Over the past two months, I've noticed a drop in engagement on Lemmy. Communities that used to have a decent amount of new content posted over a week, are now lacking or nonexistent. I've noticed this to be highly true with all communities with less than 3k subscribers. I don't recall the name of the theory, but it was something like 'community content theory.' It goes something like this:

'Around 1% of people in an online community will share content and/or try to provide original content. To have this number grow, you have to provide a way for the content posters to continue to post.'

https://www.psychreg.org/psychology-content-creating-why-we-share-what-we-share/

• Self-expression and presenting one's identity/ideal self
• Seeking social validation through likes, comments, shares
• Connecting with communities of shared interests
• Educating others and providing helpful resources
• The "helper's high" of gratification from assisting people

In my experience, the third one rings true most often with people.

That being said, we should take a look at the kind of communities that are not getting much engagement.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active

Here we can see the stats for all of the communities across hundreds of instances. (Filters can be applied.)

What's surprising to me, is the ratio of subs to active users there are. After a two minute look, I believe I see that there are a few outliers where they have nearly all of the subs active and fewer that have more actives to subs. Most of what I'm seeing is around 1/3 ratio of subs to active users per week, of the best performers. Definitely not the norm.

I have a few theories as to why this is, but would love to hear from others.