How can we make it more popular?
It’s essentially a brand new platform. A tiny dip a month after the initial boom is far from “losing users” and is not indicative of trends. I don’t understand why everyone is so obsessed with growing Lemmy as fast as possible.
Because a lot of the time you lose users because there aren’t enough users.
You also lose users when you’re basically asking your userbase to be alpha testers as you build from scratch. It’s fine, it’s an open source project.
People that are thinking this is some finished, capable competitor already are a little out of touch though. Which is unsurprising, given we’re all in a weird, dark corner of the internet atm.
The app ecosystem has been getting so much better, and people are starting to grok federation, and frankly this app would be dead if some of the recent drama happened if it had way more users.
We are definitely on the early adopter curve for this tech.
And even if it stays small, the quality and community here is thriving. Sure, we have our trolls and junk but they don’t have nearly the influence or visibility as…ahem…other familiar platforms.
I have mixed experience with community quality here. For many topics you should better ask your question on Reddit - you will get better answers there (and faster).
Depends on the communities… quite often they consist of one or two users (or bits) reposting old or current Reddit posts.
And certainly for more niche topics the communities tend to be dead.
Quite often there is little commenting or conversation.
The communities with the most conversation seem to be about Lemmy and the Fediverse…
But yes there are a couple of decent communities in my Home feed, but the whole needs to grow to get it to a tipping point where it provides an active and diverse (in topics and conversation) community.
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Fair.
Yeah we don’t need more assholes here. They can stay on the other site.
Meh, if it drops it drops. I’ll never have the relationship to social media I used to, because I don’t want it anymore. If Lemmy can give me a few posts a day of things I might not normally see, that’s enough for me. It doesn’t need to be the next Reddit or whatever. After quitting Reddit I’m getting back into things I haven’t done in years. I don’t need that again.
Damn, this is exactly how I feel. Well said. I honestly feel free after spending over a decade on that god damn website.
Same
Lemmys slow feed is helping me detox from my decade of reddit doomscrolling
Same. I’ve gotten back into hobbies that I had abandoned. It’s really nice
Sense. Social media is overwhelmingly overrated.
Amen brother. I was so addicted to Reddit i saw the things in the real world like Reddit posts. I’m glad I’m out and I’m not coming back, at least not to endlessly browse or get in any kind of content posting. It’s still great for niche hobbies and solwing lots of issues with hardware, health, unbiased product reviews.
Plus the graphs actually show that posts are up despite active users (people who make at least one post) being down. That means the people sticking are generally more willing to post and comment.
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I’ve lately made a fun game out of seeing my daily screen time average drop steadily. The decline in average daily doom scrolling has correlated directly with an increase in my dating frequency and general social activity.
There’s, like, a whole world out there!
For the last time, there is no need. We are large enough. 400,000 people is a large town or small city. Remember:
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There are no investors to please
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No stock holders to appease
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No CEO to bootlick
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No ads to chase
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No e-peen to contest
We are free at last. Free your mind from the tail chase of corporate controlled social media.
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This is pretty normal, you get a surge of users and then it tapers off a bit as people don’t like it.
Could be a lot worse, take a look at the user graph for threads.
Yeah ours is very good if we are honest.
Stop advertising the site as a place to go when you get banned from reddit for being too insufferable even for them.
This. I feel the drop in users are the people who came here thinking it was a place for “free speech” and are upset for being downvoted for shit comments.
In reality it’s probably people who checked out the site, saw its mostly software/tech and political communities, a handfull of communities for trans people and reposted memes, and a dash of “the West will fall and China will prevail” communist communities, and decided to leave.
Also the porn is hidden too well, and even when you figure out how to find it, the porn that exists is 90% furry and hentai. Reddit has a huge amateur porn community that I’m certain keeps much of their users coming back.
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I recommend Connect for lemmy if you have Android. Can put in filters to block communities that contain any keywords and posts that contain key words. And block entire instances.
When it comes to social media filtering is important to curate out the filler you don’t want.
It’s not about filters. It’s the community it self.
News in Lemmy is biased at best.
What place isn’t. If you want unbiased aggregate of news the only option is a rss. There isn’t a place for an unbiased social media for news if it is user submitted and driven by voting or algorithm based.
I said biased at best because it’s cancer at worse. To me, it’s pure democats media and everything should be reported as such.
I live in the other side of the world so I don’t care much about US politics btw.
A great feature, but with a small userbase making a small amount of content, filtering those things out leaves you with not much left.
Makes sense as yes, Elon and republicans fucking suck. Not sure what else one would say about them.
Definitely recommend subscribing to stuff you’re more interested in and browsing that way. All is always going to be a bit lowest common denominator, same as on every similar site.
Welcome to Reddit reposts V2
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Damn dude, that was such a spot-on summary I feel like I don’t need to log in to lemmy for a month lol
So a fair reflection of reality? I get that. I have different venues to escape reality myself.
Oh crap. Has that been happening? That would be bad.
It certainly feels like it is, because the user base seems to be made up of exclusively the type of person from reddit that made me want to commit war crimes.
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Trying to make a place popular for the sake of popularity is putting the cart before the horse, and will always be a losing battle.
Make your Lemmy instance a place worth spending time. Don’t worry about user counts or popularity.
I think you are missing a big piece of the bigger picture.
Much of the ‘utility’ of the lemmy alternatives is the significantly larger user base, which is what’s necessary for more niche communities to get off the ground and actually be viable. Without that userbase, lemmy is just another alternate place to discuss the basest common topics, that can be discussed anywhere. I mean, technology and news are nice to have, but it’s the variety of the niche community that are what keep people still hooked on reddit.
So in the end, making a place popular for the sake of popularity actually does serve an important purpose.
You’re not wrong. You just need to look around you and realize this is still pretty shitty and people with normal taste won’t really like it.
It needs more work. More polish. And where the fuck is the rest of my Fediverse content? Then it can try to keep users. Until then, it gets us. You know, us completely average, very normal, extremely typical sorts, that are totally just like everyone else, we promise.
IMO, Lemmy doesn’t need to be super popular. Large numbers don’t automatically mean great quality, while great quality can result in greater numbers.
How can we make it more popular?
By not doing the things that corporations do to make things popular. Do we even need Lemmy to be popular? I think we concentrate on trying to keep the Fediverse and Lemmy user focused and privacy friendly and people will naturally come over as they get burnt on the ever increasingly enshitified corporate data-theft sites. We need to be something different than the big sites. A breath of fresh air. I think people will be OK with putting up with a few quirks to escape those toxic environments. I think Lemmy is progressing just fine and I’m enjoying it.
Modern capitalism has made us overly concerned with anything other than constant and rapid growth. This does not concern me.
How about instead of worrying about making it more popular we concentrate on making it better?
Eliminate all the shitty worthless content and spammy replies that people brought over with them from the shit hole that shall not be named and focus our efforts on creating quality content that users (particularly the ones that are already here) actually enjoy and engage with.
That’s my two cents on it anyway.
One that that has made me unsubscribe from several communities here is when they are just bot-lead reposts of the equivalent subreddit. This makes these communities on lemmy objectively worse than the reddit equivalent because there is not the population to interact with the sheer volume of posts, and it just becomes spam without engagement.
More upvoting of posts.
I know that sounds a bit dumb/lame, but when I first got here and every post had like 5 upvotes, maybe 20 and then maybe once a week you’d see one with more than 100, it was jarring. Made the place feel empty and without interaction. Which it’s really not, but that was my and I think perhaps a lot of peoples’ first impression.
Stop with the doomerism.
“Lemmy is losing users” -> Lemmy has a stabilizing base of communities developing their own culture after a great exodus from several centralized platforms. Original, high quality content is finding its home here as users engage with one another on thousands of federated, interoperable, transparent websites.Like the quality of content has gone up over the last month… Like a lot! So don’t sweat it. We’ll get there, but it’s gonna take a few years. In it for the long haul. Heck I was on Reddit for like 7-10 YEARS, this is brand spanking new ❤️
Yeah, I’ve noticed that things are stabilizing a bit too. Maybe some if that has to do with hexbear idiots not sticking around? Either way, it feels nicer around here after that initial glut where there was a flood of trolls all of the sudden
What happened to them anyways? Did everyone just mass defederate them? Or did I somehow block them entirely?
I think for the most part, they were not welcomed into the larger community and fucked back off to their echo chamber
Yeah, it’s gotten more pleasant for sure ❤️
Why is your username red? Are you a mod of this sub or a admin on lemmy.world?
I’m one of the admins. I run the infrastructure team though, and mod a little here and there when needed 😋
When you say admin, is that an admin of lemmy.world or an admin or all instances? Just curious how all of this works… where is the infrastructure hosted? AWS or something?
I’m the head of infa on LW, but we have a few other managers as well who run different parts of the site. I’m also a site admin as well, for when I help out w/ moderation.
AKA
LW infra = Head of sysadmin team
LW Site Mods = Just a janitor :-P We have other managers, and mods that work under them.
We have infra across many services, but that is kinda of sensitive.
Awesome, thanks for the info/knowledge. Thanks for all you and the team do.
Honestly, the main problem for popularity’s sake is the un-diverse userbase.
It’s a bunch of techy redditors, the same way that many other services that splinter off from reddit are. Almost all the communities are literal clones of reddit ones. So for someone who wants a similar style of place and doesn’t have a hatred of reddit corporate built-in, why would they not go to reddit, which has the same kind of userbase but with 100x the users?
Honestly, other than “Open Source Master Race!!!111!!!111”, there isn’t any reason, especially not one that the average person will care about.
Another one, and I fucking HATE saying this, not enough zoomers dragging their friends along. This place feels like a place for the 30-something instead of the 20-something. Which isn’t bad, of course, but in terms of network effect power it is, because peer pressure is huge for social media.
But, separate from all that, do we actually want it to be that kind of popular? Maybe we should stay under the radar for the most part. Keep it from becoming stale and condescending like lots of Redditors can be. Keep the advertisers from sinking claws in. Maybe that’ll be better for the site as a whole than needing ads to support a service 100x the size.
Keep calm and continue posting and commenting. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
