Fediverse memes

Be the change that you want to see

A social network needs enough users to actually function. In the early days, Lemmy/kbin/associates were too quiet to be appealing, so there was a constant push to bring in new users. As this is a Reddit clone social network, inevitably that means hoping that Reddit users will come across.

I would argue that Lemmy et al is already at a high enough number of active users that there's a basic critical mass; that there's enough activity here such that a new user would find plenty to keep them engaged. It could certainly stand to be much bigger still, but the pressure to grow is much less intense.

There's a formula I'm confident we could come up with that focuses on the amount of users you have, how shitty your userbase is and how fresh/niche/true your content is.

Lemmy is on one end, decent userbase, not so fresh, mid content. Reddit is massive, shitty and riddled with bad actors and poor information but offers more niche and fresh content

I only have Lemmy but I consume way less social media since that's all I have... Which is a good thing.

I don't mind the fact that Lemmy changes at a slower pace. Gives me less to scroll through

I ditched Reddit 2 years ago and haven't been back. This is a self-solving problem: as more people use and contribute, there will be more content and engagement.

But as a heavy user of Lemmy (and previously of Reddit), there's things you can do. Chief among them is switching from the "Active" list to "Hot" when you want to see new stuff. I pretty much never run out of content, and that's without even dipping into "New"...

Reddit is people reposting stuff from Twitter, so what you are saying is that we need to repost more stuff from Twitter.

Different strokes for different folks, as they say. That's precisely one of the things that I value most in social media— exposure to people and ideas outside of my day-to-day experience. I don't understand the femcel memes, or c/ich_iel, for example, but that's what makes them so fascinating. I was thinking of leaving Reddit even before the API fiasco, because the feed changed daily while not changing at all. I didn't find it valuable to see the same breaking news story posted to 15 different subreddits, nor the same "Men of Reddit: Do you pee through the underwear flap, or over the waistband?" question posted (literally! I watched and counted one day!) every 5 minutes. I didn't replace Reddit with Lemmy, I just stopped using the former when Apollo stopped working. Lemmy drew me in over the course of a couple of months. It's quiet, but you can have conversations instead of shouting into the void.

For me, Lemmy is far more successful.

The problem with Lemmy is that the demographic that uses it is too specific: nerdy, atheist, college educated (usually in computers) Gen X and early Millennial left-wing political hobbyists.

Like, there's a reason the one of the only specific media franchises that can sustain an active community here is Star Trek.

Sorting by top day and hiding read posts gives me more than enough "fresh content." If you're craving more, maybe that's just the Reddit addiction.

I find there is new content but so often a lot of it is US politics based. Some other stuff does exist but its hard to filter out the stuff I don't care about at times.

Sure I can subscribe to other communities, but finding them can be difficult and searching for all is swamped by Trump and Musk.

Nah, Reddit front pages didn't few fresh since 2021 for me, and recently it became worse by the bots posting the same post i saw 5-10 days early again.

terminally online nerds

I am offended and in agreement

Decentralized control is probably the biggest asset we have to fight back against these issues. Each instance host has motivation to keep their community in the best shape possible, for users and visitors.

If one instance is having struggles, you can migrate to another - and instance hosts could share tactics and information about the process of management.

I still wouldn't mind 100k monthly active users, or even 75k.

That should mean one additional active poster on all the community where I'm alone, and that would be cool

I heard a guy at a restaurant the other day talking about someone who was "reddit famous". His party had no context for what that meant. I felt bad for that guy

That’s the beauty of it - it doesn’t matter, since it’s all the Threadiverse. Lemmy, Piefed, mbin, whatever else may come along. As long as they all use ActivityPub, they’re all interoperable, and people can choose whichever one suits them best. Afaik, though, Lemmy is still far and away the most popular right now

And here's a problem. Even I, pretty tech savvy user, can't keep up with all this. I look away for a moment, and you'all on a new meta already, all the old servers are bad now and all the cool kids on a new system already. I can't imagine anyone with an advanced grass-touching ability being able to keep up with all this shit.

most posts on the piefed feed are posted by lemmings so nahh

but we can be successful collectively ;)

...same-same