Ask Lemmy

Less politics, less news, less "I'm mad about this so you should be mad about it too" rage posting/armchair activism, less "ist's and ism's". Less preachy shit about capitalism bad, communism good (or maybe .ml should just be blocked by default?). Less bitching about Reddit (I swear, I've heard less about friends' exes than some people bitch about Reddit here). Less "hurr durr power tripping mods" circlejerking.

More content about cool stuff, hobbies, amazing feats, movies, books, TV shows, etc.

This place has much of the latter but it's completely overshadowed by the former to the point you have to almost dig for it. Even blocking the overt news, politics, and political "humor" communities, it still seeps in to comics and memes and unrelated communities.

There's still plenty of good in this world, but you'd never know it from looking at what's always topping the feed here.

And a new user checking this place out is going to be immediately hit in the face with all of the former and probably not even see the latter.

Honestly, I think we have way too many communities. Cull them back to a small set of fairly broad communities: Arts, Tech, Politics, etc. Once those are active enough, then start to subdivide as the sub communities grew to a sufficient size to self-sustain.

What happened instead, was people tried to create all the same communities that reddit has, without the people to sustain them, and now it looks like a ghost town.

Honestly I'm happy the Fediverse doesn't have the Reddit user base. I'd rather try recruiting people from various forums on specific topics to the Fediverse. Like homebrewing (alcoholic beverages) is still happening in independent web forums that I think would be neat if they got federated, but I don't think they in turn are interested in a Fediverse user base.

I think the most valuable thing we can do for the fediverse is to contibute by posting in communities we care about, thus helping them be active, and engage in posts made by others in general. In short, don't lurk, don't be passive.

cultivate the niche hobby subs, thats really all that reddit still has going for it because it reached critical mass.

Reducing the amount of doomsday content on the front page, which I'm trying to help out with by starting !Nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social

Can I ask why a bigger user base equals better? I’d there a technical reason?

I think there are a huge amount of internet refugees that are now lost. I miss healthy topics, resources and niche forums. But for me they won’t come back because all that info will get scraped and infiltrated. So I question even if the numbers arrived would that equal genuine and contributing communities.

I like this place this size. I’d like more engagement but I think a lot of people are reassessing what they want from the internet and that’s that. We can’t force engagement we can see the result of that at Reddit.

If I want to read discussion about a new movie or game that all seems to be on reddit, so I guess the lesson is to try starting that sort of thing here and hope it picks up. With a smaller user base you have to accept that individual posts may not get any traction though. I do think having discussion other than Linux and whatever Trump is going on about this week would help to grow the platform.

the biggest hurdle i see right now to expanding the threadiverse is how often people here are just absolute assholes to each other.

Try to be welcoming and kind.

Outside of get-popular-quick schemes:

Volunteer your time and expertise to make Lemmy better. Whether it's sharing secret recipes for free, or helping out newer users, all users need to contribute to make it a better place that people want to use.

We should start making little comics about how people who aren't on Lemmy all go to hell and put them in random places.

First and foremost, before the usual argument happens, I know that more is not necessarily better.

Having said that, it would be better if lemmy’s userbase were much bigger

Ok Rick James...

More Star Trek memes! And more memes in general.

In addition, suffer some Reddit. Not the main pages, the niche groups. Name drop Lemmy in regular posts.

If you are active on other social media, have a channel people watch. Again, mention Lemmy.

Leak the funhole.

Stay upprayed fam.

A couple of things that come to mind

• advertise, drop the name here and there, especially on reddit because it is so similar in purpose, also share posts from lemmy with friends
• interact with communities you're interested in, make sure there's good content or at least comment, especially in smaller, nicr communities
• improve user experience, Lemmy is slow, especially when loading subscriptions, also posts reappear all the time while scrolling
• more casual content, I don't want to be confronted with all the horrors going on in the world all the time, sometimes I just want to see something funny, apolitical, etc, something chill

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The main hurdle is onboarding. Normal people wont understand federation. All they know is Login with Google, that's it.

Midnight rave.

Can we pool some money together and advertise somewhere or put stickers at coffee shops in big cities. Some of my other thoughts are to have influencers plug it, put adds on blogs especially hobby blogs and niche blogs if that’s who we’re trying to attract.

First step is to make sharing posts easier by integrating something like https://threadiverse.link/.

If I wanted to share your post with my friends, I'd send them the following link: https://piefed.ca/c/asklemmy/p/461864/what-should-we-be-doing-individually-to-increase-lemmy-s-userbase.

If my friends were also on Piedfed.ca, then all's fine. But if they're on a different instance and want to comment and/or vote on your post, then they're fucked. They would have to go on their home instance, look for !asklemmy@lemmy.world, and then search for your post.

I say friend, but this applies to literally everyone here except those who are already on Piefed.ca.

hola, trataré de mencionar algo que me parece no sale o no se ve mucho como debate,

soy un usuario que leer bastante lemmy por varias razones, novedades, noticias, comentarios, revelaciones...
en mi caso particular pues por no conocer mucho ni poco el idioma inglés pues acudo constantemente al traductor incorporado de firefox, y con calma pues voy seleccionando hilos, debates y respuestas que bien interesan,

cuando se comenzó a gestar la expansión de lemmy hice la tecnica de responder en ambos idiomas, en original español y el bloque traducido en inglés,

¿es un problema que todo lemmy o mayormente sea solo en inglés? pues es un eterno debate complejo, si y no, en el caso de español por ahora instancias de lemmy son muy contadas, muy pocas y ya casi sin participación o seguimiento, ya ni menciono otros idiomas locales o regionales pero igualmente importantes como el catalán,

por eso ando en la duda que el idioma de acceso o la poca o nula facilidad de traducir hace o puede hacer que lemmy no se expanda mas, solo algunas apps externas y accesibles de android hacen posible la traducción con pulsar un botón, pero si me preocupa un poco "mucho" que este detalle de lengua está ahora "bloqueando" a muchos o miles y miles de usuarios que les gustaría participar, escribir, responder y ampliar el tema de cualquier naturaleza.

Hi, I'll try to bring up something that I don't think gets discussed much.

I'm a user who reads Lemmy quite a bit for several reasons: updates, news, comments, revelations...
In my case, since I don't know much English, I constantly use Firefox's built-in translator, and I carefully select threads, discussions, and replies that are of interest.

When the Lemmy expansion started, I used the technique of replying in both languages: the original Spanish and the translated section in English.

Is it a problem that all or most of Lemmy is only in English? Well, it's a complex, eternal debate—yes and no. In the case of Spanish, for now, instances of Lemmy are very few and far between, with almost no participation or follow-up. I won't even mention other local or regional languages, which are equally important, like Catalan.

That's why I'm wondering if the access language or the limited or nonexistent ease of translation is preventing Lemmy from expanding further. Only a few external and accessible Android apps allow translation with the touch of a button, but I'm quite concerned that this language issue is currently blocking many, or even thousands, of users who would like to participate, write, respond, and expand on the topic in any way.

waiting for more reddit purges? thats sadly is the only way. other ways, reddit just have all the communities that lemmy doesnt.

currently reddit is very careful about massive purges now, they are just doing background ones, even if they increased thier filtering and sensitivity of bot? detection. they want to avoid bots being to pervasive on site to make it seem like its mostly users.

First thing is gain enough support in the presumption that increasing userbase is a desirable outcome.

Chasing bigger numbers for bigger numbers sake is one of the biggest problems with capitalism

Trying to convince people I know to join the Fediverse is like, well, it's a lot like trying to convince people to switch to Linux. They're not gonna do it and I'll look like a jackass if I talk about it too much.

If there was an easy way to grow this platform overnight, we'd be doing it. Reality is there's no shortcut, all we can do is continue building community with the people who are here and hope that we see some slow and steady incremental growth.

Best thing you can do is make your own communities for topics that we haven't already got one for.

Also going on reddit and just going "join lemmy join lemmy join lemmy" over and over again probably helps, right?