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?
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 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
…It was about this time I realized the other poster was about 8 stories tall and was a crustacean from protozoic era.
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 television@piefed.social. It’s only active because of me. I make up the majority of the posts. But when I do post, I get activity.
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?).
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.
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?
Yes, it collects all the replies in one post, if the OP’s been cross posted to different communities, and it only shows the post title once, so it doesn’t overcrowd your feed. You can submit to communities to create your home feed like Lemmy, or there are Feeds that you can subscribe or create to your own liking, or there are Topics of collected similar communities, for easier browsing too. It has a more complicated structure than Lemmy, but I think it’s worth it.
Cross-posting would be cool if the communities were hierarchically subdivided and automatically cross-post the most recent top 3 to a parent community. E.g. /c/art < /c/traditional_art < /c/classical_paintings
It would be much easier to discover and search new stuff you like.That would be really cool. And kinda fits the “organic growth by subdividing” model
As a user, It would be nice to be able to consolidate.
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.
Good point, and true.
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.
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 television@piefed.social. 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I’m making up for my lurker years.
If more people adopt this strat we will enrich the fediverse (and naturally attract more people,) though I prefer a small userbase with quality discussion, but both require participation.
cultivate the niche hobby subs, thats really all that reddit still has going for it because it reached critical mass.
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.
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.
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 !Nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social
Can I ask why a bigger user base equals better? I’d there a technical reason?
I think there are a huge amount of internet refugees that are now lost. I miss healthy topics, resources and niche forums. But for me they won’t come back because all that info will get scraped and infiltrated. So I question even if the numbers arrived would that equal genuine and contributing communities.
I like this place this size. I’d like more engagement but I think a lot of people are reassessing what they want from the internet and that’s that. We can’t force engagement we can see the result of that at Reddit.
I think people just miss their niche interest communities.
For example, I love Elden Ring, but !eldenring@lemmy.world hasn’t had any new posts in almost a year. Meanwhile the Elden Ring subreddit has a bunch of posts just from the last few minutes.
Still not enough to make me go back to Reddit, but I admit it’s something I miss and something that just can’t be recreated without more people.
Yeh I think that too. But agree wouldn’t go back. I just have to be satisfied with more observing.
Please join us in the !soulslike@lemmy.zip community. Game specific comms are almost dead but some of us genre enjoyers congregate there.
Thanks, count me as a new happy subscriber!
To be honest, Elden Ring is the only Souls game I’ve played and so it’s the only one of any real interest to me for now, but I am appreciative of the tags used in the post titles that allow me to filter out the content from other games I’m not interested in seeing. Glad to see content is alive somewhere!
Word on the street is that Elden Ring is a gateway drug :P.
I primarily used reddit for niche hobbies and fandoms that have no equivalent here. Small userbase * niche special interest = I might possibly be the only person on this platform who’s into some of my hyperfixations.
With a large enough critical mass, more users can hopefully mean more shared interests to talk about.
the biggest hurdle i see right now to expanding the threadiverse is how often people here are just absolute assholes to each other.
That tracks with every other platform though. I think the big hurdle is that it seems more complicated to get into since having independent instances is so different than everybody else.
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.
Outside of get-popular-quick schemes:
Volunteer your time and expertise to make Lemmy better. Whether it’s sharing secret recipes for free, or helping out newer users, all users need to contribute to make it a better place that people want to use.
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
Ok Rick James…
Cocaine’s a helluva drug
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.
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Okayyy
Good job :)
More Star Trek memes! And more memes in general.
In addition, suffer some Reddit. Not the main pages, the niche groups. Name drop Lemmy in regular posts.
If you are active on other social media, have a channel people watch. Again, mention Lemmy.
