Going in with the aim of making Lemmy "more popular" is not the best approach. There are going to be surges of people signing up for new accounts, trying it out a bit, then leaving, especially when Reddit does something major in its poisoning of well. But the goal shouldn't be to try to keep everyone who ever creates a Lemmy account.

The best thing to do is build the communities here that you are interested in. Do what you can to make them lively and active. This, combined with client improvements from Lemmy developers, will lead to steady growth and more community participation.

[–] TheRealKuni@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Going in with the aim of making Lemmy “more popular” is not the best approach.

This (and the rest of your excellent post) reminds me of a fantastic quote from a letter J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote to his younger brother:

“Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.”

Similarly, Lemmy being popular is not a specific aim which we “may learn to attain.” Rather it is a description of the adequacy of the content. Build the community we want, the popularity may follow, or it may not! But to try to make a popular website “is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.”

[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What a banger of a quote haha

[–] TheRealKuni@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Right‽ I love it.

Found it while listening to the audiobook for American Prometheus, and it was when I realized I was going to seriously enjoy hearing snippets of Oppenheimer’s writing. Dude was brilliant in so many ways.

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

The best thing to do is build the communities here that you are interested in. Do what you can to make them lively and active.

The question as ever remains, though, how does one go about this without coming across poorly? That's always the tricky part of trying to form new groups and communities, because it's not quite marketing but it's in a similar vein to get things going, and it more often than not reads as at best mildly uninteresting or at worst offputting and annoying.