How can we make it more popular?
Honestly, the main problem for popularity’s sake is the un-diverse userbase.
It’s a bunch of techy redditors, the same way that many other services that splinter off from reddit are. Almost all the communities are literal clones of reddit ones. So for someone who wants a similar style of place and doesn’t have a hatred of reddit corporate built-in, why would they not go to reddit, which has the same kind of userbase but with 100x the users?
Honestly, other than “Open Source Master Race!!!111!!!111”, there isn’t any reason, especially not one that the average person will care about.
Another one, and I fucking HATE saying this, not enough zoomers dragging their friends along. This place feels like a place for the 30-something instead of the 20-something. Which isn’t bad, of course, but in terms of network effect power it is, because peer pressure is huge for social media.
But, separate from all that, do we actually want it to be that kind of popular? Maybe we should stay under the radar for the most part. Keep it from becoming stale and condescending like lots of Redditors can be. Keep the advertisers from sinking claws in. Maybe that’ll be better for the site as a whole than needing ads to support a service 100x the size.
I think there’s other factors.
I worked for 12 hours today. When I came home and browsed ALL, it was exactly same posts as there was this morning. That’s a problem for getting return visits. I have resolved to take some of the energy I spend on comments and dedicate it back to posts.
I find lemmy waaaaay more condescending and less spontaneous than reddit.
I still think it’s a better platform in many ways, but the mere fact that “moral superiority” is a prime reason for joining guarantees that it will be condescending.
more plateauing than losing I think
Because it’s just a circlejerk for the most part and it’s not particularly useful
Lots of good content here but I’m never going to use it to the same extent I used reddit
It’s normal, people come and go, same on mastodon. We will have times where people join like crazy, just wait :)
We don’t have to prove ourselves to any investors though, so slight decline is totally fine!
What is this? We dont need to apply the “growth growth growth!” mantra from our fucked up economies?
I want more people to experience how cool lemmy is.
Stop advertising the site as a place to go when you get banned from reddit for being too insufferable even for them.
This. I feel the drop in users are the people who came here thinking it was a place for “free speech” and are upset for being downvoted for shit comments.
In reality it’s probably people who checked out the site, saw its mostly software/tech and political communities, a handfull of communities for trans people and reposted memes, and a dash of “the West will fall and China will prevail” communist communities, and decided to leave.
Also the porn is hidden too well, and even when you figure out how to find it, the porn that exists is 90% furry and hentai. Reddit has a huge amateur porn community that I’m certain keeps much of their users coming back.
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Who cares? I’m here, you’re all here, and for now the content I see is pretty good quality compared to alternatives. I’m of the mindset that too many users can be just as bad for a site like lemmy as too few.
The only way to make it more popular is by having more content. Unfortunately we haven’t reached the critical mass number of people that keeps people interested.
The niche communities get no love
Woodworking, knitting, houseplants, etc.
All these “average joe”-hobbies are nearly non existant here and thus… why woulf those users arrive?
Ita most bot posts, memes and tech news i see, when browsing all.
Heya, I was just doing a search for something and your comment popped up so thought I’d let you know we do actually have some quite decently active craft communities. !woodworking@lemmy.ca and !knitting@lemmy.world for example. Join us, the more the merrier! :)
Isn’t this ok? I’m not saying it’s better… just OK?
I don’t know if this is just me but why is there always a race to be the “most popular/larger platform”?
Isn’t this kind of race to be the most popular the reason why a lot of platforms/companies/jobs/games/etc are suffering today? Growth for the sake of growth and forcing something to be more popular just because it needs to be more popular is just kind of sad.
It’s not like “corporate fediverse/lemmy” needs more users… At least this is my opinion.
It’s not growth for the sake of growth, it’s growth for the sake of network effects.
More users = more content. I can’t be the only one to feel the draw to Reddit since there’s still often more active discussions there.
Trying to make a place popular for the sake of popularity is putting the cart before the horse, and will always be a losing battle.
Make your Lemmy instance a place worth spending time. Don’t worry about user counts or popularity.
I think you are missing a big piece of the bigger picture.
Much of the ‘utility’ of the lemmy alternatives is the significantly larger user base, which is what’s necessary for more niche communities to get off the ground and actually be viable. Without that userbase, lemmy is just another alternate place to discuss the basest common topics, that can be discussed anywhere. I mean, technology and news are nice to have, but it’s the variety of the niche community that are what keep people still hooked on reddit.
So in the end, making a place popular for the sake of popularity actually does serve an important purpose.
How can we make it more popular?
By not doing the things that corporations do to make things popular. Do we even need Lemmy to be popular? I think we concentrate on trying to keep the Fediverse and Lemmy user focused and privacy friendly and people will naturally come over as they get burnt on the ever increasingly enshitified corporate data-theft sites. We need to be something different than the big sites. A breath of fresh air. I think people will be OK with putting up with a few quirks to escape those toxic environments. I think Lemmy is progressing just fine and I’m enjoying it.
Do we even need Lemmy to be popular?
Yes otherwise this will become a tech and tankie echochamber shithole
Can you elaborate how making Lemmy like current popular sites will prevent tech and “tankie” content?
Do i need to?
Reddit was great because it had everything from baking to bombmaking and itwas popoular in its own communities. Lemmy only has bombmaking and even then nobody in the bombmaking communities go to !bombmaking@lem.ee or !bombmaking@lemmee.to or !bombmaking@federationsite.websitedomainending
They go to reddit/r/bombmaking. Because thats where the people are.Lemmy is supposed to be a better reddit alternative. But all we have right now is a big majority of “socialism is the best, all problems stem from capitalism” people. And while i totally agree with the sentiment, i do not want to have the 1000th discussion on why capitalism sucks.
Especially not if the discussion is brought up everytime by capitalismhater@capitalismhate.capitalimshate who highjacks all threads to speak about why capitalism is bad.Edit or rather adding onto my “rant”: I do not mean that the majority is literally “socialism is the best”-people. But we have a strong and loud majority of enthusiasts for their fields that are nieches at best in ““the real world””
That’s pretty much the biggest gripe I have with Lemmy; there can be different groups with the same general theme who never come across each others’ content, resulting in small echochambers with minimal content.
I can be a data point, after initial enthusiasm I find myself spending less time on lemmy - which is not necessarily a bad thing. For me, it’s just that real life is getting precedence. Also this does not mean I left lemmy, will return again when the rough edges are sorted out.
Maybe stop being such diehard Linux nerds. Kind of cringe
