That’s it? Wow, a lot fewer people were upset about the loss of 3rd party apps than I thought. We need to add at least 3 more zeroes to that number if this place stands a chance at taking down reddit.
I… kinda like lemmy the way it is I guess? Sure, I wish some niche-communities were a bit more active (looking at you, /c/malefashionadvice). But then again on Lemmy I actually feel motivated to contribute actively. Because I know my content won’t be monetized by some corporate behemoth. So maybe this is just fine the way it is?
Every once in a while I check up on what reddit looks like now.
I find the same or similar topics posted, with 600 comments instead of 30, and 570 of those 600 are just whatever’s the first thing that pops into everyone’s mind after reading the post title.
I like it better here.
Both sides have their benefits, and it’s a shame there is no good best-of-both-worlds. I get where you’re coming from, I never felt the urge to participate on Reddit because it was so often just shouting into the void and getting buried in hundreds of one-word replies and in-jokes and memes. Here I feel seen, and often feel like my contribution (although mostly just small comments) makes an impact.
At the same time, a huge critical mass of a userbase is completely necessary for niche communities to survive. Maybe not as overwhelmingly massive as Reddit’s, but magnitudes larger than Lemmy has right now. Lemmy has a very distinct userbase slant and if you’re in the target audience (tech, FOSS, Linux etc) you’re probably great here. But even common interests like sports struggle for traction, and true niche stuff has an extremely tough time.
Sports discussion and game threads are actually the only thing I really miss about Reddit, I find the time I spend on Lemmy much more productive/informative and less likely to get sucked down an argumentative rabbit hole.
At the same time, a huge critical mass of a userbase is completely necessary for niche communities to survive. Maybe not as overwhelmingly massive as Reddit’s, but magnitudes larger than Lemmy has right now.
To confirm, you don’t think we have a minimum population base currently on Lemmy?
If so, how do you make that judgment? How are you measuring that? How are you quantifying that?
It doesn’t need to take down reddit. I’d like to see Lemmy at 1 million active users though. Just need enough critical mass to be able to branch into more smaller sublemmys which draws in the fans of those subs specifically and creates better curated content.
at 1 million active users though. Just need enough critical mass to be able to branch into more smaller sublemmys which draws in the fans of those subs specifically
I was responding kind of someone else as well, but where are these numbers coming from?
Is it truly 1 million? Or maybe 500k? Or maybe 2 million?
People seem to be using numbers so arbitrarily.
I think somewhere between 1-4 million would be a good cross section of interests without a critical mass of users
Oh, many more were upset - just too lazy to inconvenience themselves with switching platforms.
I’d say this is only half of the answer.
After browsing Lemmy for a while, you get the sense that the average user here is the type that gets upset about a social media company making changes to an API. That is a very specific type of person and you can see it in the comments.
I’d guess people get turned off by that type of person and leave.
I come here once Reddit and hacker news content is old. This isn’t a place I’d recommend to anyone, unfortunately. There are extremely strong biases all over and deep echo chambers. Users here seem like the perpetually online type. Most perspectives I’ve seen have been heavily influenced by online discourse rather than reality.
I visit this site less and less due to the user base.
Complains about strong bias here like it isn’t just as bad or worse on reddit.
I don’t give a crap about the API. Reddit’s system of rando-bans are a fatal flaw to its usefullness.
If this place ends up with 70 million users, I won’t be one of them. Lemmy isn’t a for-profit company. It doesn’t need growth for the sake of growth.
Besides, lemmy growth isn’t a measure of Reddit shrinkage. Lots of people are just quitting without a replacement.
Slow but steady growth is better imo, especially since Lemmy’s moderation tools are still not that good and instance admins often get overwhelmed maintaining their own instances. Some instance admins got frustrated so much, they decided to create a new lemmy backend: https://github.com/sublinks/sublinks-api
I like the idea of a slow increase over time. I remember Reddit did that one chatroom experiment where you started out small. And then merged with larger and larger rooms. Small rooms had at least a chance to hang and chat and the larger rooms turned into twitch chat spam. To a degree maybe the same could be said for comments, on Reddit now I still see thousands of redundant replies to subjects whereas here it’s definitely still fresh if not shorter chains.
Though in terms of niche topics it may definitely need more traffic somehow. I think reddit benefits a lot from its search indexing and if Lemmy ever began to appear in search traffic more like forums did in early Google I could see that improving.
