How can we make it more popular?
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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For the last time, there is no need. We are large enough. 400,000 people is a large town or small city. Remember:
There are no investors to please
No stock holders to appease
No CEO to bootlick
No ads to chase
No e-peen to contest
We are free at last. Free your mind from the tail chase of corporate controlled social media.
These are good things, for sure, but for me they are separate from why I'm here. The niche discussions that I crave are just not here. We're simply not large enough to have anything but the most popular subjects get any traction. So we have memes, politics, and programming/linux discussions. Worse off, you have to dodge the hexbear and lemmigrad dipshits. So the overall experience is still suffering due to the size.
I want more normies 😭
Don't mind the memes, but there's too much tech and politics IMO
Yeah, i get tired of the us centric politics and although I have an interest in tech, its too much here
Specially politics. Even meme communities are becoming a politics cesspool, at least that meme community of lemmy.ml, or 196 of lemmy.blahaj.zone (in a lesser way, but still), or gaming communities. Damn, do I have to block every single community of every single instance to really enjoy lemmy/kbin without being bombarded 24 hours with politics? And the funny/sad thing is that moderators and administrators don't even care.
I’ve noticed less discussion over the past month and more groupthink like Reddit. Just Elon bad. America bad. It’s quickly becoming an echo chamber that will cause people to stop using it. People can only hear one liners so often before they get bored.
True, but a slow, steady growth is going to result in a better platform than having a flood of old redditors that take over. And that’s coming from a Reddit refugee, which I’d guess is a pretty significant portion of the user base these days. I saw a thread about Beehive considering leaving the fediverse altogether because they can’t keep up with all the fedderated content coming in that doesn’t meet their standards. I also think there needs to be further development of the software, things like users being able to block while instances(I’m fine with porn instances existing, but I don’t want them showing in my main feed and I don’t necessarily want to block everything labeled NSFW), as well as something comparable to the multi-Reddit system that lets me make groups of communities to browse together rather than just subscribed/home/all. The second would go a long way to getting that niche content communities up and running. The few niche communities that I have found seem to get buried under the more popular ones(which was an issue on Reddit for a long time too), so some method to bring that niche content to the surface on par with the bigger communities would go a long way too.
There are like 50,000 active users. That is the metric that matters above all else.
People that make an account and never post (which is where that 400,000 number you are referring to comes from) means next to nothing. If the number of active users continues to decrease, then this site will be dead, regardless of what the user count it.
To be fair, that's true of most social media, including Reddit.
Exactly. This. We’re not trying to get popular.
Lemmy has a good group. It will ebb and flow. People are finding their groups online. If it’s not here. That’s fine. If you enjoy lemmy. Stay! But we don’t need to grow lol
I don't want us to get exactly popular, but I'd like to be big enough where the nice communities can be big and active enough. I still have to go to reddit for those and it is annoying.
It's not big enough. Virtually every Lemmy sub alternative to Reddit is empty with no content, so I spend the majority of my time on Reddit.
...Except for the mods and admins of whatever instance you use, and you can't even make your own because of the CSAM problem.
It's turning into digital feudalism, where we peasants try to shop around for a lord to protect us from the other lords.
People hated exploding-heads and wolfballs for expressing the wrong opinions on lemmy, but the thing that shut down those sites ultimately wasn't defederation per se, but the fact that lemmy's architecture inherently lends itself to authoritarian digital feudalism. Now that community is over on nostr where the authoritarian centralized censorship isn't baked into the architecture.
I'll take a look at the nostr protocol, but I still think that people will naturally organize themselves into outsourcing "sort/rank/filter/block" functionality to someone else, whether that's the provider of the service or a third-party plugin that leverages lots of users' observations and behavior to train the model. In the end, plenty of us want the ability to block content we don't want to see, rank content (including comments) by interestingness or usefulness or whatever criteria we prefer, whether that's provided by the actual service or not.
After all, look at how we've created an ecosystem of ad blocking: we've whitelisted and blacklisted certain sites and domains, certain types of scripts, to where the user can control whether a website shows them ads. But it's a cat and mouse game, and the software needs to be continually updated to be effective, so most of us just rely on a third-party-maintained browser extension or pihole config to do the ad blocking for us.
In other words, we still want to be able to censor things before they reach ourselves, but certain methods of doing that are more user-friendly, or more user-centered, or more user-configurable than others.
We clearly need something better.
I honestly am just going to go back to making my own websites and using instant messengers again. User-centered control is the way the internet was intended to be used so it's time we went back to that sort of thing. Obviously relying on other people simply doesn't work.
That’s basically the population of my whole state… always interesting what people think of as “large towns” or “small cities” lol