communities with them to fill in some niches

    • Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      6 hours ago

      I think part (though not all) of the issue is discoverability. There’s other communities where this isn’t as prevalent, but a) they’re not always easy to find, and b) for this as well as other reasons, they might not be super active (if people don’t know it exists, who’s posting?)

      I get around the first bit by trawling All New once and a while. One feature I will say I liked on reddit was the random community function. But while I like that it’s a smaller userbase here for some reasons, it does mean less diversity of interests.

      • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
        21·
        3 hours ago

        PieFed offers a number of options to aid in discoverability - like Topics, Feeds (user-customizable and shareable), and combining together all replies from all cross-posts (at which point you can be like “oh hey, I didn’t know that community also existed?! Subscribed!!”).

        Sorry for being salty, but I’ve given up on Lemmy ever catching up to have even remotely close to as many features as PieFed.

        Anyway you are definitely correct, community discovery has huge flaws when using Lemmy (and it’s about to get worse, where lemmy.ml gets veto power in showing communities to newly-created instances - it is easy enough to get around that by simply adding them manually, but that will increase the authoritarian control factor even more than it is now, further strengthening the ties between the Lemmy sourcecode and the Lemmy.ml instance, where already maintenance of the latter siphons off a great deal of funding away from efforts to develop the codebase further).

        • Butterphinger@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          Same federation, same posts, same users. Different software doesn’t mean anything else changes.

    • angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.comEnglish
      21·
      5 hours ago

      And you can say “block anything related to that,” but I don’t want to stop hearing about it entirely. Just not the only topics.

      And even on the few active subs that aren’t Trump or Linux, there’s a lot of commenters that can’t shut up about Trump or Linux, particularly ones that think you’re a bad person if you ever stop talking about Trump.