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?
  • disregardable@lemmy.zip
    1·
    5 days ago

    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.

    • beSyl@slrpnk.netOP
      1·
      5 days ago

      It is possible to increase the userbase without inviting the whole world. Lemmy may have a bigger learning curve than, say, Instagram, but that is fine. Maybe not having people who can’t understand how lemmy works is a good thing. There are, however, many many people who would understand how lemmy works that have not yet learned about it or have but are not using it. Those are the people to whom we should cater.

      We should still, of course, improve the UI/UX as much as possible. Though I feel like Piefed is better for this. Lemmy devs are not receptive to suggestions, not at all. I tried. If the idea did not come from their heads, they reject it.