…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.

  • HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com
    0·
    3 months ago

    Im looking at it from a whole fediverse perspective but its large enough as is to be enjoyable. If it gets larger fine, if not fine. I just want it to develop to have as much freedom as possible and give as much control as possible to the individual for their experience.

  • Chozo@fedia.io
    0·
    3 months ago

    I just miss there being more variance in the voices I see in the comments. On Reddit, the size made it so that you were pretty much always seeing new commenters, and seeing a lot of different discussions. But here, I mostly see the same ~50 regulars across all the communities I subscribe to, and almost all the same discussions being had.

    Overall I still prefer it here, but more users and more active communities would be nice, too.

  • gerryflap@feddit.nl
    0·
    3 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
      0·
      3 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.

  • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
    0·
    3 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

  • GreenSofaBed@lemmy.zip
    0·
    3 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.

    • baatliwala@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

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

        • baatliwala@lemmy.world
          0·
          3 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
      0·
      3 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.

    • Throw_away_migrator@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 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.

  • Ballistic_86@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 months ago

    I’d really like to see more posts come through, without the dip into the “copy Reddit posts” kind of thing. When I open Reddit, I can read 100 posts of varying topics, refresh an hour later and have a lot of new posts to ingest. Lemmy doesn’t have that much activity, so I end up looking at a very similar “popular” feed this morning, this afternoon, this evening. And 1/4 of those posts will also be in my feed again the next day.

    • graphene@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Use an rss feed reader, it prevents duplicates, but it might be annoying to use if you interact with post a lot

  • Caveman@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 months ago

    I want more small communities with people who really like specific things. For example if you want to buy a robot vacuum going to a community about it is very nice to read up on what people find important and maybe issues with a particular model. Even the memes sometimes have great info (think something like a popular vacuum that doesn’t pick up anything with “At least you tried” or spongebob meme pointing at stuff of increasing sizes referencing areas the vacuum missed)

    • Caveman@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

      Example meme I just created for robo vacs which I’d like to see in the some robovac community.

  • ComradeKhoumrag@infosec.pub
    0·
    3 months ago

    One day, this too will turn to shit. But when that day comes, people will just drift to different instances. Not including federation and niche communities, this is functionally equivalent to reddit for me

    • auzy@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

      In my case…

      I just left a instance (which rhymes with seesaw) because one of the admins accused me of “starting a fight” and “not being nice” because I didn’t agree with an article that was posted.

      It was however perfectly acceptable for someone to instantly accuse me of wanting to kill an entire group of people and of being a bad person (I won’t be specific, but it was a very clear exaggeration and the comment was overlooked by the admin). But, I wasn’t being “nice” because I calmly explained my perspective on the lawsuit the article was about (and apparently having a difference of opinion is considered “fighting” lol). And honestly, my opinion wasn’t extreme in any capacity either (in fact, it half agreed with them)…

      And it was such a pity because the other admins there seem so cool, and I loved the idea of the instance (I actually donated originally)

      So, yep, I can definitely agree, it’s so easy to move around.

      So far, I’ve actually found the people on other instances to be really cool actually (which I wasn’t expecting, because my original instance portrayed the rest of Lemmy as a bit of a cesspool at times honestly)

  • RandomVideos@programming.dev
    0·
    3 months ago

    When i was using reddit, my feed was 90% cats and i was subscribed to hundreds of cat subreddits

    Lemmy doesnt have enough cats

  • Panda@lemmy.today
    0·
    3 months ago

    I don’t think it’s the size but more the number of communities and how active they are. So if there are more people here it hopefully means there will be more active users as well. And perhaps more niche communities.