How can we make it more popular?
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.
I find lemmy waaaaay more condescending and less spontaneous than reddit.
I still think it’s a better platform in many ways, but the mere fact that “moral superiority” is a prime reason for joining guarantees that it will be condescending.
Well of course it is, it’s a commie shithole, and the internet already has enough of those.
Less abrasive tankies telling people they deserve to die/be killed.
That’s about it, actually.
When I first joined, I hopped around instances and tried out a bunch. But eventually I settled on this one and I haven’t logged in to any other account in a while. I probably count as like 5 inactive users. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a lot of that.
Posts are going up pretty steady, that matters more.
