this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Yes. Best thing we can do is be ready (from a tech perspective) and welcoming (from a human perspective). They'll come or they won't.
Compared to summer, Lemmy now has thousands more users, hundreds of active communities (no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects), actual made-on-lemmy content in a bunch of places, and a bunch of apps that mostly have the bugs worked out. It's probably fair more appealing now to join than it was in summer.
We still have roadblocks: general confusion about federation (the email analogy seems to be working best), difficulty properly explaining how to sign up, a harder time finding communities, and it's impossible to migrate between instances without starting fresh.
I'm always saddened by how not-active some of those subjects are. For example: Even many large games struggle to have dedicated, active communities on Lemmy (assuming I'm not terrible at finding them, which is sadly also possible). Even some of the largest games have only completely dead communities here. A huge draw of Reddit for me was to be able to talk about the games I play with other people who do too. And mostly, the games I'd love to talk about aren't in the top 10 most played games list.
Now I could try to (re)vitalize those communities I would love to see around, and I have done so shortly after the exodus (on my previous account that died with the instance it was on). However, there's only so much talking into the void I can do until it gets boring.
I also feel like that might be a big issue for people coming over. After I manage to explain to my friends how federation works, they ask me to help them find the [topic of their interest] community, and all I can show them is a community with 10 threads, all over 3 months old and with 0 comments. Sadly it shouldn't surprise anyone they're not sticking around after that.
I think part of the problem is that we migrants decided that each reddit community also needed a corresponding lemmy community right out of the gate. For example, on reddit, there is r/hockey, then there's a sub for each individual team. However on lemmy, the team subs are dead due to insufficient traffic, and stay dead due to the exact chicken-and-egg problem you describe. The solution is to congregate in a larger community instead, where traffic is higher, even if you're posting about your relatively popular game. So as a Winnipeg Jets fan, I should post in the lemmy hockey community and not the Jets community. Likewise, if you want more chatter about Cyberpunk2077, post in the general gaming community. It works reasonably well for now, and if the signal to noise ratio ever gets bad in the larger community, then you can split off into specialty topics.
Ironically, reddit also went through this exact process 10-12 years ago. r/science became too noisy, so people ended up in r/physics and r/chemistry, and r/askscience and such. We need to start with communities with larger scope until they're active enough to split.
At this very moment I'm looking for a discussion on sci fi oriented table top rpgs. On reddit, there is dedicated discussion forums for a few of them. Here, I'll post to [email protected] because there's more people there. Off I go!
Exactly.
Communities need to be more generic until a specialisation becomes too much of the content, then a specific community should be started.
Basically this is similar to my "organicness" argument. Reddit grew over many years and these niche subs got created as they were needed, not all at once. On Lemmy and the Fediverse in general, there will be another layer of organic growth and organisation with regards to federation, where instances will clump into "neighbourhoods" that users can choose.
I feel like in some big game communities (like BG3) it looks deader than it should but if you post something you actually get quite a few replies. People are there it’s just that not everyone feels like making a new post.
Though I agree that concentrating on more generic communities for now is a good solution
User migration is now possible in Lemmy 0.19:
Source: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-12-15_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.0_-_Instance_blocking,_Scaled_sort,_and_Federation_Queue
Oh hey, I guess I learned something today :)
0.19 has been a real improvement in many ways. I'm a huge fan of the Scaled sort -- it helps the niche community content to surface.
Do you use an app or the website for this feature?
Scaled sort? Both. The app needs to support 0.19 though.
I tested Sync and Boost but can't find it. Which app do you use where this already works?
I'm on iOS. I use Voyager and Mlem and both have it.
All those toxic Redditors coming here... I hope we can manage to significantly beef up the mod tools before then.
I still feel like if we want to grow faster organically we need to natively support more "discovery functions". Just things that you can toggle off like for example a recommendation screen and stuff. The algorithm for it we can make and adapt open source so no one is scared we collect data.
We're running into the Linux Vs Windows problem, where you can technically do more stuff and have more control over you account on Lemmy, but you need to be familiar with the fediverse before joining, just to Unterstand how to use Lemmy. That's a big problem for any potential new user.
Scaled filter in 19.X helps with that
I find Kbin's Collections feature a good fix for federation confusion. Honestly I think it should be the default type of view when browsing communities, you need to abstract the average user from federation as much as possible and leave browsing by instance as an advance option for those that want to engage with federation in detail
Confusion about federation is not helped by federation not working recently due to a few notable Lemmy bugs (which are now fixed). Hopefully anyone new coming over doesn't encounter any new major bugs.