…relative to Reddit’s size?
I see so many posts and comments voicing disappointment with Lemmy’s lack of massive expansion.
I too want to see Lemmy gain more users, but I do not want it to grow to Reddit’s size. If Reddit is the yardstick, I’d say that a population that large attracts a lot of negative behaviours; degeneration of discourse, amplification of echo chambers and hive mind behaviour, etc…
I started on Reddit in 2010 and found that by 2016 things were really bad in comparison. A fun and engaging site was experiencing an obvious devolution that persists to this day, accelerated by Spez’s enshittification of the platform. Obviously the fediverse insulates us from that occurring here but I think you get what I mean.
Do you you think Lemmy is too small? I don’t. I’ve been here since the great migration last year and have had a really good time. I see a lot of familiar names in the comments on a daily basis. It actually feels like a community here. I guess I just don’t understand the fixation on the size of Lemmy’s user base. Curious to hear your thoughts.
[EDIT] Thanks for all the responses, everyone! Lots of perspectives I hadn’t yet considered.
I just joined. What’s some good sub communities with good engagement?
Welcome!
- !movies@lemm.ee
- !television@lemmy.world
- !casualconversation@lemm.ee
- !interestingasfuck@lemm.ee
- !dataisbeautiful@mander.xyz
- !map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz
- !relationship_advice@lemmy.world
There is a weekly thread on !newcommunities@lemmy.world where people promote active communities
Thank you. These are fun!
You are welcome!
Welcome in from the cold. We’ve got hot cocoa and marshmallows.
Honestly, browse by All, Active, Last 6 Hours or New and block communities you dont like. Subscribe to your favorites but since this is more garden hose than firehose, drinking from the tap isn’t too bad.
For months, I kept saying "I’ll only do that until my subscribe list gets good/busy enough”. It’s been months, and still isn’t good enough.
I want the world to use open source tools.
The smaller population overall isn’t a bad thing, but it can really be felt in smaller or niche communities. Reddit’s huge size is a plus in this regard, because chances you can find at least a semi-active community for just about any hobby or niche interest.
Yeah, I’d actually forgotten about it since I’ve been here for so long but the joke “there’s a sub for everything” is actually completely true and one of the things I miss, even if it’s an inactive community you can 80% of the time find a subreddit with a few dozen posts to check out. I used to just hit “random” until I found an interesting one. I feel like I’d cycle through all the communities on my instance in a couple of days.
That being said I love the small feeling here compared to Reddit and if I had to choose between “small community with conversation” and “unlimited dopamine trickle tap” I’d rather it stay as it is
The smaller subreddit are still good on subreddit, as long as they have a good focus. They are effectively their own little communities
Yeah, my reddit account is exclusively for the communities around a couple mangas I read. As soon as the SpyxFamily and Akane-banashi communities here reach comparable levels, I will gladly jump ship.
Yes. I never had too much trouble on reddit, but I only stuck to specific subreddits and stayed away fron news or politics.
It highly depends on what you’re here for. Some communities have gathered enough active members to expect a continuous influx of posts and comments.
The strength that Reddit has built over the years is that many niche communities also thrived and turned into a rich repository of knowledge that was searchable. Lemmy isn’t there yet, if you’re into fishing, knitting, Japanese chess or sourdough baking.
But it also doesn’t need to be a perfect drop in replacement for Reddit, it’s probably fine if it remains something different, slightly fringe and a friendly place that doesn’t require massive amount of servers and moderation staff.
Japanese chess
For anyone curious it’s also called Shogi.
And if there is a lemmy community for it out there let me know. :D
Edit: I think my client bugged out with an off by one error but might be corrected
I chose this example because I’m an avid Shōgi player :-)
There is a community on my instance, but nobody ever posted anything. Maybe I could post a couple of Tsume from some books I have, or some castling strats.
They are used to the short-term goals of stonks.
The more people there are, the more popular it is with the working class. Instead of being a niche community, you can meet non-tech people that know about Lemmy.
Lemmy is good as is; slow growth is better, IMO.
Reddit took over a decade to get to that size, it’s not a fair comparison.
Reddit also didn’t have Reddit to compete with, which certainly makes things harder.
Well, there was Digg, then Digg imploded.
Yeap, but Digg was still pretty early in it’s life and was very much catering for tech nerds.
Reddit is basically the home of all communities these days, its swallowed what used to be individual forums from around the web and put them into a single place.
Building those new communities across multiple lemmy instances also adds to the complexity.
People just want what they gave up and what they know, it is that simple.
Because the communities I care about are getting less than one post per month.
Come join us at !androidgamers@lemmy.world
And at !theyknew@lemmy.sdf.org
There’s also a number of them indirectly trying to use the numbers to trash talk Lemmy. Personally, I would prefer the quality over quantity you can see here on Lemmy.
Like others already pointed out, it’s not about the size per se. It’s about the small odd communities of specific interest that we miss. These usually only thrive with numbers.
Then again, I used Lemmy for over a year and didn’t get a single death threat. I went back to check my Reddit account and had two in my inbox, I didn’t use the site since the exodus. Soooooooo, yeah. You win some you loose some.
The flagship communities are quite alive, but the niche communities have not really taken off. I am talking from both the absence of such communities, and my experience trying to migrate !fluidmechanics. The subreddit has around 10k humans (or bots).
Reddit has the same dynamics. Smaller niche communities there were awesome, the massive ones were full of toxicity. Here, the large communities are the size of small Reddit boards, which is good, but many niche communities here are unfortunately too sparse to thrive.
I don’t think Lemmy must grow. In fact I like the relative obscurity that tends to make it a better quality of user. But at this size, it’s less of a one-stop shop than Reddit. I miss the Reddit cigar community. They aren’t really in favor, particularly with the left, and there isn’t the critical mass to sustain that here. So I just don’t talk about them which unfortunately leaves me less informed about what’s going on in that world.
That so being said, I agree with the thrust of your post which is that Lemmy is just fine at this size. It is.
I’ve been having a nice time with Lemmy having ditched Reddit last year, and considering the changes that happened or have been conceptually floated over that time I’m happy with my choice.
One thing I would like is for the Lemmy framework to make it easier for the network to be “wider” than “taller” as it grows. By this I mean a wider array of separate domains with operators each with thriving niche communities, rather than a few tall generalist servers and a handful of outliers, and a fragmented myriad of inactive communities that are hard to find.
That is exactly the problem with Lemmy. Far too many niche communities with next to no members. That does not work. There are not enough people to have 5 separate communities about X.
Thanks. A topic we regularly discuss on !fedigrow@lemm.ee
Subs which are huge in other places don’t exist here. So growth is needed.
For example the Formula 1 live threads during a race has like 10 comments on Lemmy, while on Reddit it’s in the thousands. Just wish some communities were a bit more popular.
Sports are definitely an area where the sublemmies get less traffic. I quite enjoy posting on the rugby union sub but there are like 4 of us there.
Yes. For communities that on Reddit were small to medium size there was a critical mass of people to sustain large, lively threads, particularly during live events. Lemmy currently lacks that, outside of the letter tech, politics and meme communities. And for the smaller communities, activity can be almost non existent.
Then the federated nature of Lemmy allows for duplicate communities on different instances. This is not inherently a bad thing, particularly for larger interest areas as it helps prevent a particular sub group from dominating discussion in an area. But fracturing of smaller communities can make just finding an active one more difficult. I know that this is a feature in many ways, but it does have tradeoffs that have to be acknowledged.
Serious question, would having 100 comments every few seconds kill smaller instances? How well will the federation scale?
Interesting as you are on LW. The current main issue with LW is that it is too centralized, so sometimes instances located geographically further struggle to keep up to date as LW doesn’t update them fast enough
A post on the topic: https://lemmy.world/post/13967373?scrollToComments=true
Yeah, I just joined as a reddit refugee because lemmy.world looked appealing. Had no idea it would effectively become the “defacto” instance of lemmy. Would be nice if communities spread out more.
