YSK: Subscriber count on communities only show the numbers of users subscribed from your specific instance. The real number might be much larger than you think.
You can use https://lemmyverse.net/ to check actual subscriber numbers.
Edit: Why YSK: New users of Lemmy can find the number low and think that a community is dead or inactive, when infact it might be a thriving place with a lot of activity.
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For all the problems with Reddit, I can see there being so many barriers to entry on here that will keep a lot of people from ever using or switching to Lemmy. Hope this gets ironed out.
Imagine the guys developing Lemmy. For years this was a fun hobby project and all of a sudden Reddit decides to implode giving you magnitudes more users and servers requesting changes.
It also comes with contributors, too. Obviously there has been a huge rush of demand but the development team went from 2 to I think 5 or 6 now.
Eh, I think discussing potential improvement ideas isn't harmful, as long as it's done respectfully. IMO, that's how you figure out the best improvements, with people sharing different perspectives/opinions/etc. Most of the discussion I've seen about Lemmy so far has been like that, not demanding changes or being rude to the developers (in fact, most of the sentiment I've seen towards the developers/hosts of instances has been super positive, which is great). I don't think that folks entering the community should feel unwelcome to voice their opinions, even if others might disagree or those in charge don't choose to make those changes in the end. But seeing folks talking about these things and seeing the number of people in support or against something might help someone in charge realize that maybe some change or update would actually be really beneficial to their site, and end up helping them make something their even more proud of. Although, I can imagine a huge influx of people to any site like this, along with the sudden boom in corresponding discussions, is pretty crazy to deal with if you're the creator(s) of said site.
Yes, I also hope Lemmy becomes more user friendly. I think it is okay-ish by now. Some things are great, others are still a little terrible.
Mostly, I want to point at ongoing development and encourage anyone who can to support it. You can even post bounties on specific issues to encourage developers to work on that.
It'll only get better from here at least. There are good suggestions floating around that, if implemented, will make Lemmy a lot easier to use as a platform. Having an easier on-boarding experience like Mastodon will go a long way, and people have suggested being able to merge communities by having them mirror each-other which would be great.
But I think people need to let go of the idea that Lemmy should cater to the average person or be bigger than Reddit. The Fediverse isn't a replacement for social media, it's an alternative. We don't need 100 million active users. I'm pretty happy at where we are now, and hope that the community will grow over time to maybe get to one million.
Yeah, the way instances are not that well aware of other instances is a big barrier. In particular, it's extra difficult to be the first in your instance to subscribe to a community. And the "all" feed in small instances sucks because it only includes what people on your instance have subscribed to.
Ah. This explains why my All feed got really weird really fast.
I actually think some technological hurdle is a good thing. If it's a little difficult to join, that will act as its own filter to keep the laziest and lowest effort people away.