When I first joined, I hopped around instances and tried out a bunch. But eventually I settled on this one and I haven’t logged in to any other account in a while. I probably count as like 5 inactive users. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a lot of that.

Posts are going up pretty steady, that matters more.

Honestly, the main problem for popularity’s sake is the un-diverse userbase.

It’s a bunch of techy redditors, the same way that many other services that splinter off from reddit are. Almost all the communities are literal clones of reddit ones. So for someone who wants a similar style of place and doesn’t have a hatred of reddit corporate built-in, why would they not go to reddit, which has the same kind of userbase but with 100x the users?

Honestly, other than “Open Source Master Race!!!111!!!111”, there isn’t any reason, especially not one that the average person will care about.

Another one, and I fucking HATE saying this, not enough zoomers dragging their friends along. This place feels like a place for the 30-something instead of the 20-something. Which isn’t bad, of course, but in terms of network effect power it is, because peer pressure is huge for social media.

But, separate from all that, do we actually want it to be that kind of popular? Maybe we should stay under the radar for the most part. Keep it from becoming stale and condescending like lots of Redditors can be. Keep the advertisers from sinking claws in. Maybe that’ll be better for the site as a whole than needing ads to support a service 100x the size.

It’s essentially a brand new platform. A tiny dip a month after the initial boom is far from “losing users” and is not indicative of trends. I don’t understand why everyone is so obsessed with growing Lemmy as fast as possible.

The biggest issue I have with lemmy isn’t even about anything but meme communities being tiny. It’s that I don’t have a way to find the tiny ones that do exist so I can’t join them. I don’t know how to look for anything, and when I just use the search built into sync the lemmy’s that do pop up are unclear as fuck to me

Meh, if it drops it drops. I’ll never have the relationship to social media I used to, because I don’t want it anymore. If Lemmy can give me a few posts a day of things I might not normally see, that’s enough for me. It doesn’t need to be the next Reddit or whatever. After quitting Reddit I’m getting back into things I haven’t done in years. I don’t need that again.

For the last time, there is no need. We are large enough. 400,000 people is a large town or small city. Remember:

1. There are no investors to please

2. No stock holders to appease

3. No CEO to bootlick

4. No ads to chase

5. No e-peen to contest

We are free at last. Free your mind from the tail chase of corporate controlled social media.

Stop advertising the site as a place to go when you get banned from reddit for being too insufferable even for them.

Trying to make a place popular for the sake of popularity is putting the cart before the horse, and will always be a losing battle.

Make your Lemmy instance a place worth spending time. Don’t worry about user counts or popularity.

How can we make it more popular?

By not doing the things that corporations do to make things popular. Do we even need Lemmy to be popular? I think we concentrate on trying to keep the Fediverse and Lemmy user focused and privacy friendly and people will naturally come over as they get burnt on the ever increasingly enshitified corporate data-theft sites. We need to be something different than the big sites. A breath of fresh air. I think people will be OK with putting up with a few quirks to escape those toxic environments. I think Lemmy is progressing just fine and I’m enjoying it.

Lemmy got a HUGE influx of users from the Reddit fiasco. Of course, there was going to be a pull back.

What is going to determine if Lemmy becomes popular is if it has reached critical mass to start growing organically on its own.

as a recent refuge myself. Some random thoughts.

Things that will help, hobby groups moving here. And other interest groups. Not expecting everyone to code, be a privacy advocate, or a political extremist.

Solving some of the fundamental issues around “federation” and ease of use for the average user that just wants to post about cars, hobby, etc

Actually WANTING more users. There is a non small portion that activity is toxic to new users who came from Reddit just to escape.

Well of course it is, it’s a commie shithole, and the internet already has enough of those.

Less abrasive tankies telling people they deserve to die/be killed.

That’s about it, actually.