I never understood how people would complain that a site with thousands or tens of thousands of users is “too small”. I feel like that is a real sweet spot, you can have actual conversations and interactions that matter a bit more. Meanwhile, the constant flood of posts, comments and spam on the top social media sites made me feel like nothing I write will even matter, since all the posts will be buried under the information flood in the matter of minutes.
On reddit, I was never on the default front page or /r/all. I was subbed to a hundred niche communities.
On lemmy that’s harder in 2 ways. The first is the critical mass you need to keep a community active, and the second is fragmentation.
For instance, I was super active in the scuba and underway photography subreddits. Not only is the community tiny here, but which scuba sub do i go to? With multiple instances, there’s no default community named “scuba.”
I just checked those communities on Lemmy.ca and part of the problem is that they weren’t federated to Lemmy.ca so I subscribed to them to make connection then hopefully you will have more Canucks diving in ;)
It would be neat if same-topic communities somehow could somehow merge into a single community view via federation. There are probably some downsides to what I’m considering, but it seems like it could help alleviate fragmentation while allowing the “same” communities to be hosted across multiple instances. If one instance defederated from another, the community posts in that instance would be excluded from the combined view.
Maybe even a simple opt-in/out of a combined view for communities that truly want or need to stand alone. Not sure if this goes against the core concepts of federation or not. It seems like a nice compromise at a glance, if it could be implemented well.
PieFed already has such Categories of Communities, it’s a really nice feature. PieFed has a lot of such things actually - like hashtags, the ability to block all users from an instance without requiring admin approval, YouTube embeds, etc.
Unfortunately PieFed is not quite ready for the masses as its more foundational features aren’t finished yet, like much of the times a Notification won’t point to whatever caused it for whatever reason, and it lacks user tagging, and search options.
But it’s nice to see these kinds of features functional already!:-)
If you just want to look at and respond to anything there is enough people. If you want to find specific, niche communities then it’s still pretty small.
I would say the population size makes it a little easier to recognize the more friendly responses too. I feel on Reddit the friendly responses are quickly buried by the more spiteful ones.
Reddit is so big 95% of your comments get buried with no replies. There’s no conversation most of the time. You’re just reading the conversations of others who got in on the post really early and got upvoted to the top.
I’m also of the opinion that the average IQ on Lemmy is notably higher than the average IQ on Reddit, so the discussions tend to be less clownish.
This is the opinion of someone that finally got tired of Reddit and jumped to Lemmy just over a month ago. I also feel like I’m seeing more activity on Lemmy just over the last few weeks. So there’s probably others like me that just got fed up and made the switch.
I’m kind of crossing my fingers that Lemmy doesn’t get too popular. It’ll ruin this like it ruins every social media site.
I never understood how people would complain that a site with thousands or tens of thousands of users is “too small”. I feel like that is a real sweet spot, you can have actual conversations and interactions that matter a bit more. Meanwhile, the constant flood of posts, comments and spam on the top social media sites made me feel like nothing I write will even matter, since all the posts will be buried under the information flood in the matter of minutes.
There’s definitely a difference with scale.
On reddit, I was never on the default front page or /r/all. I was subbed to a hundred niche communities.
On lemmy that’s harder in 2 ways. The first is the critical mass you need to keep a community active, and the second is fragmentation.
For instance, I was super active in the scuba and underway photography subreddits. Not only is the community tiny here, but which scuba sub do i go to? With multiple instances, there’s no default community named “scuba.”
https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=scuba
All of them are inactive, seems like it’s not a very discussed topic here
Yeah.
I miss it.
I just checked those communities on Lemmy.ca and part of the problem is that they weren’t federated to Lemmy.ca so I subscribed to them to make connection then hopefully you will have more Canucks diving in ;)
I always just go with the one with the most activity.
It would be neat if same-topic communities somehow could somehow merge into a single community view via federation. There are probably some downsides to what I’m considering, but it seems like it could help alleviate fragmentation while allowing the “same” communities to be hosted across multiple instances. If one instance defederated from another, the community posts in that instance would be excluded from the combined view.
Maybe even a simple opt-in/out of a combined view for communities that truly want or need to stand alone. Not sure if this goes against the core concepts of federation or not. It seems like a nice compromise at a glance, if it could be implemented well.
PieFed already has such Categories of Communities, it’s a really nice feature. PieFed has a lot of such things actually - like hashtags, the ability to block all users from an instance without requiring admin approval, YouTube embeds, etc.
Unfortunately PieFed is not quite ready for the masses as its more foundational features aren’t finished yet, like much of the times a Notification won’t point to whatever caused it for whatever reason, and it lacks user tagging, and search options.
But it’s nice to see these kinds of features functional already!:-)
Communities should just consolidate. Happens regularly, the electric vehicle did recently, you can see it on !fedigrow@lemm.ee
If you just want to look at and respond to anything there is enough people. If you want to find specific, niche communities then it’s still pretty small.
I would say the population size makes it a little easier to recognize the more friendly responses too. I feel on Reddit the friendly responses are quickly buried by the more spiteful ones.
Yeah sometimes even parts of mastodon feel like they’re getting too impersonal. Like I’ll be in a conversation and realise I don’t any of these people
Yup.
Reddit is so big 95% of your comments get buried with no replies. There’s no conversation most of the time. You’re just reading the conversations of others who got in on the post really early and got upvoted to the top.
I’m also of the opinion that the average IQ on Lemmy is notably higher than the average IQ on Reddit, so the discussions tend to be less clownish.
This is the opinion of someone that finally got tired of Reddit and jumped to Lemmy just over a month ago. I also feel like I’m seeing more activity on Lemmy just over the last few weeks. So there’s probably others like me that just got fed up and made the switch.
I’m kind of crossing my fingers that Lemmy doesn’t get too popular. It’ll ruin this like it ruins every social media site.
Reddit has a follow bias. Lemmy has a rebel bias. IQ tests aside, I know where I’d rather be.