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?
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.
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 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.
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 see a lot more shitting on .ml than on reddit. I think that’s what needs to stop. If you don’t like it, fine, use another instance.
cultivate the niche hobby subs, thats really all that reddit still has going for it because it reached critical mass.
Honestly, I think we have way too many communities. Cull them back to a small set of fairly broad communities: Arts, Tech, Politics, etc. Once those are active enough, then start to subdivide as the sub communities grew to a sufficient size to self-sustain.
What happened instead, was people tried to create all the same communities that reddit has, without the people to sustain them, and now it looks like a ghost town.
I agree with this. Leads to communities being drip fed and having small user bases where eventually most people (who are not committed) just end up back on Reddit.
So how many communities should there be exactly?
About tree fiddy
Trying to convince people I know to join the Fediverse is like, well, it’s a lot like trying to convince people to switch to Linux. They’re not gonna do it and I’ll look like a jackass if I talk about it too much.
If there was an easy way to grow this platform overnight, we’d be doing it. Reality is there’s no shortcut, all we can do is continue building community with the people who are here and hope that we see some slow and steady incremental growth.
I think the most valuable thing we can do for the fediverse is to contibute by posting in communities we care about, thus helping them be active, and engage in posts made by others in general. In short, don’t lurk, don’t be passive.
First thing is gain enough support in the presumption that increasing userbase is a desirable outcome.
Chasing bigger numbers for bigger numbers sake is one of the biggest problems with capitalism
Honestly memes on lemmy are orders of magnitude greater than ones I see on reddit. If growing user base makes the memes more lame I don’t know if I support it
the biggest hurdle i see right now to expanding the threadiverse is how often people here are just absolute assholes to each other.
That tracks with every other platform though. I think the big hurdle is that it seems more complicated to get into since having independent instances is so different than everybody else.
Midnight rave.
Can I ask why a bigger user base equals better? I’d there a technical reason?
I think there are a huge amount of internet refugees that are now lost. I miss healthy topics, resources and niche forums. But for me they won’t come back because all that info will get scraped and infiltrated. So I question even if the numbers arrived would that equal genuine and contributing communities.
I like this place this size. I’d like more engagement but I think a lot of people are reassessing what they want from the internet and that’s that. We can’t force engagement we can see the result of that at Reddit.
I think people just miss their niche interest communities.
For example, I love Elden Ring, but !eldenring@lemmy.world hasn’t had any new posts in almost a year. Meanwhile the Elden Ring subreddit has a bunch of posts just from the last few minutes.
Still not enough to make me go back to Reddit, but I admit it’s something I miss and something that just can’t be recreated without more people.
Please join us in the !soulslike@lemmy.zip community. Game specific comms are almost dead but some of us genre enjoyers congregate there.
I only came here when Reddit banned me, even though I knew about it for ages before that.
So we should get more people on Reddit to threaten violence against Nazis.
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Okayyy
Nothing.
Twitter was fine until it got popular, as was Reddit.
