…relative to Reddit’s size?
I see so many posts and comments voicing disappointment with Lemmy’s lack of massive expansion.
I too want to see Lemmy gain more users, but I do not want it to grow to Reddit’s size. If Reddit is the yardstick, I’d say that a population that large attracts a lot of negative behaviours; degeneration of discourse, amplification of echo chambers and hive mind behaviour, etc…
I started on Reddit in 2010 and found that by 2016 things were really bad in comparison. A fun and engaging site was experiencing an obvious devolution that persists to this day, accelerated by Spez’s enshittification of the platform. Obviously the fediverse insulates us from that occurring here but I think you get what I mean.
Do you you think Lemmy is too small? I don’t. I’ve been here since the great migration last year and have had a really good time. I see a lot of familiar names in the comments on a daily basis. It actually feels like a community here. I guess I just don’t understand the fixation on the size of Lemmy’s user base. Curious to hear your thoughts.
[EDIT] Thanks for all the responses, everyone! Lots of perspectives I hadn’t yet considered.
There’s also a number of them indirectly trying to use the numbers to trash talk Lemmy. Personally, I would prefer the quality over quantity you can see here on Lemmy.
The smaller population overall isn’t a bad thing, but it can really be felt in smaller or niche communities. Reddit’s huge size is a plus in this regard, because chances you can find at least a semi-active community for just about any hobby or niche interest.
Yeah, I’d actually forgotten about it since I’ve been here for so long but the joke “there’s a sub for everything” is actually completely true and one of the things I miss, even if it’s an inactive community you can 80% of the time find a subreddit with a few dozen posts to check out. I used to just hit “random” until I found an interesting one. I feel like I’d cycle through all the communities on my instance in a couple of days.
That being said I love the small feeling here compared to Reddit and if I had to choose between “small community with conversation” and “unlimited dopamine trickle tap” I’d rather it stay as it is
The smaller subreddits are still good on reddit, as long as they have a good focus. They are effectively their own little communities
Yeah, my reddit account is exclusively for the communities around a couple mangas I read. As soon as the SpyxFamily and Akane-banashi communities here reach comparable levels, I will gladly jump ship.
Yes. I never had too much trouble on reddit, but I only stuck to specific subreddits and stayed away fron news or politics.
Because that’s what I’m missing. I like the apps, I like the site, but I need content. And not memes or politics, but specific niche topics. The nice thing about Reddit is that there’s more than enough content about basically anything. Non mainstream music (DnB, Hardstyle, Trance), games, hobbies. There are always hundreds ,if not thousands of people engaging. I don’t want a discussion with 3 other people, I want a large community that can actually provide me with a lot of new information and keeps itself going without any effort from my end.
Agreed, the political posts are inevitable with a big election looming unless you filter a lot of subs you are stuck seeing the same ones. And lemmy doesn’t have enough content to turn over so you wind up seeing the same posts from 2 days ago with only 3 comments.
I figure the best thing to do is comment on anything I can and try to engage more people. I was such a lurker on Reddit, but that’s not helpful here.
Some years ago Reddit had such a large reach in the media space that you could be discussing something on there and news outlets would pick up on it. For a brief period it actually felt like a platform where ordinary people could get heard and influence the world outside of Reddit or at least sway opinions of other real users. The reason why it worked was the massive userbase. The high profile AMA’s drew quite the crowd. Those days are long gone. It’s been a long time I saw any serious news outlets report on what happens on Reddit. GameStop was probably the last big Reddit thing to make a dent on the outside world.
I don’t want Lemmy to be that big, but it would be nice to know that if you make effort to write something that is important to you, that it gets read by more than two other people who already have the same opinion.
Late reply, but in English media articles, it’s still fairly common for me to see references to what people said on Reddit. AFAIK there are also still entertainment sites (“Caveman Circus” being one) that still regularly harvest expert or semi-expert takes found on Reddit in order to construct ‘best of’ articles.
Though-- perhaps that activity is down somewhat, as you suggest.
This is of course only my opinion but I want it much bigger but maybe not the size of reddit. I like being able to have a problem and going into the specialized community to ask the pros. Online searching is currently slowing down results. AI searches will tell someone to use an outlet to fix a pipe and if someone searching for something they don’t know may try figuring out why their pipe doesn’t even have a plug. I also like to research into things HEAVILY and having a community where I can sift through thousands of posts to form an idea of what I’m looking to learn is nice.
With that said I can’t knock lemmy any because the community that has 150 people will have 125 of them respond to anything you post.
With that said I can’t knock lemmy any because the community that has 150 people will have 125 of them respond to anything you post.
Yeah. Compared to Reddit which can have a sub with millions of members but the top posts only get like 12k upvotes and 300 comments
Like others already pointed out, it’s not about the size per se. It’s about the small odd communities of specific interest that we miss. These usually only thrive with numbers.
Then again, I used Lemmy for over a year and didn’t get a single death threat. I went back to check my Reddit account and had two in my inbox, I didn’t use the site since the exodus. Soooooooo, yeah. You win some you loose some.
Because there are only a handful of communities that have enough traffic to sustain a meaningful conversation.
Even popular activities have low traffic, god forbid you want to participate in a community based around a niche activity.
I love Lemmy and I’m not going back to reddit… But sometimes it feels like a desolate wasteland here.
I need people like you to join https://fediverser.network to become a community ambassador. Please join it, find the subreddits that you would like to migrate and let’s bring the people who are interesting.
I agree. The smaller communities is nice, but when it’s so small that each post has less that 5 comments, I feel the conversations are limited.
I don’t think it’s the size but more the number of communities and how active they are. So if there are more people here it hopefully means there will be more active users as well. And perhaps more niche communities.
There are a lot of communities missing. I cant find anything financial related like /personalFinance, /financialIndependence, /povertyFinance, /frugal with any decent amount of interaction. Most with maybe 1 post or a handful of comments every month. Without gaining a lot of users there isnt enough content to stay
I want the world to use open source tools.
Does anyone remember the inside jokes in the early days of reddit?
When does the narwhal bacon? Orangered Chuck Testa!! Ridiculously photogenic guy And of course the long list of meme-level posts like broken arms, cumbox, celebrity AMAs
This type of community humor made a lot of people feel like they’d found their tribe on reddit in those early days.
I haven’t seen much like this develop on Lemmy yet, possibly because there’s so many disparate communities merging. I’m not really sure. Or maybe all those 20-something redditors are now pushing 40.
I think it will take a while for a lemmy culture to develop and the community won’t attract outsiders much until it does.
cough cough I… I was there cough during the beans
Lemmy is just a continuation of the Reddit crap of recent years, except for less corpo bullshit, but with more lefty infighting.
I need to not poop for three days.
Yeah those memes were cringy as fuck thank god no one’s doing anything that dumb
For example the Formula 1 live threads during a race has like 10 comments on Lemmy, while on Reddit it’s in the thousands. Just wish some communities were a bit more popular.
Yes. For communities that on Reddit were small to medium size there was a critical mass of people to sustain large, lively threads, particularly during live events. Lemmy currently lacks that, outside of the letter tech, politics and meme communities. And for the smaller communities, activity can be almost non existent.
Then the federated nature of Lemmy allows for duplicate communities on different instances. This is not inherently a bad thing, particularly for larger interest areas as it helps prevent a particular sub group from dominating discussion in an area. But fracturing of smaller communities can make just finding an active one more difficult. I know that this is a feature in many ways, but it does have tradeoffs that have to be acknowledged.
Serious question, would having 100 comments every few seconds kill smaller instances? How well will the federation scale?
Interesting as you are on LW. The current main issue with LW is that it is too centralized, so sometimes instances located geographically further struggle to keep up to date as LW doesn’t update them fast enough
A post on the topic: https://lemmy.world/post/13967373?scrollToComments=true
Yeah, I just joined as a reddit refugee because lemmy.world looked appealing. Had no idea it would effectively become the “defacto” instance of lemmy. Would be nice if communities spread out more.
Sports are definitely an area where the sublemmies get less traffic. I quite enjoy posting on the rugby union sub but there are like 4 of us there.
As a mod of three niche Soulslike communities, one of which that probably has less than 10 active users at best, it’s really hard to put out quality content and keep a community alive all on your own. I had to resort to a bot filling two of the communities with regular posts so there is some semblance of life in the communities, but reception has been mixed so far and the engagement didn’t grow as much as I had hoped.
Unfortunately, I don’t see any other way for these communities to be sustainable if like 95% of users on here are lurkers. Plus, I’m not the best fit for moderation and pumping out posts asking for engagement constantly since I’m a lurker at heart myself.
‘All’ is pretty good, though. It’s where I spend most my time on Lemmy.
I think itd make more sense to not have /c/ommunities dedicated to certain games, just post that stuff on /c/games
I get the idea, but I think general all-purpose games communities are just too general
Maybe one community for Soulslike that you would promote on the weekly !newcommunities@lemmy.world thread would be a good compromise?
I already did that for all three communities back when I created them. Reception for the last one was quite good, I thought!
Feel free to promote them weekly, there are always new people joining
Gotcha 👍🏻
Because the communities I care about are getting less than one post per month.
Come join us at !androidgamers@lemmy.world
And at !theyknew@lemmy.sdf.org
I want more small communities with people who really like specific things. For example if you want to buy a robot vacuum going to a community about it is very nice to read up on what people find important and maybe issues with a particular model. Even the memes sometimes have great info (think something like a popular vacuum that doesn’t pick up anything with “At least you tried” or spongebob meme pointing at stuff of increasing sizes referencing areas the vacuum missed)
Example meme I just created for robo vacs which I’d like to see in the some robovac community.
