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Question to the ones that fully left Reddit
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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This comment seems very related to the specific content you are looking for. Lemmy is a good place for tech information but that’s about it. Cooking, home improvement, personal finance, DIY, crafting etc don’t have homes on here with many active users, and especially not the amount of knowledgeable users that were on Reddit.
This all started because of an API change, so it would make sense that the predominant amount of users who migrated are more tech savvy.
!personalfinance@lemmy.ml people seem pretty knowledgeable, it's more that people don't ask that many questions.
!food@lemmy.world have been merging the othercooking communities recently so hopefully activity increases there
The second best time to create activity is now. I'm actually very fluent in US-based personal finance but no one has posted asking for help. I think there are a lot of communities that have a lot of subscribers and no activity - just waiting for someone that needs help.
I guess personal finance was a bad example; in the hour since I made my comment two people have replied about that but no one has really mentioned hobby style communities (the others i mentioned) which leads into the second main issue I see which is that Lemmy’s userbase is not a casual one.
Almost everyone one here can tell you what an API means, where as the vast majority of people who are doing Google searches with Reddit at the end probably can’t/don’t care about it. That’s leads to an over representation of the ‘smart communities’ like Linux, Technology and Personal Finance. Since there are many people migrating to Lemmy that are already interested in those topics, the expertise is a lot higher.
Meanwhile, I don’t think a lot of people who would frequent Reddit for cooking advice, home improvement questions mechanical questions and other topics like those made the switch so easily. And no matter how many times you post in this subs, it’s not going to bring people from Reddit who didn’t want to leave in the first place.
Plus, when it comes to people asking questions related to things they need to do in real life, they need an answer. I made a bunch of posts on some communities here about an issue in a new rental house and got no comments on it at all. I’m all for trying to get Lemmy bigger but I can’t do that at the expense of the things I need to do in my day to day life.
That's fair - obviously that will need time to grow but I'm not sure what we can do to foster it in the meantime. My personal guess is that getting users onto Lemmy through any means possible will help in all community directions. If Lemmy had 1 million users that were only here because of the technology community, you can count on a chunk of them being good at DIY or cooking also. The more humans that we have here, the more collective experience that we have as a whole.