It's not really that deep - it's a combination of network effect and inertia.
Because there's "nobody" on Lemmy, people don't join Lemmy. Because nobody is joining Lemmy, there's "nobody" on Lemmy, and so on and so forth.
Furthermore, Reddit (and other big social medias) already have "everyone" there, so to the vast majority of people they're just superior platforms as it's easier to find both people and content. Moving to another platform means giving that up.
I agree with this. I love the fediverse and have been using it in some form for quite a long time. I've checked in on lemmy periodically over the last year or so, but ultimately I spent a lot of time reading topics on somewhat niece subjects and so the lack of posts has been a huge factor.
It feels like it takes one of these self-imploding events to really cause people to move as one to something else.
This post is 9 months old
Lmao I didn’t even notice that. I thought this was new and was confused on the question lol
The nobody is on lemmy is quickly changing.
Reddit is a private company founded in 2005, valued at $1.8 billion dollars and employing around 350 people. Lemmy was founded two years ago and is run with relatuvely little funding (I would say approximately two paid employees and a dozen or so volunteers, distributed around different instances). That's not comparable. At all.
Most people aren't banned from reddit. Your personal experience is rare. If someone isn't banned from the biggest platform, they need a motivation to leave. Why would they leave? I know why YOU would leave, but why would THEY leave?
Most people coming here, not all but most, are doing it because they were banned from reddit. As a result, they just try to recreate reddit here, instead of making something better, a better culture or a higher quality of community. Lemmy is treated by the majority as a 'free speech reddit' and nothing more.
Strong political bias in the popular communities may be distasteful to the majority of people who would use a reddit-like site, who tend to be pro-capitalist liberals.
We'd love to be able to start a proper open-source programming collective, with the ability to hire more programmers than just the two of us to add features and make lemmy better, but the money just isn't there. Its difficult to compete with a multi-billion dollar company that's able to pay high salaries and mobilize hundreds of skilled programmers ( even tho I still am veryy proud of what we've been able to do with our limited time, and all the contributions people have made to lemmy ).
Its not a specific problem for us either, all open source projects need more funding than theyre currently getting to thrive. Twitch streamers make more money than open source devs, its a pretty sad state of affairs.
IMO pretty much the only reason reddit is beating us, is the first-mover advantage. I noticed a long time ago that adding more features doesn't improve the lemmyverse's user count. Its only when reddit alienates certain groups, that we see large influxes of users and new instances. Otherwise people are happy to stay on reddit, because that's where communities already are.
/r/piracy is probably the next big community that could migrate to lemmy. Reddit keeps banning then unbanning piracy-related communities, and file-sharers will see that their position is precarious there. /r/privacy should move to lemmy, the reddit redesign is a bloated mess of spyware.
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