this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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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.
Does it need to?
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?
To be fair /r/malefashionadvice turned into a circlejerk of popular people posting fits (influencers?) and very little real advice outside of a preset notion of what was acceptable.
I don't give two shits about taking down reddit. I just want somewhere else to go, and Lemmy works for that.
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.
Yeah, I feel that. Formula 1 does okay (maybe unsurprisingly due to it being tech adjacent), but even huge sports like soccer are mostly ghost towns.
Sports need folks having fluid communication about what’s happening right then and you need enough folks to be seeing and reacting to both the event/game and the comments at the same time for that, maybe one day we’ll get there
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?
I mean, depends on what you view Lemmy as, right? It's a great place to hang around and chat (depending on your interests). The people here are generally polite and friendly, and most interactions feel meaningful. It does not currently have enough content volume and niche communities to provide a viable Reddit alternative to most people.
Completely subjectively, though I didn't think it was an unpopular opinion. I thought most people agreed niche communities struggle here. The exact number of users needed to reach critical mass I have no idea on, just a best guess extrapolating between where we are now and where Reddit was a decade ago. You can use Mastodon as another data point. I'm not on there, but I'm under the impression that Mastodon, too, has a little low userbase to truly feed niche communities, and it's noticeably larger than Lemmy.
Just for the record, I wasn't thinking that your opinion is an unpopular one (in case you were addressing me directly).
Its just that I see people use a lack of population in 'niche' communities as a failure of Lemmy overall, and using some subjective made-up number to justify Lemmy's overall failure, when there's obviously traffic to major communities and 'life'/activity on Lemmy on a daily basis.
I replied to another comment as well, where a person also used a number to justify an opinion, and it seems so arbitrary to me to be able to make those kind of firm decisions. So I wasn't just 'picking on you'. :) No offense was meant.
To me, it seems like Lemmy is currently growing over time, and is too early to 'declare it dead' (not saying you did that, but just in general).
It's not so much a "failure" of Lemmy as it is an assessment of the situation (at this point in time). I wasn't suggesting Lemmy was or will be a failure, nor that it's dead. I like it here and I'm active most days. There still isn't enough activity in niche subs for Lemmy to have mainstream appeal, though. Even a broad subject like Poetry is carried by a handful of people, and that is a fairly lively "niche sub".
We're currently still in the phase where determined, committed individuals have to spend concerted effort into keeping small subs going, rather than them being self-sustaining.
I do like it here, though, and I really hope the growth continues.
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.
Yeah, 1 million would be about the right size for a better active community. 500k would probably do wonders too.
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
500K (for example) people talking in communities wouldn't be enough?
How did you derive the 1-4 million number?
Just a really quick estimate based on the size of the subreddits I once enjoyed that by their nature need to be larger. Things like /r/cfb, /r/nba, /r/FreeFolk
Thanks for the convo.
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.
The perpetually online type is on Mastodon.
Here on Lemmy are the people who disconnected from social media, block or boycott 95% of today's internet and self-host matrix servers to discuss about self-hosting matrix servers.
Complains about strong bias here like it isn't just as bad or worse on reddit.
Personally, I think it is worse here as there is almost zero opposing voice. On Reddit, there are people from most sides of most topics. Here, in most conversations, there is only one side represented.
Now, I tend to agree with the bias here, on some things, some times. But even when I agree, I want to see arguments from the opposition. Otherwise, I never learn.
Even if you agree with something, you can play the 'devils advocate' and say what is wrong. You need to look at both sides.
I for example despise Apple. But i gotta admit their phones are pretty good if you just want a smartphone. Or if everything you have is apple, then the ecosystem is really nice.
Try to understand the other side, and be the opposing person. So these conversations can happen.
I don't give a crap about the API. Reddit's system of rando-bans are a fatal flaw to its usefullness.
I dont mean to be rude, but people that have been banned from Reddit coming here does not improve the community.
There are 2 kinds of people who get banned. People who actually deserve it and people who get rando-bans. A rando-ban is something you have no control over. It is caused by things like unwritten rules, nonsensical rules, or the unpaid intern mods having a bad day. Things that a warning could have easily taken care of. Lemmy cannot give you a rando-ban, but if you actually deserve a ban than multiple people can come together and do it.
My first rando-ban on reddit was posting too much content from the Washington Post. Even though I was only posting about 1 article per month I was "spamming". It is wonderful knowing that on lemmy/kbin I can finally start submitting content again without risking a rando-ban.
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.
Imagine hosting an instance if Lemmy had that many users. I can imagine it being a full time job.
Agree to disagree. I miss having niche communities, and the only way to get them is with a large user base.
I don't want Lemmy to go after Reddit. I want it to be its own thing.
With that being said, more users would mean having some living communities. Some major communities on lemmy.world like videos are hilariously empty, probably less so than small, local subreddits.
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.
Old reddit isn't dead yet
Are you trying to get the bots to migrate too?