Why are so many people so fixated on Lemmy's growth?

AstralPath@lemmy.ca to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 304 points –

...relative to Reddit's size?

I see so many posts and comments voicing disappointment with Lemmy's lack of massive expansion.

I too want to see Lemmy gain more users, but I do not want it to grow to Reddit's size. If Reddit is the yardstick, I'd say that a population that large attracts a lot of negative behaviours; degeneration of discourse, amplification of echo chambers and hive mind behaviour, etc...

I started on Reddit in 2010 and found that by 2016 things were really bad in comparison. A fun and engaging site was experiencing an obvious devolution that persists to this day, accelerated by Spez's enshittification of the platform. Obviously the fediverse insulates us from that occurring here but I think you get what I mean.

Do you you think Lemmy is too small? I don't. I've been here since the great migration last year and have had a really good time. I see a lot of familiar names in the comments on a daily basis. It actually feels like a community here. I guess I just don't understand the fixation on the size of Lemmy's user base. Curious to hear your thoughts.

[EDIT] Thanks for all the responses, everyone! Lots of perspectives I hadn't yet considered.

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The smaller population overall isn't a bad thing, but it can really be felt in smaller or niche communities. Reddit's huge size is a plus in this regard, because chances you can find at least a semi-active community for just about any hobby or niche interest.

Yeah, I'd actually forgotten about it since I've been here for so long but the joke "there's a sub for everything" is actually completely true and one of the things I miss, even if it's an inactive community you can 80% of the time find a subreddit with a few dozen posts to check out. I used to just hit "random" until I found an interesting one. I feel like I'd cycle through all the communities on my instance in a couple of days.

That being said I love the small feeling here compared to Reddit and if I had to choose between "small community with conversation" and "unlimited dopamine trickle tap" I'd rather it stay as it is

The smaller subreddits are still good on reddit, as long as they have a good focus. They are effectively their own little communities

Yes. I never had too much trouble on reddit, but I only stuck to specific subreddits and stayed away fron news or politics.

Yeah, my reddit account is exclusively for the communities around a couple mangas I read. As soon as the SpyxFamily and Akane-banashi communities here reach comparable levels, I will gladly jump ship.

Because that's what I'm missing. I like the apps, I like the site, but I need content. And not memes or politics, but specific niche topics. The nice thing about Reddit is that there's more than enough content about basically anything. Non mainstream music (DnB, Hardstyle, Trance), games, hobbies. There are always hundreds ,if not thousands of people engaging. I don't want a discussion with 3 other people, I want a large community that can actually provide me with a lot of new information and keeps itself going without any effort from my end.

Agreed, the political posts are inevitable with a big election looming unless you filter a lot of subs you are stuck seeing the same ones. And lemmy doesn't have enough content to turn over so you wind up seeing the same posts from 2 days ago with only 3 comments.

I figure the best thing to do is comment on anything I can and try to engage more people. I was such a lurker on Reddit, but that's not helpful here.

Some years ago Reddit had such a large reach in the media space that you could be discussing something on there and news outlets would pick up on it. For a brief period it actually felt like a platform where ordinary people could get heard and influence the world outside of Reddit or at least sway opinions of other real users. The reason why it worked was the massive userbase. The high profile AMA's drew quite the crowd. Those days are long gone. It's been a long time I saw any serious news outlets report on what happens on Reddit. GameStop was probably the last big Reddit thing to make a dent on the outside world.

I don't want Lemmy to be that big, but it would be nice to know that if you make effort to write something that is important to you, that it gets read by more than two other people who already have the same opinion.

Late reply, but in English media articles, it's still fairly common for me to see references to what people said on Reddit. AFAIK there are also still entertainment sites ("Caveman Circus" being one) that still regularly harvest expert or semi-expert takes found on Reddit in order to construct 'best of' articles.

Though-- perhaps that activity is down somewhat, as you suggest.

For example the Formula 1 live threads during a race has like 10 comments on Lemmy, while on Reddit it's in the thousands. Just wish some communities were a bit more popular.

Yes. For communities that on Reddit were small to medium size there was a critical mass of people to sustain large, lively threads, particularly during live events. Lemmy currently lacks that, outside of the letter tech, politics and meme communities. And for the smaller communities, activity can be almost non existent.

Then the federated nature of Lemmy allows for duplicate communities on different instances. This is not inherently a bad thing, particularly for larger interest areas as it helps prevent a particular sub group from dominating discussion in an area. But fracturing of smaller communities can make just finding an active one more difficult. I know that this is a feature in many ways, but it does have tradeoffs that have to be acknowledged.

Sports are definitely an area where the sublemmies get less traffic. I quite enjoy posting on the rugby union sub but there are like 4 of us there.

Serious question, would having 100 comments every few seconds kill smaller instances? How well will the federation scale?

Interesting as you are on LW. The current main issue with LW is that it is too centralized, so sometimes instances located geographically further struggle to keep up to date as LW doesn't update them fast enough

A post on the topic: https://lemmy.world/post/13967373?scrollToComments=true

Yeah, I just joined as a reddit refugee because lemmy.world looked appealing. Had no idea it would effectively become the "defacto" instance of lemmy. Would be nice if communities spread out more.

Because there are only a handful of communities that have enough traffic to sustain a meaningful conversation.

Even popular activities have low traffic, god forbid you want to participate in a community based around a niche activity.

I love Lemmy and I'm not going back to reddit... But sometimes it feels like a desolate wasteland here.

I agree. The smaller communities is nice, but when it's so small that each post has less that 5 comments, I feel the conversations are limited.

I need people like you to join https://fediverser.network to become a community ambassador. Please join it, find the subreddits that you would like to migrate and let's bring the people who are interesting.

You don't want people like me. I have time to complain, but not time to work on a solution lol

The flagship communities are quite alive, but the niche communities have not really taken off. I am talking from both the absence of such communities, and my experience trying to migrate !fluidmechanics. The subreddit has around 10k humans (or bots).

It highly depends on what you're here for. Some communities have gathered enough active members to expect a continuous influx of posts and comments.

The strength that Reddit has built over the years is that many niche communities also thrived and turned into a rich repository of knowledge that was searchable. Lemmy isn't there yet, if you're into fishing, knitting, Japanese chess or sourdough baking.

But it also doesn't need to be a perfect drop in replacement for Reddit, it's probably fine if it remains something different, slightly fringe and a friendly place that doesn't require massive amount of servers and moderation staff.

Japanese chess

For anyone curious it's also called Shogi.

And if there is a lemmy community for it out there let me know. :D

Edit: I think my client bugged out with an off by one error but might be corrected

it's like 90% IT nerds here lol. whether you want growth or not depend on how okay you are with that. I love you guys but a lot of your hobbies bore me to shit and I want someone to talk to

Typing as an IT nerd, I would be glad to also see some more diversity in interests aside from tech.

It’s still an emerging technology so it makes sense that many of the early adopters are IT nerds. Early Reddit was the same- the most active communities were IT, programming or video game related. More diversity will appear in time.

Well, for me, the site has very little to offer because I'm not into USA politics (I check on them, but that is not why I was on Reddit to begin with), and that is more or less the only topic with a self sustained community besides meme pages. So yes, I do want this place to grow, not a little, a lot.

A couple of the big comics communities also churn out a good chunk of content every day... if you like comics. "ArtPorn" and "SuperbOwl" also come to mind. I recommend you keep searching @Lanusensei87@lemmy.world, because you may find some great content sources that you weren't previously thinking about.

(late reply alert!)

When i was using reddit, my feed was 90% cats and i was subscribed to hundreds of cat subreddits

Lemmy doesnt have enough cats

I blame this partially on a lack of good video support

Well yeah, lemmings are rodents cats aren't welcome

I want all people to use Lemmy.

I want us to stop the tribalism. What made reddit fail was the management, not the users.

Yes some people suck, and if you ask me it's most people, but diversity is powerful and without it we have no future.

Reddit hasn’t completely failed yet. If it had, it wouldn’t have so many users. The users are preventing it from failing.

On Reddit I went to specific subreddits and things were bubbling there, on Lemmy I pretty much have to stay on All to get any active content. I really don't want Lemmy to reach eternal September, but we definitely need much more activity and a much larger user base than we currently have.

Same here. On the upside, "All“ on Lemmy has a much higher quality than what Reddit had in the past years. I really enjoy my daily doomscroll on Lemmy.

Like others already pointed out, it’s not about the size per se. It’s about the small odd communities of specific interest that we miss. These usually only thrive with numbers.

Then again, I used Lemmy for over a year and didn’t get a single death threat. I went back to check my Reddit account and had two in my inbox, I didn’t use the site since the exodus. Soooooooo, yeah. You win some you loose some.

As a mod of three niche Soulslike communities, one of which that probably has less than 10 active users at best, it's really hard to put out quality content and keep a community alive all on your own. I had to resort to a bot filling two of the communities with regular posts so there is some semblance of life in the communities, but reception has been mixed so far and the engagement didn't grow as much as I had hoped.

Unfortunately, I don't see any other way for these communities to be sustainable if like 95% of users on here are lurkers. Plus, I'm not the best fit for moderation and pumping out posts asking for engagement constantly since I'm a lurker at heart myself.

'All' is pretty good, though. It's where I spend most my time on Lemmy.

I think itd make more sense to not have /c/ommunities dedicated to certain games, just post that stuff on /c/games

I get the idea, but I think general all-purpose games communities are just too general

Maybe one community for Soulslike that you would promote on the weekly !newcommunities@lemmy.world thread would be a good compromise?

Does anyone remember the inside jokes in the early days of reddit?

When does the narwhal bacon? Orangered Chuck Testa!! Ridiculously photogenic guy And of course the long list of meme-level posts like broken arms, cumbox, celebrity AMAs

This type of community humor made a lot of people feel like they'd found their tribe on reddit in those early days.

I haven't seen much like this develop on Lemmy yet, possibly because there's so many disparate communities merging. I'm not really sure. Or maybe all those 20-something redditors are now pushing 40.

I think it will take a while for a lemmy culture to develop and the community won't attract outsiders much until it does.

Lemmy is just a continuation of the Reddit crap of recent years, except for less corpo bullshit, but with more lefty infighting.

cough cough I... I was there cough during the beans

Yeah those memes were cringy as fuck thank god no one's doing anything that dumb

I just miss there being more variance in the voices I see in the comments. On Reddit, the size made it so that you were pretty much always seeing new commenters, and seeing a lot of different discussions. But here, I mostly see the same ~50 regulars across all the communities I subscribe to, and almost all the same discussions being had.

Overall I still prefer it here, but more users and more active communities would be nice, too.

There are a lot of communities missing. I cant find anything financial related like /personalFinance, /financialIndependence, /povertyFinance, /frugal with any decent amount of interaction. Most with maybe 1 post or a handful of comments every month. Without gaining a lot of users there isnt enough content to stay

That's an interesting topic, because I always felt like !personalfinance@lemmy.ml was hurt by being on lemmy.ml

Also, finance tends to be country dependent due to different laws and investment products available, so it fractions the userbase because of that

Yeah it's a pretty rough gig to host retirement planning, which typically revolves around stock ownership in the end, on something theoretically dedicated to, you know, abolishing capitalism.

You can do it, but it's like "have 500k in your bank and move to Mexico, invest in commodities"

On !fedigrow@lemm.ee there's a weekly thread called "How are you doing with your communities?" It's for/by all the people who single-handedly keep niche communities alive by posting regularly. It can be a tough job, and easy to burn out. That's because of the relatively small population here on Lemmy.

However, I agree that I like the culture here better. On Reddit, even when I blocked ads I still felt like I was being marketed to and manipulated.

This is of course only my opinion but I want it much bigger but maybe not the size of reddit. I like being able to have a problem and going into the specialized community to ask the pros. Online searching is currently slowing down results. AI searches will tell someone to use an outlet to fix a pipe and if someone searching for something they don't know may try figuring out why their pipe doesn't even have a plug. I also like to research into things HEAVILY and having a community where I can sift through thousands of posts to form an idea of what I'm looking to learn is nice.

With that said I can't knock lemmy any because the community that has 150 people will have 125 of them respond to anything you post.

With that said I can’t knock lemmy any because the community that has 150 people will have 125 of them respond to anything you post.

Yeah. Compared to Reddit which can have a sub with millions of members but the top posts only get like 12k upvotes and 300 comments

I don't think it's the size but more the number of communities and how active they are. So if there are more people here it hopefully means there will be more active users as well. And perhaps more niche communities.

I’d really like to see more posts come through, without the dip into the “copy Reddit posts” kind of thing. When I open Reddit, I can read 100 posts of varying topics, refresh an hour later and have a lot of new posts to ingest. Lemmy doesn’t have that much activity, so I end up looking at a very similar “popular” feed this morning, this afternoon, this evening. And 1/4 of those posts will also be in my feed again the next day.

Use an rss feed reader, it prevents duplicates, but it might be annoying to use if you interact with post a lot

I want more small communities with people who really like specific things. For example if you want to buy a robot vacuum going to a community about it is very nice to read up on what people find important and maybe issues with a particular model. Even the memes sometimes have great info (think something like a popular vacuum that doesn't pick up anything with "At least you tried" or spongebob meme pointing at stuff of increasing sizes referencing areas the vacuum missed)

Example meme I just created for robo vacs which I'd like to see in the some robovac community.

I want the niche communities to fill out but otherwise I agree.

Im looking at it from a whole fediverse perspective but its large enough as is to be enjoyable. If it gets larger fine, if not fine. I just want it to develop to have as much freedom as possible and give as much control as possible to the individual for their experience.

most online users, like well over 90%, don't post or comment with any regularity, that's just how online activity works.

coming from Reddit, lurkers are expecting unlimited content in any community to consistently appear, without internalizing that it is users creating that content

Lemmy lurkers are the people that need to add content if they want to see more content.

I agree that lemmy is fine the way it is, getting a few new users every day, a few new communities, consistent quality posts and actual conversation instead of the chaotic morass that Reddit easily devolves into with so many posts.

I mainly used Reddit for communities dedicated to niche games and hobbies. None of those communities exist on the Fediverse, because the venn diagram of very niche interests x Fedi itself being niche has too little overlap. Fedi would have to be substantially bigger to replicate that part of Reddit, only when there are a ton of users to begin with will I be able to find the small percentage of them who also want to talk about the stuff I want to talk about.

There’s also a number of them indirectly trying to use the numbers to trash talk Lemmy. Personally, I would prefer the quality over quantity you can see here on Lemmy.

Reddit took over a decade to get to that size, it's not a fair comparison.

Reddit also didn’t have Reddit to compete with, which certainly makes things harder.

Well, there was Digg, then Digg imploded.

Yeap, but Digg was still pretty early in it's life and was very much catering for tech nerds.

Reddit is basically the home of all communities these days, its swallowed what used to be individual forums from around the web and put them into a single place.

Building those new communities across multiple lemmy instances also adds to the complexity.

Reddit has the same dynamics. Smaller niche communities there were awesome, the massive ones were full of toxicity. Here, the large communities are the size of small Reddit boards, which is good, but many niche communities here are unfortunately too sparse to thrive.

I don't think Lemmy must grow. In fact I like the relative obscurity that tends to make it a better quality of user. But at this size, it's less of a one-stop shop than Reddit. I miss the Reddit cigar community. They aren't really in favor, particularly with the left, and there isn't the critical mass to sustain that here. So I just don't talk about them which unfortunately leaves me less informed about what's going on in that world.

That so being said, I agree with the thrust of your post which is that Lemmy is just fine at this size. It is.

Give it some time and you will see what Lemmy is capable of.

Subs which are huge in other places don't exist here. So growth is needed.

I just joined. What’s some good sub communities with good engagement?

Welcome in from the cold. We've got hot cocoa and marshmallows.

Honestly, browse by All, Active, Last 6 Hours or New and block communities you dont like. Subscribe to your favorites but since this is more garden hose than firehose, drinking from the tap isn't too bad.

For months, I kept saying "I'll only do that until my subscribe list gets good/busy enough”. It's been months, and still isn't good enough.

Why are you so fixated on people who are fixated on Lemmy's growth? 🤔

I would like particular communities to grow but the Facebook/Instagram/tiktok people can stay where they're at.

I see lemmy as a sort of test-balloon: Can we overcome network effects? And in a larger (and maybe slightly hyperbolic) sense, can we become a rational civilization or are we doomed to fail as a species?

On a civilization level we are currently seeing a massive downward trend due to news and social media become completely... well wrong. And it's getting worse. The main media aspects of the internet have done the exact opposite of what we wanted it to become. And most of it is because it's run only for profit.

So lemmy and the fediverse is a pretty good attempt at trying to break that and replace it with something more democratic and sane. But I think it's likely that lemmy is going to fail to achieve that. The synergy through network effects is just too strong. Reddit, youtube, facebook, google, twitter will never be replaced. At least not without a massively funded alternative (e.g. tiktok that funded creators for a while) and that just ends in the same way again. Seeking profit instead of serving the users is a kind of insanity for our "means of communication".

Of course that is a bit hyperbolic and lemmy is fine and fun to use as it is, but I wish it would fully replace reddit as a sane alternative.

I saw a bunch of new people join recently because of Reddit saying something about potentially pay walling subs. Perhaps that has something to do with it.

Too many people are just competitive. I didn't get it either, just ignore it and post memes.

I've been having a nice time with Lemmy having ditched Reddit last year, and considering the changes that happened or have been conceptually floated over that time I'm happy with my choice.

One thing I would like is for the Lemmy framework to make it easier for the network to be "wider" than "taller" as it grows. By this I mean a wider array of separate domains with operators each with thriving niche communities, rather than a few tall generalist servers and a handful of outliers, and a fragmented myriad of inactive communities that are hard to find.

That is exactly the problem with Lemmy. Far too many niche communities with next to no members. That does not work. There are not enough people to have 5 separate communities about X.

One day, this too will turn to shit. But when that day comes, people will just drift to different instances. Not including federation and niche communities, this is functionally equivalent to reddit for me

In my case..

I just left a instance (which rhymes with seesaw) because one of the admins accused me of "starting a fight" and "not being nice" because I didn't agree with an article that was posted.

It was however perfectly acceptable for someone to instantly accuse me of wanting to kill an entire group of people and of being a bad person (I won't be specific, but it was a very clear exaggeration and the comment was overlooked by the admin). But, I wasn't being "nice" because I calmly explained my perspective on the lawsuit the article was about (and apparently having a difference of opinion is considered "fighting" lol). And honestly, my opinion wasn't extreme in any capacity either (in fact, it half agreed with them)..

And it was such a pity because the other admins there seem so cool, and I loved the idea of the instance (I actually donated originally)

So, yep, I can definitely agree, it's so easy to move around.

So far, I've actually found the people on other instances to be really cool actually (which I wasn't expecting, because my original instance portrayed the rest of Lemmy as a bit of a cesspool at times honestly)

People just want what they gave up and what they know, it is that simple.

You are not wrong, it is within human nature to seek validation for their actions. Some people came here expecting a mass migration from Reddit that did not exactly happen because inertia is a powerful force in human behavior. So some people are sour about it, it's understandable.

You can insult and annoy more people with your comments when there's more users, so..

(People on lemmy are way too nice. I love that, but I miss old fashioned trolling here. It's just part of the internet for me.)

Yeah will I think you're a fucking idiot for that shitty take 👍

(Am I doing it right? ❤️)

Agreed, he's a sad clump of grinded meat in a loose ill fitting sack. The sweaty kind, their armpits likely have patches in their moist hairy growth.

Okay.. that wasn't very nice of me, I'm going to go find some cute pictures of river otters to re center myself.

/I hope he is having a nice day (no real hurtfulness meant)

Awww, you guys are making me feel so sentimental 💕 thank you, you fucks

Anytime!💕 If you need some cute to wash off the pain the otters really are a nice relief: https://lemmy.world/c/otters

I sincerely sent an otter pic from there to my gf half an hour ago. Maybe you and I are more similar than we think.

(Why would you wash off the pain, though? You smear it unto others, that's the most fun part of pain. You can still send them otter pics.)

(People on lemmy are way too nice. I love that, but I miss old fashioned trolling here. It's just part of the internet for me.)

Hey, Fucko. While I also miss that a bit, I find the positivity that I encounter more in the Fediverse to be much better for my mental and emotional health. Plus, it's inconveniencing you in particular 💕.

I guess for me it's disappointing to see how much nonsense ppl will put up with from reddit, when so many ppl made noises Abt how they wld leave

More people need to know about lemmy.

Perhaps the next time reddit fuck off, we will see.

But i think it might not a case anymore, because Reddit is so good with censor now.

Comment hide, shallowban new account, especially detect multi and shallowban in 30 minutes, it is unlikely there will be a revolt on Reddit.

They are used to the short-term goals of stonks. 

The more people there are, the more popular it is with the working class. Instead of being a niche community, you can meet non-tech people that know about Lemmy. 

Lemmy is good as is; slow growth is better, IMO.