Fediverse

It's essentially a brand new platform. A tiny dip a month after the initial boom is far from "losing users" and is not indicative of trends. I don't understand why everyone is so obsessed with growing Lemmy as fast as possible.

Meh, if it drops it drops. I'll never have the relationship to social media I used to, because I don't want it anymore. If Lemmy can give me a few posts a day of things I might not normally see, that's enough for me. It doesn't need to be the next Reddit or whatever. After quitting Reddit I'm getting back into things I haven't done in years. I don't need that again.

For the last time, there is no need. We are large enough. 400,000 people is a large town or small city. Remember:

1. There are no investors to please

2. No stock holders to appease

3. No CEO to bootlick

4. No ads to chase

5. No e-peen to contest

We are free at last. Free your mind from the tail chase of corporate controlled social media.

This is pretty normal, you get a surge of users and then it tapers off a bit as people don't like it.

Could be a lot worse, take a look at the user graph for threads.

Stop advertising the site as a place to go when you get banned from reddit for being too insufferable even for them.

Trying to make a place popular for the sake of popularity is putting the cart before the horse, and will always be a losing battle.

Make your Lemmy instance a place worth spending time. Don't worry about user counts or popularity.

How can we make it more popular?

By not doing the things that corporations do to make things popular. Do we even need Lemmy to be popular? I think we concentrate on trying to keep the Fediverse and Lemmy user focused and privacy friendly and people will naturally come over as they get burnt on the ever increasingly enshitified corporate data-theft sites. We need to be something different than the big sites. A breath of fresh air. I think people will be OK with putting up with a few quirks to escape those toxic environments. I think Lemmy is progressing just fine and I'm enjoying it.

Modern capitalism has made us overly concerned with anything other than constant and rapid growth. This does not concern me.

Stop with the doomerism.
"Lemmy is losing users" -> Lemmy has a stabilizing base of communities developing their own culture after a great exodus from several centralized platforms. Original, high quality content is finding its home here as users engage with one another on thousands of federated, interoperable, transparent websites.

More upvoting of posts.

I know that sounds a bit dumb/lame, but when I first got here and every post had like 5 upvotes, maybe 20 and then maybe once a week you'd see one with more than 100, it was jarring. Made the place feel empty and without interaction. Which it's really not, but that was my and I think perhaps a lot of peoples' first impression.

Honestly, the main problem for popularity's sake is the un-diverse userbase.

It's a bunch of techy redditors, the same way that many other services that splinter off from reddit are. Almost all the communities are literal clones of reddit ones. So for someone who wants a similar style of place and doesn't have a hatred of reddit corporate built-in, why would they not go to reddit, which has the same kind of userbase but with 100x the users?

Honestly, other than "Open Source Master Race!!!!111!!!111", there isn't any reason, especially not one that the average person will care about.

Another one, and I fucking HATE saying this, not enough zoomers dragging their friends along. This place feels like a place for the 30-something instead of the 20-something. Which isn't bad, of course, but in terms of network effect power it is, because peer pressure is huge for social media.

But, separate from all that, do we actually want it to be that kind of popular? Maybe we should stay under the radar for the most part. Keep it from becoming stale and condescending like lots of Redditors can be. Keep the advertisers from sinking claws in. Maybe that'll be better for the site as a whole than needing ads to support a service 100x the size.

In other words, lemmy population isn't just an ever-increasing growth slope, let's panic.

One that that has made me unsubscribe from several communities here is when they are just bot-lead reposts of the equivalent subreddit. This makes these communities on lemmy objectively worse than the reddit equivalent because there is not the population to interact with the sheer volume of posts, and it just becomes spam without engagement.

How about instead of worrying about making it more popular we concentrate on making it better?

Eliminate all the shitty worthless content and spammy replies that people brought over with them from the shit hole that shall not be named and focus our efforts on creating quality content that users (particularly the ones that are already here) actually enjoy and engage with.

That's my two cents on it anyway.

Keep calm and continue posting and commenting. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

What Lemmy ultimately needs is original content for people to come back. Reposting memes and links can only get you so far.

Lemmy got a HUGE influx of users from the Reddit fiasco. Of course, there was going to be a pull back.

What is going to determine if Lemmy becomes popular is if it has reached critical mass to start growing organically on its own.

as a recent refuge myself. Some random thoughts.

Things that will help, hobby groups moving here. And other interest groups. Not expecting everyone to code, be a privacy advocate, or a political extremist.

Solving some of the fundamental issues around "federation" and ease of use for the average user that just wants to post about cars, hobby, etc

Actually WANTING more users. There is a non small portion that activity is toxic to new users who came from Reddit just to escape.

This is normal, it'll stabilize. Lemmy development is certainly needed, but what we can do is just keep the content rolling despite the issues.

Maybe we just need to tighten them? Perhaps a lock washer will help 🤭

All this endless nagging of politics, ideology, capitalism, billionaries, tankies, right-wing, left-wing, Desantis and Trump are slowly making me lose interest in Lemmy. You are ruining Lemmy honestly

Popularize the apps that exist. I couldn't figure out how to browse it in a Reddit-like way until I tried an app. That was all I needed to make the switch.

Threads did the same thing. Explosive growth followed by silence. Social media grows over time. It's not a constant gigantic upward slope.

Make high quality content like answering questions and eventually people will start flocking

For me the biggest issue is user engagement and missing communities.

I enjoyed /all to see news and discussion about that news, which isn't really a thing on lemmy yet.

And i enjoyed small communities for the discussions and posts which are also not really a thing on lemmy yet.

The only way to make it more popular is by having more content. Unfortunately we haven't reached the critical mass number of people that keeps people interested.

By stopping asking how to make it more popular and starting making it a place that could become popular.

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.

Also, if you want to grow Lemmy, the best thing you can do is comment and respond to everything (With thoughtfulness of course), because the value of reddit (and Lemmy) is always in the comments, so that's the best way to contribute.

I don't think the quality of content here has been as high as I would have liked. Over on lemmy.world/c/games, the moderation and post/comment quality well below below what I would have expected from /r/Games in its glory days. For example, all the highest voted comments on the Starfield impressions thread are karma-whoring single sentence meme responses about pre-orders, "patient gamers", or piracy, all completely off-topic for an impressions thread.

The charts show that Lemmy has gained a massive amount of users quickly and is experiencing a normalization period.

Lemmy seriously needs kindergarten-level SEO. None of the communities barely show up on Google.

This is normal for any platform that gains a burst of users. You'll have significant attrition, but probably end up leveling out at somewhere higher than you started.

If you think about it, it's very hnlikely that every new lemmy user would stay

I think we're great where we're at. Exponential growth for the sake of growth is not a good thing.

We have a decent and varied user base with plenty of subject matter experts. We tend to upvote more than downvote. The app still needs to grow, find more security and discoverability, but it's pretty pleasant where we are now.

Those stats aren't particularly distressing. We lost the .ml domains. Defederation happened. We had crapload of bot accounts created then dealt with.

If DAU doesn't flatten out by november, it might be a bad sign. At the moment I'd say it's more likely that the graphs have a bunch of hidden data in them and it's not just a clean and clear indication that people are fleeing.

I'll take 40,000, nice professional pleasant people over a million random redditors any day.

My first post so apologies if I break any rules. I’ve been a computer user for 50 years. I use a pc for many hours everyday. I’m averse to Facebook, Google, and TwitterX. I first heard about Lemmy today. Perhaps why it isn’t growing as fast as some think it should.

I have been pretty comfortable here because I'm into nerdy things and most of us here are nerds. In fact, the only people that cared about reddit locking down the API were nerds or people jumping on the bandwagon because it was the next big thing. Others didn't care and just wanted reddit back and a lot of people that were here in the beginning went back to reddit. We will probably grow overtime but there's no point in wondering why lemmy isn't more popular, just participate in the communities you like.

This happens with Mastodon too. But each wave more people stick around.

I've found great content in here and it has the good vibes of early reddit I miss so much.

I really only use reddit for search engine results now.

The nature of a social network is to become big enough to attract most people or to stay a niche community.

But the process takes time. Right now the niche expanded significantly, but didn't reach the critical mass yet.

How the dynamic happens though is still mysterious. Accessibility is the first and most important feature though. Then, you need to keep up with the time and innovations, but it might be hard to see.

IMO the focus should be accessibility. Which will become difficult because elitist asshats are already fighting against growing the community, and accessibility is the easiest place for gatekeeping.