Does anybody here still wish the Fediverse just had more people?
I know and can accept the response that say I should register to X site if I want more activity. I do plan to, least with Reddit, just biding some time before I make yet the 20th disposable e-mail and probably the 100th account before it gets banned again if I cross a glass person. Glass person being someone who's so fragile on opinions and things that they'll scream 'BAN THEM BAN THEM!'.
I've been on KBin Social, Lemmy World (least 2 dedicated accounts), KBin Run, Mastodon, Blue Sky .etc
And I'd stay for a good while but I also found myself bored immediately. I check for questions to answer, it's the same questions I've seen days and weeks prior. I check around for things that are reported and they'll be hours old and some of them can be years old.
I love the idea of the Fediverse, I like some of the features that are implemented. Especially when you do ask questions on here and you're allowed to expand on it. Unlike AskReddit for example, they don't really like that and will remove your post because explaining what your question is about and backing it with an example is just unacceptable to them.
I don't know. 43,000+ people sounds a lot on paper, but in practice, it feels like you're dealing with 50 people at any given day.
Post something then. Go to whatever your niche sub is and post on it. People will see it and you might get some engagements. I recently posted in !knives@sopuli.xyz and !geocaching@lemmy.world and got engagement.
Yes there needs to be more people. There's barely any active discussion here. If you don't want to shit on Israel, there's just shit posts and Linux. We need more people to get active sports discussion, movies, TV, or anything else.
It just takes time. More passionate posters will come. Reddit is mostly ai-generated at this point.
I wish more technically focused communities had a real home here. I'll google something, and see that the project I'm working on has a dedicated subreddit where someone asked my question. Wish I could see lemmy in my search results.
Yes, I wish there would be more. But I am okay with the state it's in. The engagement is good enough, and I discover interesting things every other day. You can't force it anyway.
Not overly. More people will be good at first because it'll mean more content, but with more people and more popularity comes the corpos and enshittification.
I've been on KBin Social, Lemmy World (least 2 dedicated accounts), KBin Run, Mastodon, Blue Sky .etc
Blue sky is not on the fediverse. They've decided to come up with their own federating system from the ground up, which I think kind of squandered what could have been a pivotal opportunity to help facilitate a mass exodus from Twitter, contributing to fragmentation and confusion.
But anyway. I think they intend to have their own version of federating soon but I don't think it's up and running yet.
Lemmy seems to have quite a lot of people to be fair. Apparently Lemmy.world has nearly 7,000 users a day, which is quite a lot when you think about it.
One thing I think about is that maybe there are drawbacks to the Reddit-style format of Lemmy. A cool thing about old internet forums is that posts were show in chronological order with no upvotes, which is more similar to a real world conversation. You'd read the most recent posts, rather than the most upvoted posts. This means somebody new to the conversation can have their opinion seen.
The upvoting system means that a small number of posts get nearly all the upvotes and attention, and people who post later have their posts largely ignored.
Maybe I'm wrong but it's just something I thought about.
I got my first reddit ban today!! I told a gamer advocating for bikini armor or something that he should just get a second screen and watch porn while he plays if he's so fucking horny all the time and it was flagged as "harassment". It's only for 7 days so I guess I need to work harder to get a permaban lol.
Maybe less content is good? Infinitely scrolling is not great, and we all know that. Having limited content on Lemmy allows me to at least move onto something else.
I've been using this account for over a year since the Rexodus. Haven't had this disinterest problem. Do I wish there were more users, sure, but it takes time. Work on making this place great and they will continue to move here. Create, mod, or just post to a niche community.
For me the biggest problem is not volume in general but volume of niche content. The best thing about Reddit was all the active, engaging communities that would sprawl around any niche subject you could imagine.
I do, yes, especially for niche communities. But other social networks aren't the answer. Go look at what Reddit has become, or Twitter, or Facebook. It's all junk. Half of it is AIs talking to AIs. There's almost no meaningful conversation taking place. At least here we occasionally get some good conversations, although those are rare outside of politics and Linux.
For more diverse content I indeed wish, but you can't build a healthy social network with an explosion of members without the moderation and toolings required to handle such a wave.
I'd rather be there while the Fediverse grows organically and gather my info from multiple sources the old fashioned way.
More users would be great for the fediverse, in theory. Right now Lemmy (and Mastodon) can attribute a lot of their users to people unhappy with Reddit Inc. (or X) in some way. Throwing more unhappy people into the user base would probably not lead to good outcomes.
Personally I think Lemmy and Mastodon will never get the critical mass of users needed to maintain healthy communities because the only thing they have to offer is a less bad clone of an existing network.
X is bad because a malignant political demagogue is actively destroying what most people liked about Twitter. Reddit is bad because reddit inc. cares more about profit more than the needs of the user base. But the platforms they created and/or operate aren't designed with a federated model in mind.
If the fediverse is ever going to move out of the technically savvy, early adopter nerds phase I think it's only going to do that through something new and better than what already exists.
.world is no different than reddit so you shouldn't expect any improvement there.
for me the lemmyverse is better so far than reddit, x, or facebooks but that's because i spend most of mt time away from the diet reddit lemmyverse instances; maybe that'll work for you too.
I have actual internet friends here. People who, based solely on their efforts and words and interactions, align with my own beliefs and ideals and help me temper and adjust accordingly as time goes on. Adults. I'd happily stay like this or with more, similar people, growing slowly and legitimately.
I wish there was more people on not-so-general communities.
If this means less meme or political posts, it would be for the best. However, more specific communities that are not part of a themed instance have very little activity. If I want to learn about ecology and its science, I know I can find many active communities on slrpnk.net, if I want content that matter to Germans, I can go it feddit.org, jlai.lu the same for Frenchs. But if I want people posting picture of nice looking sticks or find !foraging stories or connect with people doing !origami@feddit.org I know that I have to be patient and that's to bad 'cause if people spend less time commenting US election or some shower thoughts, some people will find time and fun interacting in these communities and many others.
I used reddit for two things: news, and niche subcommunities around small hobbies and fandoms.
We've got the former here, but I don’t know if we'd ever have enough of a critical mass to sustain the latter. And that sucks for me, because I no longer have a good space for that stuff, but I still don't ever want to go back to reddit now.
I would say I miss some specific people or groups, both on Lemmy and on Mastodon, rather than generally "more" people. Friends of mine, certain people I used to follow on Twitter that haven't made the jump, some communities about specific hobbies, that sort of thing.
Overall, I enjoy the fact that I can get a rough idea about who is who instead of interacting with a mass of faceless strangers.
The largest Lemmy instance is the most boring, full of unfunny memes and the worst Redditor culture. What you want is high quality postrs, not simply more people!
Since the vast majority of website users are minimally engaged, I would love for a few more active posters for stability of content and discussion, but not a massive influx of users just to have users.
I also don't want a plethora of users who get banned repeatedly for not being self aware that their behavior is the problem. The occasional crossed wires ban, no biggie, but thinking there are so many glass people that creating dozens of alts is necessary is not a good look.
Speaking personally, while I am here, my participation in Lemmy is lacklustre at best; same with Mastodon. I got burnt out from social media and the years from 2016 - 2024 have really ruined my enthusiasm. I think maybe a lot are in the same boat. Maybe we'll see more people come out of the "shields up, dark times overload" in a year or so... and maybe it will take longer.
Personally I don't find a huge difference with reddit and threadiverse, at least for larger subs. Sure, on paper there are hundreds of comments, but most are the same tired decade old memes. You can predict what the comment sections are gonna be like from the title alone. At worst you get similar comments here, but you don't have to dig through hundreds of comments before finding something worthwhile.
Yes, I still moderate a subreddit which is a support group for a particular surgery. There isn't such a community on the fediverse and the group of people who need this surgery seem to be few in number here too. (Won't be any more specific about the nature of the subreddit or surgery for privacy reasons, before anyone asks)
Absolutely. There's just fuck all to do here. I used reddit for fan communities a lot, and most of them stayed behind. (Unless you're a trekkie I guess. Then you're set.)
So You Thought You Were Lying Low in a Space Forged by an Exodus from Society to Bury your Shoebox of Fake IDs but Nuance Defied Expectation, a Stone's Tale
The "threadiverse" (i.e. lemmy-compatible communities), yeah. There are still many topics that I would find interesting to discuss, but that nobody talks about here; to the extent that there are communities for them, they get very little activity.
The microblogging fediverse (mastodon-compatible), I think, is popular enough by now, I have no real desire to see even more activity there, can hardly keep up with what I'm currently following there and currently tend to unfollow more accounts than I start following.
I wish there were more people in the fediverse, but not necessarily heaps more on Lemmy. I don't want Reddit numbers on Lemmy. But I wish there were more platforms and more people engaging with them, and no, if the answer is shit like Threads then I don't want any of it.