I think it’s the same on Reddit, I guess. Reddit’s algorithms just avoids showing you the posts that don’t seem to be so popular (though, at least on the subreddits I was, I remember there were a lot of posts that didn’t have any comments or only had a bot comment. I actually think Lemmy might be even more active in the comments than on Reddit)
Normally it isn’t that buggy, or at least it was mostly fine for months. Not sure what is wrong right now on our instance slrpnk.net. I think there is some backend issue and I probably need to speed up the migration to my own server.
Lemmy is both a smaller community and a lot more “opt-in” than other sites. Each instance may or may not federate (read: link up) with others, and to find communities you have to explicitly search for them. There is no algorithm nor massive popularity to shove communities in your face, so less people are aware. What Lemmy needs is more adoption by people. Growth is going to be the only way that the community aspect survives.
A few issues I’ve seen with adoption in the federated/open source world-
There is a technical barrier to entry. The fact that you’re on a website that’s connected to other different websites in the same interface is one that people aren’t particularly familiar with. For a social website, questions around moderation and who you’re interacting with are problems which are hard to address if you’re unwilling or incapable of learning the terminology you need to learn to understand how this works.
Each entry point into this website system is slightly different as well - how it presents itself, the design, who participates on that entry point, what kind of discussions exist. You might stumble across a lemmy instance as your first introduction to lemmy that doesn’t appeal to you and not recognize that it’s not everything that’s available on lemmy and discovering that can be difficult. The same is true of other federated websites.
As you mentioned there’s also issues with algorithmic feed. This is what leads a lot of people to stick with a particular platform. They want content to come to them, rather than searching for it, and they aren’t always aware what content they want. Federated content is much more pull oriented than push oriented and until someone codes an algorithm to push I think there will be a lot of resistance with a particular subset of individuals who are interested in pushed content rather than pulled
It’s unfortunate, but we usually see the biggest growth when communities are forced to migrate when they get booted off other platforms.
Lemmy as a whole is still missing the community engagement necessary for people to want to start migrating on their own. The snowball hasn’t started rolling down the hill yet, but we’ll get there.
While this is true, I think we also need to do a post-mortem on the genzedong migration some time.
My impression is that a lot of people on lemmy.ml stopped posting afterwards as the genzedong people would dogpile on anything even slightly outside of their misguided hivemind ideas. It killed off entire communities on lemmy.ml for sure.
Overall it was probably a net negative in user numbers as a lot of the genzedong people also seem to have stopped coming to Lemmygrad after a short while.
I really like Lemmy but it is true that it does have some issues attracting active contributors or commentators. I think some of this might be because it’s a little more explicitly political as a project. Some of it is because it’s newer I think. Some of it is because less people use stuff like reddit to begin with, so it’s kind of a niche audience.
There’s been issues with troll brigading in the past which I think makes the community a little more insular by default.
Maybe start commenting more
I think it’s the same on Reddit, I guess. Reddit’s algorithms just avoids showing you the posts that don’t seem to be so popular (though, at least on the subreddits I was, I remember there were a lot of posts that didn’t have any comments or only had a bot comment. I actually think Lemmy might be even more active in the comments than on Reddit)
Good questions.
deleted by creator
Its still very buggy. Its hard to get out of this loop. Fix bugs. Needs users to report bugs. Loop.
Normally it isn’t that buggy, or at least it was mostly fine for months. Not sure what is wrong right now on our instance slrpnk.net. I think there is some backend issue and I probably need to speed up the migration to my own server.
Lemmy is both a smaller community and a lot more “opt-in” than other sites. Each instance may or may not federate (read: link up) with others, and to find communities you have to explicitly search for them. There is no algorithm nor massive popularity to shove communities in your face, so less people are aware. What Lemmy needs is more adoption by people. Growth is going to be the only way that the community aspect survives.
A few issues I’ve seen with adoption in the federated/open source world-
There is a technical barrier to entry. The fact that you’re on a website that’s connected to other different websites in the same interface is one that people aren’t particularly familiar with. For a social website, questions around moderation and who you’re interacting with are problems which are hard to address if you’re unwilling or incapable of learning the terminology you need to learn to understand how this works.
Each entry point into this website system is slightly different as well - how it presents itself, the design, who participates on that entry point, what kind of discussions exist. You might stumble across a lemmy instance as your first introduction to lemmy that doesn’t appeal to you and not recognize that it’s not everything that’s available on lemmy and discovering that can be difficult. The same is true of other federated websites.
As you mentioned there’s also issues with algorithmic feed. This is what leads a lot of people to stick with a particular platform. They want content to come to them, rather than searching for it, and they aren’t always aware what content they want. Federated content is much more pull oriented than push oriented and until someone codes an algorithm to push I think there will be a lot of resistance with a particular subset of individuals who are interested in pushed content rather than pulled
It’s unfortunate, but we usually see the biggest growth when communities are forced to migrate when they get booted off other platforms.
Lemmy as a whole is still missing the community engagement necessary for people to want to start migrating on their own. The snowball hasn’t started rolling down the hill yet, but we’ll get there.
While this is true, I think we also need to do a post-mortem on the genzedong migration some time.
My impression is that a lot of people on lemmy.ml stopped posting afterwards as the genzedong people would dogpile on anything even slightly outside of their misguided hivemind ideas. It killed off entire communities on lemmy.ml for sure.
Overall it was probably a net negative in user numbers as a lot of the genzedong people also seem to have stopped coming to Lemmygrad after a short while.
I really like Lemmy but it is true that it does have some issues attracting active contributors or commentators. I think some of this might be because it’s a little more explicitly political as a project. Some of it is because it’s newer I think. Some of it is because less people use stuff like reddit to begin with, so it’s kind of a niche audience.
There’s been issues with troll brigading in the past which I think makes the community a little more insular by default.