To be fair, we’ve got two committed users modding and submitting regularly now with a smattering of semi-regular post contributors and a good number of commenters.
Your point stands though, most of the comparable niche communities on reddit are far larger at least in user count.
It’s just the 90-9-1 rule in effect. We’re only at just under 60k MAUs. It’s a great number and makes for decent activity in the larger subs but if 1% of those are regular posters that’s… 600. That’s not really enough to spread across niche interests, so it figures that most of them lack active subs.
Reddit shares that but fair has nothing to do with it: people are grandfathered into existing Reddit subs and for them to switch, they want it to be painless. Also, niche subs with fantastic mods are particularly where Reddit’s toxicity problem is least apparent, as compared to coming to Lemmy and browsing by All. Otherwise new visitors go back to Reddit and complain in e.g. r/RedditAlternatives about what meanies we have over here… which is a true statement, as Lemmy was literally created by the same people who were kicked out of Reddit for being too toxic, and created this Reddit 2.0 (but decentralized, making it worthwhile).
Being told that e.g. having a bank account makes them equivalent to supporting genocide does NOT endear people to us. Take a look at Lemmy.ml, and/or hexbear.net, if you don’t believe me - tbf there were far more of such BoTh SiDeS sAmE posts back prior to the USA election, and pretty much every election in a Western nation, but they still persist today. We are a Nazi bar here, by federating that content everywhere. Also, the last time I checked out that join-lemmy website, it literally gave me the advice to join… wait for it… Hexbear.net, making even defederation from such instances as Lemmy.world insufficient so long as people are being told to come here via that website.
People do not enjoy being made fun of - should they though? - hence Lemmy will never gain a mainstream audience of non-technical users from the primarily centrist or even right-leaning userbases of Reddit or X/Twitter. We can be okay with that, or do something about it, but either way those are the options, not the middle ground of just hoping that people will ignore the trolling that is far too often allowed here.
I think having hexbear and .ml is a good thing, because those users are on those servers. They can be blocked (and properly on piefed :) ), so people who want to interact with them can, and those who don’t, don’t have to.
To be fair, we’ve got two committed users modding and submitting regularly now with a smattering of semi-regular post contributors and a good number of commenters.
Your point stands though, most of the comparable niche communities on reddit are far larger at least in user count.
It’s just the 90-9-1 rule in effect. We’re only at just under 60k MAUs. It’s a great number and makes for decent activity in the larger subs but if 1% of those are regular posters that’s… 600. That’s not really enough to spread across niche interests, so it figures that most of them lack active subs.
Plus there’s a bit of a toxicity problem.
Reddit shares that but fair has nothing to do with it: people are grandfathered into existing Reddit subs and for them to switch, they want it to be painless. Also, niche subs with fantastic mods are particularly where Reddit’s toxicity problem is least apparent, as compared to coming to Lemmy and browsing by All. Otherwise new visitors go back to Reddit and complain in e.g. r/RedditAlternatives about what meanies we have over here… which is a true statement, as Lemmy was literally created by the same people who were kicked out of Reddit for being too toxic, and created this Reddit 2.0 (but decentralized, making it worthwhile).
Being told that e.g. having a bank account makes them equivalent to supporting genocide does NOT endear people to us. Take a look at Lemmy.ml, and/or hexbear.net, if you don’t believe me - tbf there were far more of such BoTh SiDeS sAmE posts back prior to the USA election, and pretty much every election in a Western nation, but they still persist today. We are a Nazi bar here, by federating that content everywhere. Also, the last time I checked out that join-lemmy website, it literally gave me the advice to join… wait for it… Hexbear.net, making even defederation from such instances as Lemmy.world insufficient so long as people are being told to come here via that website.
People do not enjoy being made fun of - should they though? - hence Lemmy will never gain a mainstream audience of non-technical users from the primarily centrist or even right-leaning userbases of Reddit or X/Twitter. We can be okay with that, or do something about it, but either way those are the options, not the middle ground of just hoping that people will ignore the trolling that is far too often allowed here.
I think having hexbear and .ml is a good thing, because those users are on those servers. They can be blocked (and properly on piefed :) ), so people who want to interact with them can, and those who don’t, don’t have to.