Some of those users left rather soon, and some more keep dropping off regularly, as they can't seem to adapt to Lemmy, or rather live without one or another feature or content from Reddit.

Now to your question, what can we do better?

Advertisement is of course one, but a large part of the users who left Lemmy we're likely because of Lemmies unfinished state, so maturing Lemmy should be a top priority. "But properly maturing a social site requires an already existing user base" - and that's exactly what we have right now, even if it's dwindling.

Other solutions might also spring from creating the better user experience, such as features to moderate properly, both on a moderator and user basis, and of course to provide sufficient high-quality content.

We can of course try and forcefully promote Lemmy while promising rich lands and green fields, but I think that this is not the optimum path for Lemmy at this time, as we just might acquire the same bad reputation that vegetarians or Linux or a lot of other good initiatives suffered from.

[–] Hyperreality@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Some of it is also the nature of the fediverse. For example, you'll sometimes see people complaining about having to see the same story multiple times.

The exact same article will be posted on technology@lemmy.ml, technology@lemmy.world, technology@beehaw.org, etc. etc. Or you won't get to see stories depending on which instance you're using, because server A has chosen not to (no longer) federate with server B, which means you need an account with multiple networks to see the whole fediverse, despite the fediverse supposedly being interconnected.

That's off-putting to many users, but I don't know if there's a way to change that easily, because these kinds of things are arguably part and parcel of the fediverse.

[–] Ashtear@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not only that, but following the influx of new users was an assumption that just setting up niche communities exactly the way they were set up on Reddit was the best way forward (despite there only being a fraction of the userbase).

Some of these niches are going to need to merge. In some cases it's going to happen naturally as redundant communities die off, but I'd like to see some effort to preempt that.

[–] ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That, and the reddit repost bots who sometimes mass post content from Reddit with no interaction on Lemmy.

Now, having the same post being replicated on multiple subs was no rarity on Reddit, but they tended to use crossposting.

I've found the current moderation tools to be enough to deal with the latter problem, but crossposting or linking posts would be a nice feature on Lemmy, even if I'm not sure how one would properly implement that on the fediverse. So yea....