…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.
The smaller population overall isn’t a bad thing, but it can really be felt in smaller or niche communities. Reddit’s huge size is a plus in this regard, because chances you can find at least a semi-active community for just about any hobby or niche interest.
Yeah, I’d actually forgotten about it since I’ve been here for so long but the joke “there’s a sub for everything” is actually completely true and one of the things I miss, even if it’s an inactive community you can 80% of the time find a subreddit with a few dozen posts to check out. I used to just hit “random” until I found an interesting one. I feel like I’d cycle through all the communities on my instance in a couple of days.
That being said I love the small feeling here compared to Reddit and if I had to choose between “small community with conversation” and “unlimited dopamine trickle tap” I’d rather it stay as it is
The smaller subreddits are still good on reddit, as long as they have a good focus. They are effectively their own little communities
Yes. I never had too much trouble on reddit, but I only stuck to specific subreddits and stayed away fron news or politics.
Yeah, my reddit account is exclusively for the communities around a couple mangas I read. As soon as the SpyxFamily and Akane-banashi communities here reach comparable levels, I will gladly jump ship.
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.
Agreed, the political posts are inevitable with a big election looming unless you filter a lot of subs you are stuck seeing the same ones. And lemmy doesn’t have enough content to turn over so you wind up seeing the same posts from 2 days ago with only 3 comments.
I figure the best thing to do is comment on anything I can and try to engage more people. I was such a lurker on Reddit, but that’s not helpful here.
Happy cake day!
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.
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.
I need people like you to join https://fediverser.network to become a community ambassador. Please join it, find the subreddits that you would like to migrate and let’s bring the people who are interesting.
You don’t want people like me. I have time to complain, but not time to work on a solution lol
I agree. The smaller communities is nice, but when it’s so small that each post has less that 5 comments, I feel the conversations are limited.
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)
Example meme I just created for robo vacs which I’d like to see in the some robovac community.
When i was using reddit, my feed was 90% cats and i was subscribed to hundreds of cat subreddits
Lemmy doesnt have enough cats
I blame this partially on a lack of good video support
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.
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.
Yeah. Compared to Reddit which can have a sub with millions of members but the top posts only get like 12k upvotes and 300 comments
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.
Use an rss feed reader, it prevents duplicates, but it might be annoying to use if you interact with post a lot
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 need to not poop for three days.
cough cough I… I was there cough during the beans
Yeah those memes were cringy as fuck thank god no one’s doing anything that dumb
Lemmy is just a continuation of the Reddit crap of recent years, except for less corpo bullshit, but with more lefty infighting.
it’s like 90% IT nerds here lol. whether you want growth or not depend on how okay you are with that. I love you guys but a lot of your hobbies bore me to shit and I want someone to talk to
It’s still an emerging technology so it makes sense that many of the early adopters are IT nerds. Early Reddit was the same- the most active communities were IT, programming or video game related. More diversity will appear in time.
Typing as an IT nerd, I would be glad to also see some more diversity in interests aside from tech.
Are you already on !casualconversation@lemm.ee ?
I meant more talk shop lol
Which field are you in?
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.
Late reply, but in English media articles, it’s still fairly common for me to see references to what people said on Reddit. AFAIK there are also still entertainment sites (“Caveman Circus” being one) that still regularly harvest expert or semi-expert takes found on Reddit in order to construct ‘best of’ articles.
Though-- perhaps that activity is down somewhat, as you suggest.
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 want the niche communities to fill out but otherwise I agree.
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.
A couple of the big comics communities also churn out a good chunk of content every day… if you like comics. “ArtPorn” and “SuperbOwl” also come to mind. I recommend you keep searching @Lanusensei87@lemmy.world, because you may find some great content sources that you weren’t previously thinking about.
(late reply alert!)
On Reddit I went to specific subreddits and things were bubbling there, on Lemmy I pretty much have to stay on All to get any active content. I really don’t want Lemmy to reach eternal September, but we definitely need much more activity and a much larger user base than we currently have.
Same here. On the upside, "All“ on Lemmy has a much higher quality than what Reddit had in the past years. I really enjoy my daily doomscroll on Lemmy.