this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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Instead of complaining about why people stay on Reddit, perhaps you should focus more on improving Lemmy communities, so that people don't feel a need to return.
While I do like it here, it is very quiet, even when it comes to popular subjects like football, pro wrestling, anime, etc - the sort of stuff that Reddit still excels at.
That's been my issue. Many of the subs I followed on Reddit have been "recreated" on Lemmy, but there's essentially no one posting in them on Lemmy. Even high-effort posts, like a helpful guide, will get 1 or 2 comments compared to dozens or hundreds on Reddit. Many posts get no obvious community interaction at all.
That's okay, we can change that! Be the person who posts and interacts with the community. :) the same thing happened on reddit once upon a time.
That doesn't work, though. If I add posts and comments to, let's say, a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu community on Lemmy, that's just one more number. That isn't going to improve.
Reddit had a huge boost from Digg, and even then, it was a different time when fewer numbers were fine, and people were more willing to engage in social media at lower numbers.
If Lemmy instances are to grow, that engagement needs to be directed. It needs popular communities to be highlighted, and once consistent interaction is there, growing communities need instance owners to direct traffic/engagement their way. That's how subs like /r/soccer got off the ground, and it's probably the only way it'll happen on Lemmy.
I've been fighting to get my community off the ground and even though I do get a small amount of engagement no one else has made any posts and I honestly wonder if it'll ever get anywhere. I need to come up with something more interesting to do than I have been.
Many of the subs I spent a lot of time posting on are completely dead, bar maybe a few people that contribute 90% of all posts and comments. Others simply don't exist, and given that they were quite niche (local subs, anime subs) there's absolutely no way that they'll ever get noticed on Lemmy if something like pro wrestling has next to no posts/comments.
IMO, the only way this will improve is a combined effort from Lemmy instances to highlight great communities, and to drive people towards ones that are growing.
I personally have not seen very many Lemmy posts return on Google searches, if at all. It's not apparent whether or not they are indexed at all, and I would imagine that's a big vector for new user engagement.
What I miss are the gaming communities. There is no talk about games I play on Lemmy, just general gaming communities and I never browsed r/gaming either. Biggest let-down: PoE even has a dedicated Lemmy instance but it’s empty and abandoned.
There is just not enough demand because only a minor fraction of reddit users got hit by the 3rd-party app slaughter. The vast majority doesn’t care and still stayed on reddit. It was the expected outcome.
Hot take of the day: What doesn’t help with this is how fractured communities are throughout the instances. What I mean by this is if I subscribe to “World News” on lemmy.world, I won’t see the posts from the same type community on other instances, like “World News” on beehaw, in my subscriber feed unless I subscribe to them too (or someone crossposts). This adds an unnecessary level of micro-management and probably also drives people away from Lemmy. The biggest strength of Lemmy is so-to-speak also its biggest weakness.
Idk if that's even a hot take. It's something I've talked to several people about and honestly one of the reasons I don't think lemmy will end up growing much past its current user base. Too much micromanaging when most people just want to see content that interests them.
Wow, is that last point true? I guess I misunderstood how federation worked big time. I thought by subscribing to something like "news", I was supposed to receive all posts and comments to those posts from all whitelisted instances like some kind of syndication. Is that not actually how it works?
I only get the posts from communities I am directly subscribed with. So if there is something like syndication, it does not work for me.
Oh nooo