If at all possible, lol
I think the ideal would be not how to make it “like Reddit”, but how to help niche and smaller communities have more members. Unfortunately, I think the easiest way is just to get more users to Lemmy in general.
It is not just niche topics, I find quite a bit of things that are not (in my opinion) niche, yet there is very little participation in Lemmy. Take for for example Postgresql. By now it is one of the most widely used databases yet there is a minuscule number of posts and users in the related communities.
Another example. Just did a search for largest communities in Reddit… One of them is music with an estimated 38 million redditors. In Lemmy the largest two music communities seem to be 9.9K (!music@lemmy.world) and 18.9K (!music@hexbear.net). That is an astronomical difference for something that is as mainstream as it gets given the broad topic.
I think the best each one of us can do is to participate and post as often as possible in the communities we would like to see grow.
Why would you want that? I think of lemmy as an old message board. I think it’s better that way.
Because of a severe lack of content. On Reddit you can find a community for basically anything. On Lemmy there are only a few alive ones. E.g. there are very few alive country communities.
Anything that gets that big turns into a shithole. Enshitification will find a way. So just don’t.
Just look at every single big subreddit lmao. The only way to use that site is to leave every single default and join smaller communities.
I agree somewhat in the context of centralization. But the spread of the fediverse is a good thing. If Lemmy grows, alongside decentralization, then it should stay true to its roots.
There’s admittedly some things I miss from Reddit like bigger niche communities, but I would never want this to get as popular as reddit, because then you’ll end up just getting the same problems as reddit down the road and we’ll all have to migrate again. And who wants that?
If we could somehow keep the bigger Communities the same size they are now, while growing niche Communities, that would be ideal. It’s logically impossible though.
Why would we want to do that? Please don’t.
Why would we want to do that?
So that we can discuss more niche hobbies with other people who love that hobby.
if you build it they will come
Factually untrue. There just aren’t enough people interested in certain topics who are regular users of Lemmy & Piefed to have those communities be thriving.
well you gotta advertise too of course.
Why are you being so patronising? It does not work. I told you it doesn’t work. Your patronising comments don’t help. I’ve tried it. I’ve seen others try it. To get niche Communities off the ground requires a latent interest in that community’s subject matter. You cannot just make it spring out of nowhere.
ok, sorry
Porn.
Like any type of media, you win by getting porn on your side. Bring the NSFW content creators over and everyone else will follow.
Yeah the porn here is kinda lacking.
There’s a whole instance dedicated to porn, isn’t there? At least there used to be, is it still live? My instance is defederared from it so idk.
It worked for VHS
There only thing Reddit has over Lemmy is their awesome niche subreddits. Outside of that they have nothing and being more like Reddit is not something we want. With attention comes heavier moderation.
I would say it’s slightly more than this: The vast majority of Lemmy is comprised of only a few things—politics, tech, memes—and it’s hard to find discussions or opinions about almost everything else. The main value of reddit to me is (was?) that you could find a lot of input from people involved in a wide variety of fields, from niche hobbies to more generic areas of interest like history, philosophy, or medicine.
I’ve actually found that there are people on Lemmy with similar levels of expertise, and they’re willing to share it just as well, but they have fewer opportunities to do so, because very few threads get posted outside the 3 main topics. Several times I’ve come across useful and interesting insight, but it was in the comments of posts only vaguely related, so it would have been difficult to find intentionally if I hadn’t run into it.
So, perhaps, this is what could improve Lemmy: starting more discussions about different topics. Perhaps this will attract more people to read them, which might attract more people to post.
There only thing Reddit has over Lemmy is their awesome niche subreddits I mean, to me at least that’s 99% of the point of a platform like this?
+1
Reddit can keep all the gigasubs. Let the niche fandoms trickle over here…
Bigger isn’t necessarily better
This.
Yeah, sure , but I believe there is a Goldilocks zone we are not yet in
That’s not what she said :'(
Have you looked at shit like lemmy.world? Why in the name of Allah would you want more of that shit on here?
I don’t think the majority of people here would be happy if that happened.
- Be friendly to other Lemmites. Encourage them to post and comment.
- Post and comment whenever you can.
- If you have niche hobbies or interests, try posting about them into an appropriate community.
Social networks and message boards get more popular as they get more users. Bring friendly and posting regularly should help us maintain the user base.
I personally enjoy that Lemmy isn’t as popular as Reddit. It feels more home-grown and friendly because it’s not as large. That being said, contributing to and engaging with the content you enjoy is a good start. Finding a niche here can be great and there are tons of interesting communities to contribute to!
I understand the motive, I too am on some niche communities that sometimes didn’t have posts for months. For that i use reddit (but the old interface). Now let’s see your question.
No, we can’t make lemmy as popular as reddit, but we can turn lemmy into a reddit twin, and make it popular, by pushing only one instance like .world.
The social media that popularised fediverse the most was mastodon, and yet it’s because they pushed mastodon.social as the default, making a large part of the userbase think that mastodon is only mastodon.social.
People do not even notice things more complicated than buttons “join”, “login”, or “post”. They are lost on join-lemmy.org because they don’t know why they should choose a server, read description, understand whatever is federation, and they’ll prefer going back to their comfort zone.
But hey, social media experience enshittifies as the userbase gets bigger, and i came here by fleeing reddit so please don’t
People do not even notice things more complicated than buttons “join”, “login”, or “post”. They are lost on join-lemmy.org because >they don’t know why they should choose a server, read description, understand whatever is federation, and they’ll prefer going back >to their comfort zone.
Agree on this 100%. When I first found Lemmy I had no idea what instance to join, why it matter, or… why it really didn’t matter all that much… It was just confusing… and the first instance I joined ended up closing… which was less than an ideal experience as it was without notice and the instance just disappeared. Took me days to even find out why they had closed. Then took me several more days to find the next instance to join.
Federation is both a weakness and a strength in that there may be people who get turned off by that initial complexity.
Then, some people who join may see low volumes on communities they care about and end up not joining.
I fear that Lemmy will not scale properly, popularity will exponentially increase the load. It’s basically actions multiplied by instances
The nature of the fediverse means bad actors could run rampant, jumping instances and usernames to turn the place into a shitshow.
The only reason it isnt happening already is that we arent worth the trouble.
The only way to avoid it once a certain size is reached is a paid moderation team with a mission statement to stamp that shit out, which means a budget is needed which means backers/investors/advertising… and tou get where this is going.
Keep the light alive as Reddit further enshittifies
