Theres a lot of websites that claim to track the fediverse in its totality. But the numbers are all over the place.

So...hows the Fedi vibe lately?

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[–] 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Speaking for Lemmy, I feel like political and meme communities are alive and well, but smaller specialized niche communities still haven’t been able to get a foothold.

The collective user base is pretty small, so only the broader interest communities get engagement and or survive c/all.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 days ago

    Yeah, I've been wondering about this lately. I'm starting to think that the platform itself requires too much tech literacy to use and understand to ever be appealing to anyone other than highly tech-literate individuals. While I'd like to believe there's enough of us out there to build rhobust communities around non-tech topics if this is true, I'm starting to worry that there just aren't.

    For all it's flaws, Reddit was always very simple to understand and interact with, and it seems like the fediverse is just inherently more complex. Even if that's not true, it's going to FEEL true to anybody new since virtually all the active communities are peopled by the tech-literacy 1%

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    With the smaller and more specialised communities, often if you have a question or post something you do get engagement, there are people interested in them but often just not much volume there

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Depends on the topic.

    Since traffic is low, most eyeballs come from feeds like /all, and that can be good for some niche communities and bad for others.

    For example, I’ve seen certain software / hardware user group communities really struggle. Weird example - if people try to start user groups or developer communities for Microsoft or Apple products, their questions and or news posts can get downvoted and shredded with unconstructive comments. Basically, all of those communities get their new posts screened by a bunch of OSS evangelist, because that’s most of us here. Those posts get murdered in the crib.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    Yeah, people (including me at the time of APIpocalypse) thought a lift and shift of many communities from reddit made sense, when what we needed was general communities that would eventually poop out niche ones when their posts started to become distracting in the general community's feed.

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