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?
We should start making little comics about how people who aren’t on Lemmy all go to hell and put them in random places.
you can link to posts and comments here on other platforms if they are interesting or funny or cool
you can also post your dingus on the NSFW one
hola, trataré de mencionar algo que me parece no sale o no se ve mucho como debate,
soy un usuario que leer bastante lemmy por varias razones, novedades, noticias, comentarios, revelaciones…
en mi caso particular pues por no conocer mucho ni poco el idioma inglés pues acudo constantemente al traductor incorporado de firefox, y con calma pues voy seleccionando hilos, debates y respuestas que bien interesan,cuando se comenzó a gestar la expansión de lemmy hice la tecnica de responder en ambos idiomas, en original español y el bloque traducido en inglés,
¿es un problema que todo lemmy o mayormente sea solo en inglés? pues es un eterno debate complejo, si y no, en el caso de español por ahora instancias de lemmy son muy contadas, muy pocas y ya casi sin participación o seguimiento, ya ni menciono otros idiomas locales o regionales pero igualmente importantes como el catalán,
por eso ando en la duda que el idioma de acceso o la poca o nula facilidad de traducir hace o puede hacer que lemmy no se expanda mas, solo algunas apps externas y accesibles de android hacen posible la traducción con pulsar un botón, pero si me preocupa un poco “mucho” que este detalle de lengua está ahora “bloqueando” a muchos o miles y miles de usuarios que les gustaría participar, escribir, responder y ampliar el tema de cualquier naturaleza.
Hi, I’ll try to bring up something that I don’t think gets discussed much.
I’m a user who reads Lemmy quite a bit for several reasons: updates, news, comments, revelations…
In my case, since I don’t know much English, I constantly use Firefox’s built-in translator, and I carefully select threads, discussions, and replies that are of interest.When the Lemmy expansion started, I used the technique of replying in both languages: the original Spanish and the translated section in English.
Is it a problem that all or most of Lemmy is only in English? Well, it’s a complex, eternal debate—yes and no. In the case of Spanish, for now, instances of Lemmy are very few and far between, with almost no participation or follow-up. I won’t even mention other local or regional languages, which are equally important, like Catalan.
That’s why I’m wondering if the access language or the limited or nonexistent ease of translation is preventing Lemmy from expanding further. Only a few external and accessible Android apps allow translation with the touch of a button, but I’m quite concerned that this language issue is currently blocking many, or even thousands, of users who would like to participate, write, respond, and expand on the topic in any way.
cultivate the niche hobby subs, thats really all that reddit still has going for it because it reached critical mass.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Less politics, less news, less “I’m mad about this so you should be mad about it too” rage posting/armchair activism, less “ist’s and ism’s”. Less preachy shit about capitalism bad, communism good (or maybe .ml should just be blocked by default?). Less bitching about Reddit (I swear, I’ve heard less about friends’ exes than some people bitch about Reddit here). Less “hurr durr power tripping mods” circlejerking.
More content about cool stuff, hobbies, amazing feats, movies, books, TV shows, etc.
This place has much of the latter but it’s completely overshadowed by the former to the point you have to almost dig for it. Even blocking the overt news, politics, and political “humor” communities, it still seeps in to comics and memes.
And a new user checking this place out is going to be immediately hit in the face with all of the former and probably not even see the latter.
Programming.dev has been hiding a lot of those kind of communities by default, others could as well:
https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/
But even with that fairly substantial hide list, I agree, we do drown in news and politics.
Ooh, nice. +1 for your admin team. Maybe my instance would consider doing something similar. It is a topic-based instance after all.
I see a lot more shitting on .ml than on reddit. I think that’s what needs to stop. If you don’t like it, fine, use another instance.
.ml is a default instance…which is filled with tankies. It literally turns people away. The devs wanna have their own little tankie instance is fine but gaming the system to make it appear as an instance to join like 95% of the time is going to drive people away.
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People post politics to communities that have rules against it, and the mods do nothing about it. Lemmy needs moderators who do their jobs. The political issue is a moderation issue.
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Yep. When I visit Lemmy, it tends to feel like a dark place. I don’t think news and politics should be dialed down to zero, but the overall negativity here is a bit heavy, and likely a deal-breaker for many exploring Lemmy for the first time.
For comparison to another decentralized social media platform: Nostr generally seems like a pretty positive place. The people tend to be friendly, and it’s quite common to see them saying “good morning” to each other for seemingly no reason (aside from having a nice morning, I suppose). Conversations generally seem civil and mature. Unfortunately, there’s LOT of Bitcoin stuff to wade through over there.
That is what subscriptions and the local timeline are for. The “all” should show whatever is getting the most attention.
The issues you are seeing are due to the small userbase. With a bigger userbase, your local timeline would be fuller. With a bigger userbase, you would be able to see plenty of content in non-meme communities and non-politics community.
That is what subscriptions and the local timeline are for. The “all” should show whatever is getting the most attention.
“All” is what new users typically see. Or see immediately after clicking from “Local” if that’s what the instance is set to default to. New users do not have any subscriptions, and if they’re just browsing as guest, they literally can’t subscribe or do any kind of curation.
First impressions are important. Someone comes here brand new and the first impression is typically that of an angry mob.
So to get a bigger userbase, the “default, guest experience” needs to provide a good first impression. This…preachy/angry/politics/news flood is highly likely to just turn them away and not even bother trying to curate to find the good bits.
I agree. First impressions are important. Perhaps there could be some “click here to change timeline” in the UI?
But again, this is mainly an issue due to the small userbase. With a bigger userbase, the memes and politics would not be so prevalent, hopefully. We would have smaller, text-based communities taking some of the attention.
You seem to be ignoring the problem, which is that the default guest experience of lemmy will filter out all the people who would solve the problem. “Increase the user base” only helps if the users who join aren’t depressed doomers.
There are certainly plenty of communities that aren’t dedicated to doomscrolling. They do need more activity though, plain and simple. I can’t single handed solve the issue of the All feed having so much of that, but I do try to regularly contribute to communities that are more varied, and I suggest to you and other users to do the same. Lemmy is a much smaller userbase and can’t rely on the same proportion of users to contribute content like reddit.
Here are just a few communities I like to visit regularly, and contribute to any time I have a good contribution that aren’t full of doomscrolling content.
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 instead of promoting Lemmy as a whole, promote individual instances separately (but evenly)
A couple of things that come to mind
- advertise, drop the name here and there, especially on reddit because it is so similar in purpose, also share posts from lemmy with friends
- interact with communities you’re interested in, make sure there’s good content or at least comment, especially in smaller, nicr communities
- improve user experience, Lemmy is slow, especially when loading subscriptions, also posts reappear all the time while scrolling
- more casual content, I don’t want to be confronted with all the horrors going on in the world all the time, sometimes I just want to see something funny, apolitical, etc, something chill
Don’t.
I don’t think that the current structure is set up for growth. The devs have stated that they don’t see preparing for growth as a priority and we haven’t seen the kind of mod tools needed for a larger audience.
I also don’t see an onboarding process that has been created to explain to new users how a Federated Lemmy is different from Reddit.
Piefed is structurally further along here at coping with larger audiences.
First step is to make sharing posts easier by integrating something like https://threadiverse.link/.
If I wanted to share your post with my friends, I’d send them the following link: https://piefed.ca/c/asklemmy/p/461864/what-should-we-be-doing-individually-to-increase-lemmy-s-userbase.
If my friends were also on Piedfed.ca, then all’s fine. But if they’re on a different instance and want to comment and/or vote on your post, then they’re fucked. They would have to go on their home instance, look for [email protected], and then search for your post.
I say friend, but this applies to literally everyone here except those who are already on Piefed.ca.
Can we pool some money together and advertise somewhere or put stickers at coffee shops in big cities. Some of my other thoughts are to have influencers plug it, put adds on blogs especially hobby blogs and niche blogs if that’s who we’re trying to attract.
This would not be such a bad idea, honestly. Or just some small stickers that people place on their laptops.
However, I feel like we should see who comes on top, lemmy or PieFed. I feel like piefed might be our best option tbh. The lemmy devs don’t seem to be open to ideas, not to mention their whole stance on politics.
I mean for me it was a recent decision to delete for-profit and algorithmic social media. But that was internally driven as I realised they were making me more miserable and I couldn’t stomach the advertising anymore. But I’ve always failed to replicate that feeling in other people who are stuck in a mixture of sunk cost fallacy and boiled frog status, no idea how to do it consistently.
