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Lemmy Just Broke the 54k MAU Record Set During the 2023 API Exodus! (lemmy.ca)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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"600 servers" "55.1k monthly active users"
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[–] 127 points 2 years ago (20 children)

Help retain users by discussing more than just politics

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  • [–] 75 points 2 years ago (12 children)

    For real we need more uplifting subs, my feed is just Musk and Trump diarrhea.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    I think this is an artifact of what's oddly the biggest weakness of the fediverse: decentralization.

    When I used reddit back pre-api stuff, my front page was 100% niche subs I'd subscribed to, but those niches have trouble le growing here because there's so many instances.

    I was super active in the scuba subreddit. Here on Lemmy, there's several scuba groups that tried to form, but none of them stuck because they were all on different instances instead of one central location where everyone could work together to make the community.

    As a result, most of us haven't been filtering out 99% of Lemmy because the 1% where we'd be active doesn't exist. It's like joining reddit and having your frontpage be /r/all. It's a shitty experience that g9ves a lot of weight to political posts.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago

    I don't think the subs failed to get off the ground because of federation, I think they did because they didn't have a dedicated person tirelessly filling them with posts and single-handedly carrying them. Because that's still where we are population wise. 50k+ MAUs is very nice, but not nearly enough for niche subs to be self-sustaining. Look at any small but active Lemmy sub right now and it's often a single person doing 90% of the posting. The only real way to get a new sub going is to be that person.

    At least now we have stuff like Lemmy Federate and places like !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca that are both fairly active, so getting a new sub off the ground should be much easier than two years ago.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    It doesn't matter almost at all which instance a community is on. People could just unite the different scuba groups into one. Basically any they see fit. I'm not sure the decentralization really causes this effect. Or does it make it too difficult to find communities? I've been plenty able to find communities from various instances, at least.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    If people have to follow breadcrumbs to find which of the dozen groups is active, if any, very few people are going to join.

    On reddit, if you wanted to find a sub for airbrushing, you would type in /r/airbrush. That was it.

    On Lemmy, there's no central location for communities, but even worse is that most of the big instances WILL have a community with that name - it'll just be a dead community that someone started but never took off, so there's a bunch of false leads.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    You aren't wrong with that :)

    The problem exists, although its scale isn't as big as it first seems. On Lemmy you can write "Airbrush" and join the biggest of the communities. It's quite visible that this is what is happening in several communities. One starts growing and then that's what people choose to join, etc.

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  • [–] 32 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Help retain users by discussing more than just politics

    One of the things I feel like Lemmy is still missing or is under developed is the niche hobbyist and tech help communities. I'm referring to places users can go to ask questions and start to build up a knowledge base of sorts that people will find and reference. Kind of like how if you want to actually find useful information for something, you used to add "Reddit" to every search to get meaningful results. Hopefully, that can become Lemmy. Assuming of course search engines even index Lemmy well enough

    One way to start could be just having people post small tutorials or solutions for popular problems or topics in respective communities. I know the internet has changed a lot but "back in the old days" that was a great way to get engagement going at least on tech forums.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    search engines hardly index lemmy unfortunately. Probably due to having too much repeated content on different URLs.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Probably due to having too much repeated content on different URLs.

    It seems like its gotten better in the last 2 years as I can at least get lemmy results now, and popular instances show up more but yea, still not great.

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