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?
Midnight rave.
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.
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Okayyy
Good job :)
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
Honestly memes on lemmy are orders of magnitude greater than ones I see on reddit. If growing user base makes the memes more lame I don’t know if I support it
The main hurdle is onboarding. Normal people wont understand federation. All they know is Login with Google, that’s it.
Post good content, post links to that content to people it would be desirable to have on here. Have enough other good content that they are inclined to stay.
For profit services don’t need to die. Let the influencer morons stay on them so the rest of us don’t have to deal with them and their idiot followers enshittifying another platform.
You make a very good point. I myself have noticed sites like Lemmy.world are a bit of a ghost town compared to other forums. I think the main reason is that sites like Reddit are still more popular. And that’s either because people started using Reddit when it was actually good and are clinging to nostalgia, or because people don’t know that Lemmy exists. Or both. I recently saw a post on Reddit where someone claimed that Reddit is the only usable forum on the internet.
To answer your question: Convince people that Lemmy is what Reddit was trying to be back in 2006.
Nothing.
Twitter was fine until it got popular, as was Reddit.
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.
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.
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.
Start posting!
Ive been posting way more here than I ever did at reddit, and mods dont delete my posts randomly or out of spite.
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.
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.
I only came here when Reddit banned me, even though I knew about it for ages before that.
So we should get more people on Reddit to threaten violence against Nazis.
Just keep using it. Ask questions, post solutions, as time goes on they will be more relevant.
Post everything here.
Today I Learned is a good one for old info, as people post repetitive stuff all of the time, so when people look up an unusual fact etc… They get brought straight to one of those.
DIY, Woodworking, hobbies etc. and all the main things that people want to look up.
Biggest thing, make it easy to understand.
I STILL dont really get the fediverse. Ive had it explained to me multiple times and I’m still shaky on how to explain to a normie.
Reddit is easy. Fb is easy. Lemmy has to be easy or it will never work. Humans are above all lazy.
And, give them a reason to leave. Why would my friends leave reddit or x, where the content is? (They dont care about bots or fascism). Lemmy has way less content.
Reducing the amount of doomsday content on the front page, which I’m trying to help out with by starting !Nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social
