Would you like it to grow so all of your other, non-technical interests could have active communities? Do you want more people for moral and philosophical reasons? Or are you enjoying being in a niche? Are you happy to have a platform full of techie individuals, even in communities not explicitly tied to anything techie (much like this one)?
My answer to all of these is “yes,” so I’m not quite sure what I want. What are your thoughts?
Absolutely as I have been advocating for the platform to grow by convincing folks from Reddit to make the jump as Lemmy is a solid upgrade. With its open source, third-party apps, community ran servers, more detailed statistics and public modlogs.
The way I feel about it is that I don't want Lemmy to grow for growth's sake. I want people to understand how important it is to use open protocols and free software to communicate with others and that is what will lead Lemmy and other Fediverse applications to grow.
Absolutely. I think the setup of the Fediverse in general as well as the outlook on it by the majority of admins would allow Lemmy to keep its charm even when it grows to a much bigger size.
I'd also like to see specialist instances. There could absolutely be a separate instance that has major sports, for example. Or even just the NFL. Kind of like the benefits of old forums, but with the benefits of federation and Reddit.
More geographic based instances would also be great.
Otherwise I'm not into more instances just for defederation's sake. Email works just fine having most users in a few major hosts. Lemmy can be similar. It's the option to leave that is important.
The communities aren't super-active because the idea is that they're remote-only, but that means they don't get the benefit that comes from local users browsing their local feed.
The geographical instances already exist for the most part. .world is an American instance in all but name, there's lemmy.ca for Canada and some European ones.
A sports instance would be pretty funny if im being honest. Can you imagine the drama between the different communities for a specific team?
I don't run my own instance, but one concern I see grappled with by instances, at some time in their existence, is how to handle image storage and embedding. I won't pretend to know the options or have opinions on which to use or how to resolve the larger issues, but I see that as a large hurdle to mainstream, in addition to the points referenced by OP.
Yes, because I still have to go to Reddit for gaming content. It's getting more and more, but on Lemmy they are still small or some don't exist. I try my best to interact with content on Lemmy, but sadly I'm not much of a post submitter.
People against it have a valid reason but at the end we should admit, communities in the size of a Discord, don't have too mich value, as one might just go on Discord than. Communities here need to grow to get independent from controlled social media platforms.
It's the future.
Lemmy is already the same quality of conversations as Reddit, as long as you spend some time curating your instances and block some communities. Subscribing however would be much better, but right now there's a bit too little content.
I like it how it is. There are a lot of us who are non-tech. I see enough cat posts and cannabis-related posts seem to be increasing recently. I could use more knitting and crochet content and more 3d printing would be nice but I'm ok waiting for those to grow slowly.
Yes, but slowly. Every time I go to the Reddit front page and just see astroturfing and vapid pop culture stuff, then go to the comments and see 75% repetitive bot comments, I realize how much that place sucks now. I want more niche discussion spaces, but I don't want reddit again anytime soon.
I think theres a healthy middle, where its not fully mainstream but there are enough people to be able to have active communities for all your interests
I think the big thing is that Lemmy isn't nearly as monetizable as other social media. What that means to me is that if we do grow, it'll be largely organic. It'll be at a pace where the culture won't change overnight. If we get big enough to have real issues, we can meaningfully splinter to more manageable sizes, or moderate shit stains into instances with no reach beyond themselves.
In short, so long as we maintain interoperability standards, I think we will have all the tools needed to keep things from enshittification. We might just grow out of pure longevity as other social media enterprises slowly but surely kill themselves.
I would imagine if the growth was too tremendous, the instance owners could always temporarily disable sign ups until more server infrastructure is ramped up.
I can imagine this happening after Reddit loses more giants like BrookValley and once all the mobile third party mobile apps contain all the Lemmy features. I remember in June of last year when all the iOS apps were in beta and Wefwef was the only option and god forbid you wanted to do some modding on the fly and now look how far we have come.
Of course I want the communities I enjoy to grow but not at the expense of the platform. Too much growth and it'll turn into another reddit situation with a bunch of unoriginal dipshits reposting meme responses to everything over and over. I'd rather things stay as they are then turn into that. At least now you can have interesting discussions with people when you do actually get a response.
Don't get me wrong. I'm enjoying the recent influx since the recent reddit migrations, while still staying niche. And I'm appreciating being amongst like minded, generally leftist communities here.
But if it requires opening up the floodgates to idiots, fascists, and trolls in order to kill reddit, so be it. As long as there are no algorithms, advertisers, and spez's, I'm all for more lemmings.
Yes, I do want Lemmy to grow .... but to grow organically and naturally over a very long period of time instead of artificially in a short period of time just to make some idiot or a small group of idiots a bunch of money.
Growing over a long period of time will also allow developers, maintainers and managers to grow with increased size over time. Instead of panicking over sudden exponential growth, they can slowly build stronger more robust systems over time. Also, if something is grown over a long period of time ... it will also take a long period of time for it be destroyed, dissolved or disregarded. If you grow something way too fast, chances are the risks increase for it to disappear just as quickly.
The nice thing about Reddit was that if I saw a new TV show, read a new novel, or picked up a new hobby, there would be an existing community of people already talking about it. Lemmy is great, but it doesn't have the critical mass of people needed for that to be possible.
I’m trying to post as much as I can to drive more conversation. Once people see all the benefits and experience the well crafted Lemmy third-party apps they wouldn’t want to go back.
I want to see the fediverse grow to enter the mainstream. For forum stuff specifically, that means as big or bigger than reddit. The more people discover and work on this federated form thing, the better. There will be better moderation tools, better filtering, better website experience and design, hopefully more developers enjoying opensource, etc.
And most of all, I want to see how this network will cope with not just a few thousand people talking but millions, maybe billions. If it can survive becoming mainstream, stay opensource, and ad-free, that I think we'll be a step closer to a better internet.
I like it niche and I'm here when it is niche but I'd love to see it grow. I'd honestly love it to complete replace reddit and be even bigger. I doubt that'd ever happen but it'd be cool. I'd love to see Lemmy be the new thing to find answers from people in any topic just like reddit was for a while
Lemmy will be bigger than Reddit as reasons why is it is taking a while to grow is because people are still learning about it and creating their first accounts however once that initial barrier is knocked down they’re here to stay. It also didn’t help much back then the third party apps weren’t so great during the api migration. And many moderators did not have expertise to start up their own instances so some decided to stay in the spez platform.
I have had many people in classic wow tell me they never heard of Lemmy until I brought it up in guild chat. So hopefully I convinced a few to try out the platform.
I'd love for it to be large enough to have an r/stalker type sub again. I loved that community on reddit and niche game communities don't really exist here. I've never met a single person in North America who has played that series, so I don't have anyone left to discuss it with.
Oh f off "Beaver." you pretended to be my friend then instead of discussing anything with me decided to use your alt accounts to manipulate my community. You pretend that you are looking out for the global south but as soon as you meet a Persian person who doesn't agree with your white supremacist world view you need to silence and smear me. It takes a massive leap to smear someone who was concerned about supporting the use of chemical weapons as a "tankie." This is what my thread was about, do you support this? If so YOU are the tankie.
Do you support the usage of chemical weapons? Am I really unreasonable because I don't want people to violate the Geneva conventions and wanted feedback about it?
Leave me and my community alone and stop talking about us. If you want to spam the fuck out of lemmy with low effort bullshit then fine but leave us out of it. But you are not going to do that, you're going to use your alts for false consensus and target people for drama when you don't get your way, this seems to be your MO. How long until you delete all your accounts and start again when people don't agree with you like they didn't agree with you about vegan cat food?
On one hand, it sure would be nice if there were more gamers here and every individual game had its own community, that was actually active, like Reddit does.
On the other, I've seen literally every space I've ever used get ruined by having too many people watering down the fun and altering the vibe. Eternal September fucking sucks.
I can say that the best thing to do a gaming community is to push it yourself. !satisfactory@lemmy.world was pretty empty when I got there, I just took screenshots for 8 months and talked it up whenever I could. Now it's actually thriving, and people knew to go there for the 1.0 release.
Hell I even have a decent sized Taylor Swift community on a very nerdy platform. Pick something that either doesn't exist or that doesn't have much traction and post to it constantly. It feels weird getting no, or few upvotes, but it will pick up. As it starts showing on all people will start subscribing
Growth is a secondary concern to me. I'm not against it but quality is much more important to me than quantity. And I mean quality in terms of content AND respectful interaction.
Historically, if one can even use the word for such a recent thing as the internet, techies are usually first to a new thing. And these types of conversations inevitably follow at some point as though growth at all costs is the only way to stave off death. And then a decade or so further on we end up with Xitter, Meta and Reddit where the anger is palpable and the interface revolves around pushing monetised hate at you and exploiting your private data for another source of monetisation.
I'm enjoying being able to go somewhere everyday where I don't have awfulness pushed to a platform curated feed I can't opt out of. If people want those things - fine they exist. I hope the fediverse does all it can to avoid interacting with or devolving to those places and that any discoverability tools that might get developed are for people not algorithms. I hope it remains an alternative to that mindset, not just another place to fling shit at each other.
I suspect if it does get a big pop bump there will be a few communities that get a lot of attention and start appealing to big numbers and broadest audiences, and new communities will begin for rules like no memes or image/video posts etc for smaller niche communities and sub communities.
I think it's already very hard to change our own habits. I would not hope to change other people's own habits.
I would like Lemmy to grow if only for one reason: I don't care being part of any niche (no more than I care being part of not highly popular communities, mind you). I enjoy exchanging ideas and chatting with interesting people much more than I need to feel 'smart' myself because of the tools I'm using and for any chat to happen one first have to meet people. So, the bigger Lemmy, the better for me ;)
I joined Lemmy/I left reddit only because I realised I was not OK with the way reddit changed policy (the way they control our content) and because I was not happy in the way they made their website evolve. That said, I do miss the few subs I was following and participating in on Reddit. I miss them a lot, as they were/are often very interesting and rich.... of their participants.
Can Lemmy become comparable? I don't know, I have some doubts but I also have very little intention to come back to Reddit, at least not until they change a few things.
After I announced I would not be posting on those subs anymore, a few months ago, two people contacted me to tell me that would be some kind of a loss and they were sad to see me go, asking me to reconsider. As far as I know, none have created an account here on Lemmy so we could keep on discussing stuff. Of course, I can't be sure of that but to be 100% honest the opposite would have surprised me a lot more. I had the same lack of reaction a few years ago when I quit Twitter and the likes. That's fine.
Changing habits is hard. Even more so online, I reckon.
I think it's grow or die, just like everything. So I think we'll have to grow, but I'm just curious how. Will it stay like it is now? Will it become even more niche? Will there be some capitalist instance who's gonna take over the whole fediverse? Will there be mainstream news broadcasters mentioning Lemmy posts or users? Will "This is awesome, Lemmy post this online" become a mainstream saying?
I don't really care either way. Like Digg and Reddit before it, Lemmy will eventually kill itself in confusion and another will take its place. I don't really care if it grows or shrinks in the meantime 🤷♂️ it is what it is
yes. i like the idea of federated communities. even obscure interests have its place as long as there's a community or enough interest to set up an instance.