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Lemmy Active Users looking good
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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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Every once in a while I check up on what reddit looks like now.
I find the same or similar topics posted, with 600 comments instead of 30, and 570 of those 600 are just whatever's the first thing that pops into everyone's mind after reading the post title.
I like it better here.
Both sides have their benefits, and it's a shame there is no good best-of-both-worlds. I get where you're coming from, I never felt the urge to participate on Reddit because it was so often just shouting into the void and getting buried in hundreds of one-word replies and in-jokes and memes. Here I feel seen, and often feel like my contribution (although mostly just small comments) makes an impact.
At the same time, a huge critical mass of a userbase is completely necessary for niche communities to survive. Maybe not as overwhelmingly massive as Reddit's, but magnitudes larger than Lemmy has right now. Lemmy has a very distinct userbase slant and if you're in the target audience (tech, FOSS, Linux etc) you're probably great here. But even common interests like sports struggle for traction, and true niche stuff has an extremely tough time.
Sports discussion and game threads are actually the only thing I really miss about Reddit, I find the time I spend on Lemmy much more productive/informative and less likely to get sucked down an argumentative rabbit hole.
Yeah, I feel that. Formula 1 does okay (maybe unsurprisingly due to it being tech adjacent), but even huge sports like soccer are mostly ghost towns.
Sports need folks having fluid communication about what’s happening right then and you need enough folks to be seeing and reacting to both the event/game and the comments at the same time for that, maybe one day we’ll get there
To confirm, you don't think we have a minimum population base currently on Lemmy?
If so, how do you make that judgment? How are you measuring that? How are you quantifying that?
I mean, depends on what you view Lemmy as, right? It's a great place to hang around and chat (depending on your interests). The people here are generally polite and friendly, and most interactions feel meaningful. It does not currently have enough content volume and niche communities to provide a viable Reddit alternative to most people.
Completely subjectively, though I didn't think it was an unpopular opinion. I thought most people agreed niche communities struggle here. The exact number of users needed to reach critical mass I have no idea on, just a best guess extrapolating between where we are now and where Reddit was a decade ago. You can use Mastodon as another data point. I'm not on there, but I'm under the impression that Mastodon, too, has a little low userbase to truly feed niche communities, and it's noticeably larger than Lemmy.
Just for the record, I wasn't thinking that your opinion is an unpopular one (in case you were addressing me directly).
Its just that I see people use a lack of population in 'niche' communities as a failure of Lemmy overall, and using some subjective made-up number to justify Lemmy's overall failure, when there's obviously traffic to major communities and 'life'/activity on Lemmy on a daily basis.
I replied to another comment as well, where a person also used a number to justify an opinion, and it seems so arbitrary to me to be able to make those kind of firm decisions. So I wasn't just 'picking on you'. :) No offense was meant.
To me, it seems like Lemmy is currently growing over time, and is too early to 'declare it dead' (not saying you did that, but just in general).
It's not so much a "failure" of Lemmy as it is an assessment of the situation (at this point in time). I wasn't suggesting Lemmy was or will be a failure, nor that it's dead. I like it here and I'm active most days. There still isn't enough activity in niche subs for Lemmy to have mainstream appeal, though. Even a broad subject like Poetry is carried by a handful of people, and that is a fairly lively "niche sub".
We're currently still in the phase where determined, committed individuals have to spend concerted effort into keeping small subs going, rather than them being self-sustaining.
I do like it here, though, and I really hope the growth continues.