I think searching just for redditors is too limiting honestly even if the plan is growth, i do agree with you that the main goal should be growing community in the diferent instances because to me thats the only way to have a lasting one

Tldr: trying to make this platform attractive for other people, so that we can reach 100k monthly active users, isn’t the same as wanting it to be current Reddit, and is compatible with integrity.

Hello,

First of all, thank you for the post, I guess it will have a lot of interesting comments (there are already a few).

For the context, and if people are interested, here is the thread: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46379504/19337654

he was chasing Redditors.

Interesting that you thought that. My objective isn’t definitely to chase current Redditors, but just to have a more diverse crowd. I have friends, they are nice people, it would be nice to have them around. Would they ever consider joining Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed in their current state? Definitely not, and one of the main issues is the lack of activity, and community fragmentation.

(There are others, such as the more or less intuitive interface, but mobile apps like Voyager kind of solved that).

People don’t like to shout into the void. Posters definitely not (https://lemmy.zip/post/14347368), and even lurkers are just going to leave if everything they see are three communities on the same topic, each one with 3 posts and no comments.

I would also like to point out that Reddit used to be everything described in the OP. It was a niche place for tech enthusiasts. But it grew out of that phase, and it was “the best” when all hobbies started to move from their isolated forums to Reddit. You could discover things every day, artists, scientific discoveries, history facts, all in the same place.

This is what I would like Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed to become. But for that, you there needs to be more people. Better moderation tools. Smaller number of communities, with less strict rules (if the first post people do somewhere gets removed because they have to go to a niche community on the same topic which seems much less active, they’ll just leave and never come back).

We’ve seen yesterday !WomensStuff@lazysoci.al move to !womensstuff@piefed.blahaj.zone , as Piefed offers additional moderation tools (https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/). There’s some hope, but that also shows that as a platform, we aren’t all perfect. Sure, Reddit is crap, but let’s not ignore that we have our own flaws.

There is a whole range of people who are not tech enthusiast enough for current Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed, but who would still be valuable people to have here. There’s a spectrum between niche and mass adoption, and we could reach 100k monthly active users that it would still pretty much be the same. People who were around in 2023 when everybody moved from Lemmy to here know what is was like to have 65k monthly active users. A bit more active than today, but not that much.

That’s pretty much it, see you in the comments.

Some people on Lemmy say it’s a ghost town too. If you want niche content, we don’t have it. I’m not going back, but I do miss it. I would love to be able to post a random technical question and get a good variety of responses, and you can here, but only for certain subjects.

It’s the difference between what a small town (albeit one with a university) and a large city can support.

I don’t want this place to become Reddit, though with the non commercial aspect I don’t think it would be, it would be good if we could attract some of Reddits better posters though. So I support what Blaze is doing both for selfish reasons and because I think people deserve better than corporate monopolies.

It seems like federation largely allows you both to have it your own way. Some instances are growth focused and others are culture focused (beehaw comes to mind).

My goal is to chip in where I can to make Lemmy a nice place. Eventually there will be another exodus of corpo socials and we will see a sudden influx.

So for my peace of mind, I stick to strongly moderated instances

That’s what I’m doing with mine, and holy crap is it a chore. Like, my mental health is in the gutter just trying to keep a vibe here that’s “general” while not over-modding the place to a desert. I am looking for secondary/backup admins, so if that’s the kind of environment you want to help foster, hit me up.

I do strongly feel like we need to chase some outside demographics. Things are getting a bit stale here, and we need some new blood and less, uh, passionate viewpoints.

Cases in point that I feel are detrimental to the success of the Fediverse:

• Half or more of the demographic here being armchair activists for every-freaking-thing. It might be less than half (probably so), but they’re so loud and persistent, it drowns out everything else.

• The absolutists who see the world only in black and white and paint things with a brush the size of Australia. The lack of nuance in opinions here is staggering. Everything is “all or nothing, perfect or bust, good is the arch enemy of perfect, etc” here, and that is simply not how the world works.

• The people who’s only response to literally anything in the news being “Guillotines! Luigi! Violence violence violence!”

• The people who are clearly only here because they’ve been banned and/or are otherwise too toxic to be platformed anywhere else. Like you said, I’m here because I want to be here, I want to be part of something better, and not because I was banned or otherwise asked to leave any other platform. Two years in, I cannot say this place is “better” just differently bad.

• The people who think they can say anything they want here because it’s not “corpo social media”, so anything goes.

  • And when they’re appropriately modded, they go straight to YPTB, play the victim, and incessantly whine how they’re so censored and this place is “just like Reddit”. 🙄

• The revolving door of trolls owing to the platform’s distributed nature. It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, and yes, I mix my metaphors.

Given all that ☝️ and more that I didn’t call out specifically, we definitely need to attract some new blood here, at least to thin out the above; we need people engaging on topics other than whatever hot-button issue is flooding the front page.

This article is about Bluesky, and say what you will about Mark Cuban, but he’s not wrong in this and it also applies fully to Lemmy/Piefed/et al. The amount of dog-piling that any comment that even remotely goes against the groupthink here is insane; even the slightest disagreement to an absolutist statement gets brigaded to hell and back with accusations of “bootlicker” thrown around like that’s some kind of universal checkmate move.

That’s not engagement, and it’s certainly not healthy.

My interest in this platform has been steadily declining because it’s the same old rage/soapboxes/knee-jerk reactions. I can’t imagine trying to get new people to come here right now let alone stick around. I try to post non-political, non-hot-button stuff as often as time allows, and I know others do too, but I dunno. Seems there’s too many people here who just want to rage and virtue signal and not enough who actually want to just…be people.

I think we would agree on quite a few points. I steer away from any polemical content, politics, memes and stuff like that.

I have a perfectly curated timeline which is the perfect mix of news, entertainment, enlightenment and conversation.

• Perfection is rarely a good thing and more often than not risks leading to living into an echo chamber. I like my feed as it is, including the occasional… what I would call turd content. Some troll or some plain braindead post. Why? Because it’s rare and because once in a while it won’t be a turd. It will be a surprising take on something, something that could challenge my own certainties.
• Perfection is also very subjective. Yours may not be mine. Who will decide which one should prevail if not a vote from all participants? Even more so when the tool is allowing anyone to filter content as much as they fancy no matter what the community decided to vote for.

I want Lemmy to remain Lemmy.

The only things ‘remaining’ are memories (sweet as well as bad ones), and dead things that have ceased to exist.

Here again, I would not trust myself if I realized I wanted for anything/anyone I care about to not change anymore. I’ve been living with my spouse for almost 30 years and counting and we’ve both changed a lot. That’s to be expected, that’s being alive. One only stop changing the instant one dies.

I don’t want Lemmy to sell its soul

Lemmy has no soul. It’s a tool. Like the hammer or the screwdriver in my toolbox, like that fountain pen on my desk.

to attract the very people I don’t want to be around.

Those very people you don’t want, exactly. That’s your right to not want to see them but I’d rather keep the hand on who I want and want not to see, thx ;)

I’m just saying we have to grow and improve while holding on to our values and having some integrity about it.

My values are not about deciding who we should (not) appeal to. It’s about considering how a tool (or a place) could be better in order to attract more users while not allowing anyone to take away any control from each user—so, every single one of us can make Lemmy work like they want.

I don’t give a crap if people want to eat politics or memes all day long or whatever else I would consider an incredibly stupid waste of my time or toxic to my soul. I don’t mind provided I can easily ignore them… which Lemmy allows me to already. My feed feels great and it’s never a source of stress when I open it. And the occasional shit post I may stumble upon is, well, just that: an accident. Accidents are bound to happen, right ;)

So, if appealing to more users helps attracting more devs I’m all for it in order to correct/improve what needs to be in Lemmy.

Imho, what’s needed is not to keep ‘the bad’ people outside of ‘our’ little paradise. It’s to make sure Lemmy can’t ever be hijacked or taken hostage by anyone or any group of persons and be transformed into something we would not like and we could not transform back. That’s why a few years ago I switched to GNU/Linux (from macOS) and that’s why I will not switch back no matter how many things I don’t like under GNU/Linux and its community: I can always find a workaround and that’s priceless.

edit: typos.

I think both growth and identity/integrity are essential, should be carefully balanced, and that in the current moment growth is slightly more important. Specially because identity is easier to preserve, due to the fragmented nature of the Lemmy/MBin/PieFed verse.

Lemmy needs much more MAUs that the current sub 50K for niche communities to function.

The Threadiverse having millions of MAUs doesn’t mean it has to be like reddit. It very much and can should be its own thing.

It’s a well-known problem. And mixed with finding our own identity. Do we want to be a Reddit clone? Do we want to be a different thing altogether, but then we’re not an “Reddit alternative” for people looking for that? In my humble opinion it’s silly to do a 1:1 clone of Reddit. Who wants that? I mean Reddit is there… Unless you want something different, just sign up on Reddit.

Also the influx of users shifts things. Of course people coming from Reddit are looking for an alternative. And they also bring their behaviour, way of talking… Which shifts this place. And it has. I think we discussed this after the 2023 Spez API controversy and the single largest wave of new users. It’s been the same thing on Mastodon when they first had a distinct atmosphere and every wave of Twitter exiles changed the atmosphere on the platform. Some people liked it, some didn’t.

I think the user amount is a different story though. I hear that argument a lot… We’ll grow organically. We don’t have advertisers, so we don’t need growth… But is it really that easy? Wouldn’t it show how attractive and nice we are if people wanted to come here and spend their time on Lemmy? Aren’t we set up to handle ten times more users? And if not, why? Should we change the mechanics of the place so we are?

My personal opinion is, the stagnation of users means we’re likely just not a very attractive place. And we’re just hanging around. I’d love it if people were to envy us for the nice place, and they wanted in, too. But it’s not like that.

But that doesn’t mean we need to focus on growth. In my opinion it means we need a better atmosphere here. Good content and not just the news (which you can get from any other social media site). Good tools and moderation and such things. But I’m not seeing much change regarding that. And that could be correlated to the user numbers.

And sometimes Lemmy is a ghost town. I wish I could talk to people about microcontrollers, electronics and whatever here. But it’s not a lot of people here who are interested, so I can’t get many discussions going. Instead, there’s 500 people posting the global news on politics. But that’s not quality content or what I’m interested in. So I think we definitely need to grow, or there’s just not any meaningful conversation to be had in interesting (to me) topics.

(So to summarize: I think user growth mainly isn’t the issue we need to tackle, it’s a symptom.)

Edit: And that also means I don’t want us to “keep” our integrity or identity. Frankly speaking, I don’t think it is very good as is. It’s not bad either. But I believe we could do way better. So go ahead and change it, but towards something better / more positive / whatever.

I still visit Reddit for certain subreddits because the threadiverse simply don’t have enough participants.

With threadiverse being decentralised, I don’t think you need to worry about the “cost of growth”. Even if part of it becomes like Reddit, you can always find/start an instance with a small-town vibe.

One thing I really don’t want Lemmy to be is Reddit. I engage on here far more than I ever did on Reddit.

That’s my feeling.

Lemmy does not stand a chance to be anything other than a link dump.

This is because it was built as a clone of Reddit.

Nothing here genuinely promotes intellectual dialogue or allowing communities to be controlled in a way that keeps shit heads out or keeps their voice down.