…relative to Reddit’s size?

I see so many posts and comments voicing disappointment with Lemmy’s lack of massive expansion.

I too want to see Lemmy gain more users, but I do not want it to grow to Reddit’s size. If Reddit is the yardstick, I’d say that a population that large attracts a lot of negative behaviours; degeneration of discourse, amplification of echo chambers and hive mind behaviour, etc…

I started on Reddit in 2010 and found that by 2016 things were really bad in comparison. A fun and engaging site was experiencing an obvious devolution that persists to this day, accelerated by Spez’s enshittification of the platform. Obviously the fediverse insulates us from that occurring here but I think you get what I mean.

Do you you think Lemmy is too small? I don’t. I’ve been here since the great migration last year and have had a really good time. I see a lot of familiar names in the comments on a daily basis. It actually feels like a community here. I guess I just don’t understand the fixation on the size of Lemmy’s user base. Curious to hear your thoughts.

[EDIT] Thanks for all the responses, everyone! Lots of perspectives I hadn’t yet considered.

  • wirelesswire@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1981·
    4 months ago

    The smaller population overall isn’t a bad thing, but it can really be felt in smaller or niche communities. Reddit’s huge size is a plus in this regard, because chances you can find at least a semi-active community for just about any hobby or niche interest.

    • papalonian@lemmy.world
      48·
      4 months ago

      Yeah, I’d actually forgotten about it since I’ve been here for so long but the joke “there’s a sub for everything” is actually completely true and one of the things I miss, even if it’s an inactive community you can 80% of the time find a subreddit with a few dozen posts to check out. I used to just hit “random” until I found an interesting one. I feel like I’d cycle through all the communities on my instance in a couple of days.

      That being said I love the small feeling here compared to Reddit and if I had to choose between “small community with conversation” and “unlimited dopamine trickle tap” I’d rather it stay as it is

      • morrowind@lemmy.ml
        12·
        4 months ago

        The smaller subreddits are still good on reddit, as long as they have a good focus. They are effectively their own little communities

        • ExtraMedicated@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          4 months ago

          Yes. I never had too much trouble on reddit, but I only stuck to specific subreddits and stayed away fron news or politics.

        • andrewthe95th@lemmy.world
          3·
          4 months ago

          Yeah, my reddit account is exclusively for the communities around a couple mangas I read. As soon as the SpyxFamily and Akane-banashi communities here reach comparable levels, I will gladly jump ship.

  • gerryflap@feddit.nl
    711·
    4 months ago

    Because that’s what I’m missing. I like the apps, I like the site, but I need content. And not memes or politics, but specific niche topics. The nice thing about Reddit is that there’s more than enough content about basically anything. Non mainstream music (DnB, Hardstyle, Trance), games, hobbies. There are always hundreds ,if not thousands of people engaging. I don’t want a discussion with 3 other people, I want a large community that can actually provide me with a lot of new information and keeps itself going without any effort from my end.

    • Subtracty@lemmy.world
      6·
      4 months ago

      Agreed, the political posts are inevitable with a big election looming unless you filter a lot of subs you are stuck seeing the same ones. And lemmy doesn’t have enough content to turn over so you wind up seeing the same posts from 2 days ago with only 3 comments.

      I figure the best thing to do is comment on anything I can and try to engage more people. I was such a lurker on Reddit, but that’s not helpful here.

  • bstix@feddit.dk
    53·
    4 months ago

    Some years ago Reddit had such a large reach in the media space that you could be discussing something on there and news outlets would pick up on it. For a brief period it actually felt like a platform where ordinary people could get heard and influence the world outside of Reddit or at least sway opinions of other real users. The reason why it worked was the massive userbase. The high profile AMA’s drew quite the crowd. Those days are long gone. It’s been a long time I saw any serious news outlets report on what happens on Reddit. GameStop was probably the last big Reddit thing to make a dent on the outside world.

    I don’t want Lemmy to be that big, but it would be nice to know that if you make effort to write something that is important to you, that it gets read by more than two other people who already have the same opinion.

    • JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee
      2·
      4 months ago

      Late reply, but in English media articles, it’s still fairly common for me to see references to what people said on Reddit. AFAIK there are also still entertainment sites (“Caveman Circus” being one) that still regularly harvest expert or semi-expert takes found on Reddit in order to construct ‘best of’ articles.

      Though-- perhaps that activity is down somewhat, as you suggest.

  • GreenSofaBed@lemmy.zip
    47·
    4 months ago

    For example the Formula 1 live threads during a race has like 10 comments on Lemmy, while on Reddit it’s in the thousands. Just wish some communities were a bit more popular.

    • Throw_away_migrator@lemmy.world
      14·
      4 months ago

      Yes. For communities that on Reddit were small to medium size there was a critical mass of people to sustain large, lively threads, particularly during live events. Lemmy currently lacks that, outside of the letter tech, politics and meme communities. And for the smaller communities, activity can be almost non existent.

      Then the federated nature of Lemmy allows for duplicate communities on different instances. This is not inherently a bad thing, particularly for larger interest areas as it helps prevent a particular sub group from dominating discussion in an area. But fracturing of smaller communities can make just finding an active one more difficult. I know that this is a feature in many ways, but it does have tradeoffs that have to be acknowledged.

    • baatliwala@lemmy.world
      7·
      4 months ago

      Serious question, would having 100 comments every few seconds kill smaller instances? How well will the federation scale?

        • baatliwala@lemmy.world
          4·
          4 months ago

          Yeah, I just joined as a reddit refugee because lemmy.world looked appealing. Had no idea it would effectively become the “defacto” instance of lemmy. Would be nice if communities spread out more.

    • steeznson@lemmy.world
      6·
      4 months ago

      Sports are definitely an area where the sublemmies get less traffic. I quite enjoy posting on the rugby union sub but there are like 4 of us there.

  • jadelord@discuss.tchncs.de
    42·
    4 months ago

    The flagship communities are quite alive, but the niche communities have not really taken off. I am talking from both the absence of such communities, and my experience trying to migrate !fluidmechanics. The subreddit has around 10k humans (or bots).

  • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
    42·
    4 months ago

    Because there are only a handful of communities that have enough traffic to sustain a meaningful conversation.

    Even popular activities have low traffic, god forbid you want to participate in a community based around a niche activity.

    I love Lemmy and I’m not going back to reddit… But sometimes it feels like a desolate wasteland here.

  • morgunkorn@discuss.tchncs.de
    39·
    4 months ago

    It highly depends on what you’re here for. Some communities have gathered enough active members to expect a continuous influx of posts and comments.

    The strength that Reddit has built over the years is that many niche communities also thrived and turned into a rich repository of knowledge that was searchable. Lemmy isn’t there yet, if you’re into fishing, knitting, Japanese chess or sourdough baking.

    But it also doesn’t need to be a perfect drop in replacement for Reddit, it’s probably fine if it remains something different, slightly fringe and a friendly place that doesn’t require massive amount of servers and moderation staff.

  • Lanusensei87@lemmy.world
    371·
    4 months ago

    Well, for me, the site has very little to offer because I’m not into USA politics (I check on them, but that is not why I was on Reddit to begin with), and that is more or less the only topic with a self sustained community besides meme pages. So yes, I do want this place to grow, not a little, a lot.

  • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
    372·
    4 months ago

    it’s like 90% IT nerds here lol. whether you want growth or not depend on how okay you are with that. I love you guys but a lot of your hobbies bore me to shit and I want someone to talk to

  • adaveinthelife@lemmy.ca
    26·
    4 months ago

    I want all people to use Lemmy.

    I want us to stop the tribalism. What made reddit fail was the management, not the users.

    Yes some people suck, and if you ask me it’s most people, but diversity is powerful and without it we have no future.

  • rustyfish@lemmy.world
    24·
    4 months ago

    Like others already pointed out, it’s not about the size per se. It’s about the small odd communities of specific interest that we miss. These usually only thrive with numbers.

    Then again, I used Lemmy for over a year and didn’t get a single death threat. I went back to check my Reddit account and had two in my inbox, I didn’t use the site since the exodus. Soooooooo, yeah. You win some you loose some.

  • Plopp@lemmy.world
    24·
    4 months ago

    On Reddit I went to specific subreddits and things were bubbling there, on Lemmy I pretty much have to stay on All to get any active content. I really don’t want Lemmy to reach eternal September, but we definitely need much more activity and a much larger user base than we currently have.

    • RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works
      15·
      4 months ago

      Same here. On the upside, "All“ on Lemmy has a much higher quality than what Reddit had in the past years. I really enjoy my daily doomscroll on Lemmy.

  • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zipEnglish
    21·
    4 months ago

    As a mod of three niche Soulslike communities, one of which that probably has less than 10 active users at best, it’s really hard to put out quality content and keep a community alive all on your own. I had to resort to a bot filling two of the communities with regular posts so there is some semblance of life in the communities, but reception has been mixed so far and the engagement didn’t grow as much as I had hoped.

    Unfortunately, I don’t see any other way for these communities to be sustainable if like 95% of users on here are lurkers. Plus, I’m not the best fit for moderation and pumping out posts asking for engagement constantly since I’m a lurker at heart myself.

    ‘All’ is pretty good, though. It’s where I spend most my time on Lemmy.