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?
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 on 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.
The main hurdle is onboarding. Normal people wont understand federation. All they know is Login with Google, that’s it.
the biggest hurdle i see right now to expanding the threadiverse is how often people here are just absolute assholes to each other.
Nothing.
Twitter was fine until it got popular, as was Reddit.
Don’t.
I don’t think that the current structure is set up for growth. The devs have stated that they don’t see preparing for growth as a priority and we haven’t seen the kind of mod tools needed for a larger audience.
I also don’t see an onboarding process that has been created to explain to new users how a Federated Lemmy is different from Reddit.
Piefed is structurally further along here at coping with larger audiences.
Can we pool some money together and advertise somewhere or put stickers at coffee shops in big cities. Some of my other thoughts are to have influencers plug it, put adds on blogs especially hobby blogs and niche blogs if that’s who we’re trying to attract.
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.
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.
Honestly variety is the spice of life, and keeping up with the zeitgeist is half of why people like to be online. I think this is a very good point!
I mean for me it was a recent decision to delete for-profit and algorithmic social media. But that was internally driven as I realised they were making me more miserable and I couldn’t stomach the advertising anymore. But I’ve always failed to replicate that feeling in other people who are stuck in a mixture of sunk cost fallacy and boiled frog status, no idea how to do it consistently.
waiting for more reddit purges? thats sadly is the only way. other ways, reddit just have all the communities that lemmy doesnt.
currently reddit is very careful about massive purges now, they are just doing background ones, even if they increased thier filtering and sensitivity of bot? detection. they want to avoid bots being to pervasive on site to make it seem like its mostly users.
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.
has to start somewhere, makes one wonder how reddit caught on enough to become established.
iirc StumbleUpon took me to reddit for the first time, not really organic website discovery services now.
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.
Leak the funhole.
Stay upprayed fam.
Thank you for sharing your leaky hole content.
Try to be welcoming and kind.
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
Yep. When I visit Lemmy, it tends to feel like a dark place. I don’t think news and politics should be dialed down to zero, but the overall negativity here is a bit heavy, and likely a deal-breaker for many exploring Lemmy for the first time.
For comparison to another decentralized social media platform: Nostr generally seems like a pretty positive place. The people tend to be friendly, and it’s quite common to see them saying “good morning” to each other for seemingly no reason (aside from having a nice morning, I suppose). Conversations generally seem civil and mature. Unfortunately, there’s LOT of Bitcoin stuff to wade through over there.
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.
Ooh, nice. +1 for your admin team. Maybe my instance would consider doing something similar. It is a topic-based instance after all.
I disagree with you that we need less of anything. We have about the right amount of news and politics. Now we need ~100x of everything else, so that it doesn’t seem so ever present. Lemmy doesn’t need less of anything, it only needs more.
People post politics to communities that have rules against it, and the mods do nothing about it. Lemmy needs moderators who do their jobs. The political issue is a moderation issue.
Completely agree! You should create a new community with the moderation style that you enjoy. I’ll probably even join, tbh.
That is what subscriptions and the local timeline are for. The “all” should show whatever is getting the most attention.
The issues you are seeing are due to the small userbase. With a bigger userbase, your local timeline would be fuller. With a bigger userbase, you would be able to see plenty of content in non-meme communities and non-politics community.
That is what subscriptions and the local timeline are for. The “all” should show whatever is getting the most attention.
“All” is what new users typically see. Or see immediately after clicking from “Local” if that’s what the instance is set to default to. New users do not have any subscriptions, and if they’re just browsing as guest, they literally can’t subscribe or do any kind of curation.
First impressions are important. Someone comes here brand new and the first impression is typically that of an angry mob.
So to get a bigger userbase, the “default, guest experience” needs to provide a good first impression. This…preachy/angry/politics/news flood is highly likely to just turn them away and not even bother trying to curate to find the good bits.
I agree. First impressions are important. Perhaps there could be some “click here to change timeline” in the UI?
But again, this is mainly an issue due to the small userbase. With a bigger userbase, the memes and politics would not be so prevalent, hopefully. We would have smaller, text-based communities taking some of the attention.
You seem to be ignoring the problem, which is that the default guest experience of lemmy will filter out all the people who would solve the problem. “Increase the user base” only helps if the users who join aren’t depressed doomers.
You could mitigate the problem of the small userbase with our current userbase, by just, for example, posting more of type X and less of type Y. That would be one answer to this post: what can one do, individually, to increase the userbase.
We should start making little comics about how people who aren’t on Lemmy all go to hell and put them in random places.
