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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
If I want to read discussion about a new movie or game that all seems to be on reddit, so I guess the lesson is to try starting that sort of thing here and hope it picks up. With a smaller user base you have to accept that individual posts may not get any traction though. I do think having discussion other than Linux and whatever Trump is going on about this week would help to grow the platform.
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.
the biggest hurdle i see right now to expanding the threadiverse is how often people here are just absolute assholes to each other.
We should start making little comics about how people who aren't on Lemmy all go to hell and put them in random places.
Try to be welcoming and kind.
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.
A couple of things that come to mind
Midnight rave.
The main hurdle is onboarding. Normal people wont understand federation. All they know is Login with Google, that's it.
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.
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.
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.
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 !asklemmy@lemmy.world, and then search for your post.
I say friend, but this applies to literally everyone here except those who are already on Piefed.ca.
Trying to convince people I know to join the Fediverse is like, well, it's a lot like trying to convince people to switch to Linux. They're not gonna do it and I'll look like a jackass if I talk about it too much.
If there was an easy way to grow this platform overnight, we'd be doing it. Reality is there's no shortcut, all we can do is continue building community with the people who are here and hope that we see some slow and steady incremental growth.
Best thing you can do is make your own communities for topics that we haven't already got one for.
Also going on reddit and just going "join lemmy join lemmy join lemmy" over and over again probably helps, right?
Best thing you can do is make your own communities for topics that we haven’t already got one for.
Plenty of people did just that, then came to realise that it's usually quite the job to keep their sublemmys running and build them up over time. Bot posts don't work very well, either. Hence all the dead communities across the FV.
A related issue is that the FV strongly needs people with more community-minded spirit than the typical Reddit user. IMO it's important to 'be the change,' and to try to help each other out as individuals, and help communities we appreciate. Being more of a 'lazy Reddit asshole who clutters threads with lame DudeBro jokes' isn't ideal at this point.
I don't think this site is for everyone. You need your own internal reason to use this site (anti-enshittification, banned from other places, or whatever). On a regular social media site, you log in, and you immediately are shown a feed of fun and interesting content. Unless you're like really into programming, Lemmy doesn't have fun and interesting content. Of the content that is here, people don't engage with it much, and it's poorly moderated (actual calls for death and abuse, weird sexual anime stuff, etc). Lemmy is also not easy to use or understand. Most people don't understand what an instance is, and why do I need to read paragraphs on federation just to use the site? The only way this place could compete with polished, plug-and-play social media is if the US continues getting so authoritarian that regular social sites become exorbitantly censored to a regular person's perspective.
First thing is gain enough support in the presumption that increasing userbase is a desirable outcome.
Chasing bigger numbers for bigger numbers sake is one of the biggest problems with capitalism
We don't need more usebase, we've got perfectly good userbase at home.
Honestly it's a double edged sword. The tight-knit feel of Lemmy is really cozy, but with a larger user base it will allow for more posts/interaction on niche communities.
Lemmy is sort of crappy through its software decisions, similar to how Reddit is crappy but in some ways worse. There's not much we can do about that as users. Reddit also manages to paper over some of its crappiness through moderator interventions, while Lemmy tends to let crap slide. Crappiness = clickbait titles with no indication of what the link is about, lots of duplicate posts, etc. Lemmy adds the problem of fragmenting communities across instances. I think I heard that posts duplicated across multiple communities in a single instances will somehow be cleaned up in 1.0, which can help.
Anyway there's not a whole lot that users can do, except maybe launch some new instances or forks that don't suck as much.
Piefed fixes pretty much all of those questionable software decisions, though it does introduce a couple new ones of its own.
Post more sexy pictures.
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