Why are so many people so fixated on Lemmy's growth?
Why are so many people so fixated on Lemmy's growth?
...relative to Reddit's size?
I see so many posts and comments voicing disappointment with Lemmy's lack of massive expansion.
I too want to see Lemmy gain more users, but I do not want it to grow to Reddit's size. If Reddit is the yardstick, I'd say that a population that large attracts a lot of negative behaviours; degeneration of discourse, amplification of echo chambers and hive mind behaviour, etc...
I started on Reddit in 2010 and found that by 2016 things were really bad in comparison. A fun and engaging site was experiencing an obvious devolution that persists to this day, accelerated by Spez's enshittification of the platform. Obviously the fediverse insulates us from that occurring here but I think you get what I mean.
Do you you think Lemmy is too small? I don't. I've been here since the great migration last year and have had a really good time. I see a lot of familiar names in the comments on a daily basis. It actually feels like a community here. I guess I just don't understand the fixation on the size of Lemmy's user base. Curious to hear your thoughts.
[EDIT] Thanks for all the responses, everyone! Lots of perspectives I hadn't yet considered.
Because that's what I'm missing. I like the apps, I like the site, but I need content. And not memes or politics, but specific niche topics. The nice thing about Reddit is that there's more than enough content about basically anything. Non mainstream music (DnB, Hardstyle, Trance), games, hobbies. There are always hundreds ,if not thousands of people engaging. I don't want a discussion with 3 other people, I want a large community that can actually provide me with a lot of new information and keeps itself going without any effort from my end.
Some years ago Reddit had such a large reach in the media space that you could be discussing something on there and news outlets would pick up on it. For a brief period it actually felt like a platform where ordinary people could get heard and influence the world outside of Reddit or at least sway opinions of other real users. The reason why it worked was the massive userbase. The high profile AMA's drew quite the crowd. Those days are long gone. It's been a long time I saw any serious news outlets report on what happens on Reddit. GameStop was probably the last big Reddit thing to make a dent on the outside world.
I don't want Lemmy to be that big, but it would be nice to know that if you make effort to write something that is important to you, that it gets read by more than two other people who already have the same opinion.
Because there are only a handful of communities that have enough traffic to sustain a meaningful conversation.
Even popular activities have low traffic, god forbid you want to participate in a community based around a niche activity.
I love Lemmy and I'm not going back to reddit... But sometimes it feels like a desolate wasteland here.
The flagship communities are quite alive, but the niche communities have not really taken off. I am talking from both the absence of such communities, and my experience trying to migrate !fluidmechanics. The subreddit has around 10k humans (or bots).
It highly depends on what you're here for. Some communities have gathered enough active members to expect a continuous influx of posts and comments.
The strength that Reddit has built over the years is that many niche communities also thrived and turned into a rich repository of knowledge that was searchable. Lemmy isn't there yet, if you're into fishing, knitting, Japanese chess or sourdough baking.
But it also doesn't need to be a perfect drop in replacement for Reddit, it's probably fine if it remains something different, slightly fringe and a friendly place that doesn't require massive amount of servers and moderation staff.
Well, for me, the site has very little to offer because I'm not into USA politics (I check on them, but that is not why I was on Reddit to begin with), and that is more or less the only topic with a self sustained community besides meme pages. So yes, I do want this place to grow, not a little, a lot.
Because the communities I care about are getting less than one post per month.
Come join us at !androidgamers@lemmy.world
Like others already pointed out, it’s not about the size per se. It’s about the small odd communities of specific interest that we miss. These usually only thrive with numbers.
Then again, I used Lemmy for over a year and didn’t get a single death threat. I went back to check my Reddit account and had two in my inbox, I didn’t use the site since the exodus. Soooooooo, yeah. You win some you loose some.
I just miss there being more variance in the voices I see in the comments. On Reddit, the size made it so that you were pretty much always seeing new commenters, and seeing a lot of different discussions. But here, I mostly see the same ~50 regulars across all the communities I subscribe to, and almost all the same discussions being had.
Overall I still prefer it here, but more users and more active communities would be nice, too.
As a mod of three niche Soulslike communities, one of which that probably has less than 10 active users at best, it's really hard to put out quality content and keep a community alive all on your own. I had to resort to a bot filling two of the communities with regular posts so there is some semblance of life in the communities, but reception has been mixed so far and the engagement didn't grow as much as I had hoped.
Unfortunately, I don't see any other way for these communities to be sustainable if like 95% of users on here are lurkers. Plus, I'm not the best fit for moderation and pumping out posts asking for engagement constantly since I'm a lurker at heart myself.
'All' is pretty good, though. It's where I spend most my time on Lemmy.
Does anyone remember the inside jokes in the early days of reddit?
When does the narwhal bacon? Orangered Chuck Testa!! Ridiculously photogenic guy And of course the long list of meme-level posts like broken arms, cumbox, celebrity AMAs
This type of community humor made a lot of people feel like they'd found their tribe on reddit in those early days.
I haven't seen much like this develop on Lemmy yet, possibly because there's so many disparate communities merging. I'm not really sure. Or maybe all those 20-something redditors are now pushing 40.
I think it will take a while for a lemmy culture to develop and the community won't attract outsiders much until it does.
I want the world to use open source tools.
On !fedigrow@lemm.ee there's a weekly thread called "How are you doing with your communities?" It's for/by all the people who single-handedly keep niche communities alive by posting regularly. It can be a tough job, and easy to burn out. That's because of the relatively small population here on Lemmy.
However, I agree that I like the culture here better. On Reddit, even when I blocked ads I still felt like I was being marketed to and manipulated.
There are a lot of communities missing. I cant find anything financial related like /personalFinance, /financialIndependence, /povertyFinance, /frugal with any decent amount of interaction. Most with maybe 1 post or a handful of comments every month. Without gaining a lot of users there isnt enough content to stay
This is of course only my opinion but I want it much bigger but maybe not the size of reddit. I like being able to have a problem and going into the specialized community to ask the pros. Online searching is currently slowing down results. AI searches will tell someone to use an outlet to fix a pipe and if someone searching for something they don't know may try figuring out why their pipe doesn't even have a plug. I also like to research into things HEAVILY and having a community where I can sift through thousands of posts to form an idea of what I'm looking to learn is nice.
With that said I can't knock lemmy any because the community that has 150 people will have 125 of them respond to anything you post.
I want the niche communities to fill out but otherwise I agree.
I don't think it's the size but more the number of communities and how active they are. So if there are more people here it hopefully means there will be more active users as well. And perhaps more niche communities.
I want more small communities with people who really like specific things. For example if you want to buy a robot vacuum going to a community about it is very nice to read up on what people find important and maybe issues with a particular model. Even the memes sometimes have great info (think something like a popular vacuum that doesn't pick up anything with "At least you tried" or spongebob meme pointing at stuff of increasing sizes referencing areas the vacuum missed)
I’d really like to see more posts come through, without the dip into the “copy Reddit posts” kind of thing. When I open Reddit, I can read 100 posts of varying topics, refresh an hour later and have a lot of new posts to ingest. Lemmy doesn’t have that much activity, so I end up looking at a very similar “popular” feed this morning, this afternoon, this evening. And 1/4 of those posts will also be in my feed again the next day.
Network effect matters
There’s also a number of them indirectly trying to use the numbers to trash talk Lemmy. Personally, I would prefer the quality over quantity you can see here on Lemmy.
Im looking at it from a whole fediverse perspective but its large enough as is to be enjoyable. If it gets larger fine, if not fine. I just want it to develop to have as much freedom as possible and give as much control as possible to the individual for their experience.
Reddit has the same dynamics. Smaller niche communities there were awesome, the massive ones were full of toxicity. Here, the large communities are the size of small Reddit boards, which is good, but many niche communities here are unfortunately too sparse to thrive.
I don't think Lemmy must grow. In fact I like the relative obscurity that tends to make it a better quality of user. But at this size, it's less of a one-stop shop than Reddit. I miss the Reddit cigar community. They aren't really in favor, particularly with the left, and there isn't the critical mass to sustain that here. So I just don't talk about them which unfortunately leaves me less informed about what's going on in that world.
That so being said, I agree with the thrust of your post which is that Lemmy is just fine at this size. It is.
Because I want to see Reddit fail.
I mainly used Reddit for communities dedicated to niche games and hobbies. None of those communities exist on the Fediverse, because the venn diagram of very niche interests x Fedi itself being niche has too little overlap. Fedi would have to be substantially bigger to replicate that part of Reddit, only when there are a ton of users to begin with will I be able to find the small percentage of them who also want to talk about the stuff I want to talk about.
most online users, like well over 90%, don't post or comment with any regularity, that's just how online activity works.
coming from Reddit, lurkers are expecting unlimited content in any community to consistently appear, without internalizing that it is users creating that content
Lemmy lurkers are the people that need to add content if they want to see more content.
I agree that lemmy is fine the way it is, getting a few new users every day, a few new communities, consistent quality posts and actual conversation instead of the chaotic morass that Reddit easily devolves into with so many posts.
Give it some time and you will see what Lemmy is capable of.
Bunch of size queens around here.
Subs which are huge in other places don't exist here. So growth is needed.
I would like particular communities to grow but the Facebook/Instagram/tiktok people can stay where they're at.
I see lemmy as a sort of test-balloon: Can we overcome network effects? And in a larger (and maybe slightly hyperbolic) sense, can we become a rational civilization or are we doomed to fail as a species?
On a civilization level we are currently seeing a massive downward trend due to news and social media become completely... well wrong. And it's getting worse. The main media aspects of the internet have done the exact opposite of what we wanted it to become. And most of it is because it's run only for profit.
So lemmy and the fediverse is a pretty good attempt at trying to break that and replace it with something more democratic and sane. But I think it's likely that lemmy is going to fail to achieve that. The synergy through network effects is just too strong. Reddit, youtube, facebook, google, twitter will never be replaced. At least not without a massively funded alternative (e.g. tiktok that funded creators for a while) and that just ends in the same way again. Seeking profit instead of serving the users is a kind of insanity for our "means of communication".
Of course that is a bit hyperbolic and lemmy is fine and fun to use as it is, but I wish it would fully replace reddit as a sane alternative.
I saw a bunch of new people join recently because of Reddit saying something about potentially pay walling subs. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
Too many people are just competitive. I didn't get it either, just ignore it and post memes.
I've been having a nice time with Lemmy having ditched Reddit last year, and considering the changes that happened or have been conceptually floated over that time I'm happy with my choice.
One thing I would like is for the Lemmy framework to make it easier for the network to be "wider" than "taller" as it grows. By this I mean a wider array of separate domains with operators each with thriving niche communities, rather than a few tall generalist servers and a handful of outliers, and a fragmented myriad of inactive communities that are hard to find.
I dunno but I'm not. I'm just having fun
I guess for me it's disappointing to see how much nonsense ppl will put up with from reddit, when so many ppl made noises Abt how they wld leave
Trainspotters. All of 'em.
More people need to know about lemmy.
Perhaps the next time reddit fuck off, we will see.
But i think it might not a case anymore, because Reddit is so good with censor now.
Comment hide, shallowban new account, especially detect multi and shallowban in 30 minutes, it is unlikely there will be a revolt on Reddit.
Many people have something of a fixation on the growth. It may feel big to you now, but believe me it's not done growing yet.
They are used to the short-term goals of stonks.
The more people there are, the more popular it is with the working class. Instead of being a niche community, you can meet non-tech people that know about Lemmy.
Lemmy is good as is; slow growth is better, IMO.