this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Be patient.
Lemmy is still establishing itself as the goto replacement for Reddit. New communities are popping up all the time and more users will come.
I'm excited for it! I'm personally trying to build some of the really niche communities that were big before, like the tiny EarthBound one.
Thing is, though, is the site really growing? After most have just put up with Reddit's bullshit, I can't really find recent statistics of Lemmy's active user base. And the few results I could find just show it's being stagnant, or even shrinking. I could be wrong, though, if it is growing, even better!
fedidb.org is good.
We're still in the downturn from users who tried Lemmy, and then stopped using it. They are now dropping off the active usercount, causing it to go down.
Total usercount is still increasing, meaning new users are still finding their way here.
That's actually a much more likely situation, sinc all of these sites use the monthly active users of it's main metric, and it's been 2 months since Reddit shot itself in the foot.
Honestly, I was so close to not using Lemmy at all. It looked so alien to me, like is this really the next most popular community website to Reddit? But no matter how clunky and unintuitive it was, I was determined to make it work. After some good third party apps, I'm more than satisfied.
However, can't be said for everyone. It's clear most people made an account, had no idea what an "instance" was, and then just gave up. Lemmy should invest in making their main website easy to learn and get the hang of, and try to become more popular, accessible, and branch out. Some might say how small it is gives it charm, but undeniably more people (maybe not on one instance) is better.
What this first wave has done is moved over a lot of early adopters, those types of people overlap with innovators.
Lemmy improved massively during the wave, and we are now getting great apps.
I for one will push for making signing up for an account in Thunder possible, so we can build better UX around joining Lemmy.
Lemmy itself has also seen a big jump in quality. There is now Photon, an alternative frontend that's a lot slicker, and can be installed by instances to replace the current webUI.
The next time something triggers people to go look for something else, Lemmy will be looking a lot more ready.
Have a look at [email protected]
Communities are growing
Growing is not linear, particular not when competing with a larger alternative.
What basically needs to happen is that Reddit needs to fuck up a couple of more times. Some smaller stuff will net some users, largest stuff, many. After a while critical mass has been reached and itβll be easier to grown naturally.
Well, thatβs at least what I think needs to happen. Iβm fully confident Reddit will fuck up as well. Though, this is a marathon, not a sprint.