Hello,

Thank you for chiming in.

All these spread out parallel communities on different instances with very little engagement.

Yes, that's a common very heated discussion on the platform. Some people are all for having all different versions of the same communities on as many instances as possible, when some other people advocate for some consolidation to gather the low engagement there is in on place.

This post for instance shows a bit of argument used by both sides: https://lemm.ee/post/57899132

On the other hand, some communities like !fedigrow@lemm.ee are focused on growing communities, and regularly you see people suggesting consolidation between similar communities to a single one.

I was always blown away by all the /r/AITAH (and other) posts with thousands of comments responding to clearly AI-generated scenarios.

Reddit's numbers are definitely overblown. I'll take a recent example because it's easy to compare:

• https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/ is supposed to have 166k subscribers
• !buyeuropean@feddit.uk has 11k monthly active users

While the activity levels are definitely different, the subreddit is definitely not 10 times more active than the Lemmy community. Lemmy has people asking for recommendations or alternatives, and they would get 16 comments with suggestions, more than enough in this kind of contexts.

The most discussed topic on that community has 340 comments, all organic, no bot.

So yeah, not sure what we can conclude from this, but I thought that might be interesting.