Did Reddit get massive because of Digg users making a beeline towards them or were they already big before that?
Reddit got massive because it had very vibrant communities and lots of them that inspired a loyalty in its uses.
I was brought to Reddit by a previous user, and I brought several of my friends to Reddit.
For lemmy to get there, you need thousands of communities.
Want to know stuff about Rav4? There’s a sub for it.
Want to know about accounting? There’s a sub for it?
Want to know about what’s happening in Oklahoma city? There’s a sub.
Lemmy isn’t anywhere close to this point. In fact most subs are very dead.
Reddit didn’t start out like that either. If Lemmy is to grow, it will take years of dedicated active use from us.
Preach. So what, we multiply the amount of people those Sublemmies get by 100. It’s still going to be dead. That’s how dead it is.
We need to create Sublemmies for certain groups out of thin air. There’s no chance we can convince people to move when the amount of engagement is orders of magnitude less.
Look at League of Legends. You know, the most played videogame in the world. One post per day in here. It’s over.
The entire LCS regular season I made post match threads at !league@lemmy.ml . I always enjoy those discussions. Six weeks, 2-3 days a week, so maybe 15 posts. I probably got a dozen comments combined. I went into a few team discords asking for engagement.
On Reddit that’s more like 78 posts. Each of those posts on Reddit will get hundreds of comments. 12 comments on Lemmy versus way more than 1600 comments on Reddit.
The league communities here aren’t anywhere close to 0.1% of the league community there.
It’s hard to build from absolutely nothing.
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One thing I’ve also seen people mention that could help is weighting the hot and active algorithms to prioritize smaller communities on the home feed. I remember that Reddit’s algorithm did that and it made it significantly easier to see content from communities that weren’t just the largest memes and news communities.
I don’t think there’s enough engagement in those small communities to make that viable yet. It’d just be sprinkling in dead posts.
Counter point: lemmy doesn’t need to do anything to become a top website. Just stay decentralized and independently run. If that’s meant to be a “top website” so be it, but that’s not why I’m here.
I share similar thoughts. I care more about the quality of the content and most importantly the quality of the community than the popularity of the website. I do hope that we continue to grow and that the growth will be to the benefit of the community.
Reddit has so many users. Give Lemmy time.
The goals of federated social media and corporate social media. Unlike siloed corporate social media, the fediverse platforms are not meant to compete with one another for being the ‘top dog’ so to speak. The idea is just diversity amongst the platforms and different options for people with different preferences. Since the fediverse is not concerned with revenue or appealing to a venture capitalist, competition is unimportant and I hope it stays that way.
The more users the more content there is though which is ultimately what I want as a user.
This is even more important for more niche communities a lot of which are still very quiet/dead/non-existent on Lemmy relative to reddit.
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In a way they do. At least the instances don’t compete, but the users do. Example, there could be a meme community on two instances. Users will probably gravitate towards one. The downside is that smaller communities get buried. Most of the smaller communities I’m subbed to on Lemmy don’t ever pop up in my hot/active. Reddit was a bit better I think and smaller/less active communities popped up in my front page more often and felt more balanced. I think the hot algo in Lemmy could be tweaked to be more balanced like that, would also help the competition.
I imagine these things would make Lemmy explode more:
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Influencer influencers influencers. Have Mr Beast mention how he will give half a million dollars to whomever makes the best post on a Lemmy board or something and you have it made.
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Individual users can find a way to profit from it, be it pushing a t-shirt to only fans or whatever and you’ll see an influx in ads, er, posts.
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I think we’re looking at this wrong. “Lemmy” as it is won’t get popular. It’s an underlying platform to create an internet forum. Individual instances are what may get popular
You’re not likely to read “cocksucker619 on lemmy said so and so” in a news article. Whereas “dickrider69 on an internet forum called dickriders.world said so and so” is a more likely proposition
We need to have something that they cant have or is lower quality like communities like c/techsupport
Lemmy is not a website.
What happened is that Digg died, allowing reddit to thrive for over a decade with no competition. The admins learned from this and have been rolling out their shitty changes bit by bit, instead of all at once like Digg did. Eventually it’s all going to collapse. You can’t be king forever.
You can be king forever, with consent of the users.
For a long time Reddit was fairly altruistic. I supported them with a subscription, and was proud to be a member. Reddit gold was an amazing way to monetize with the full support of the community.
As things tend to go, eventually the leadership got greedy and began to care more about money than their life’s work.
Reddit got to where it is because they did listen to the community and have public support. They’ve only squandered that in the last few years.
I’d say the downfall started with the AMA fiasco. It was never the same once they fired Victoria.
Search engines, they don’t catalog Fediverse sites properly because of the heavy dependency on domains! :/
What I think lemmy needs 1 it needs to feel like a website to the user 2 single login you join and automatically get put on a server that isn’t overloaded 3 search you need to be able to search for any sub you want right on the app 4 this is something that a user wont see but is important for them a unified system of raising money for instances
join-lemmy or join-mastodon should probably just pick a server for you with 1000-15000 users. There can be an advanced option to select a server, but that shouldn’t be the default workflow.
I disagree this is the single biggest reason people refuse to join the fediverse not even just lemmy but mastodon as well people should have the option to manually pick but default should be that it picks
I’m 50/50 on it.
I don’t want Lemmy to become too big to the point where it’s skirting on becoming the very shithole Reddit currently is.
I’d want Lemmy to at have a healthy amount of clout where it can be it’s own thing without pressure.
Make one instance the default one. Then introduce others gradually. Too confusing for first timers. I was scratching my head the first time.
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sometimes i can’t subscribe to another’s instance’s communities without creating a user account on that instance despite seeing them in the “all” filter in the first instance
This should only be the case if the 2 instances aren’t federating together. it might be a specific bug, can you give more context on what you couldn’t do?
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I think people are forgetting that Reddit didn’t start off with communities (subs), they came later. Reddit got big the same way all sites that don’t have a built in audience (e.g. Threads users basically being Insta users) - time and commitment.
Lemmy is not going to be as big as Reddit for a long, long time. Everyone has fallen into this habit of thinking all Reddit mods are power crazy egomaniacs and some are, no doubt, but the good subs on Reddit required dedicated time and effort to build up. Curating, introducing and constantly readjusting rules and expectations and at some point a good sub reaches a tipping point and it’s popular.
All this will take time with Lemmy. Community mods will need to be as dedicated as Reddit mods were. And, as a side issue, this commitment to making and keeping a community great is what spez and his idiot gremlins have just thrown away. It’s not about user numbers for Reddit, it’s now a priority for them to get mods who are willing and able to put in the amount of work the mods they just alienated had. Subreddit engagement stats are mostly going down take a look at the number of posts and the number of comments for r/askreddit, it’s a steady decline.
Lemmy might not ever get as big as Reddit but it will grow if mods stay committed and users keep posting and commenting. If that happens, that same tipping point will come.
What is most interesting about that site you linked is further down the page - it shows the number of subs still growing - but that graph cuts off at 2022. The post and comments per day plunged in early July and have not recovered. And the top poster and commenter is the same user - u/deleted
And as you say, reddit has alienated a heap of good mods - and they are the true foundation of a site like this, not users
That’s interesting to see this steady decline way before the most controversial changes.
I think that may be stemming from the earlier changes when they shut down a large number of fairly popular but controversial subs, that drove some active commenters away. Plus they started getting very ban happy in the last couple of years, that absolutely has a damping effect
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When do the sub number counts finish… if its 2022, like it is with askreddit, thats why. A graph going up to this month would likely show a dropoff
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Also, there needs to be an established code of conduct in how to interact with users. For example, if i make a post on reddit that violates a subs rules, it get‘s either removed or put in quarantine and I get a message so I know what happened. In Lemmy, your posts may just vanish without you ever knowing how or why.
