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 don’t need more usebase, we’ve got perfectly good userbase at home.
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
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.
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.
As a user, It would be nice to be able to consolidate.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 unrelated communities.
There’s still plenty of good in this world, but you’d never know it from looking at what’s always topping the feed here.
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.
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 handedly 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.
!imaginarywarhammer@lemmy.world
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 disagree with you that we need less of anything. We have about the right amount of news and politics. Now we need ~100x of everything else, so that it doesn’t seem so ever present. Lemmy doesn’t need less of anything, it only needs more.
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.
Completely agree! You should create a new community with the moderation style that you enjoy. I’ll probably even join, tbh.
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.
You could mitigate the problem of the small userbase with our current userbase, by just, for example, posting more of type X and less of type Y. That would be one answer to this post: what can one do, individually, to increase the userbase.
Stay federated and up prayed.
Bring it up at your local town hall; be sincere about what Lemmy is. Ask if there are any Reddit users then publicly shame them for using the platform.
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.
I agree, but at least on Lemmy they don’t have to look for the home instance first. You can paste the url into the search there.
It looks like that doesn’t work with the Piefed search? (Didn’t use apps in both cases)
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.
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
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
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 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.
Please join us in the !soulslike@lemmy.zip community. Game specific comms are almost dead but some of us genre enjoyers congregate there.
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.
Absolutely nothing.
same. the bigger it gets the more ads you get.
Ads and idiots.
I think we have a good idiot ratio right now, let’s not increase it.
