I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
Here is my super unpopular take: ultimately you / some / we have misunderstood “quality over quantity”.
It doesn’t mean “we don’t want more users”, it means that the best way to attract more users and growth of the platform is to focus on being the best fediverse we can be. Actively trying to attract more users is a foot gun - even in the unlikely event you’re successful, you reduce the quality of the experience for everyone.
Focusing instead on the health, vibrance, management, and activity of the platform is the best way to attract more users.
Perhaps another way of saying the same thing: the most fertile market segment are those users who used to be active monthly. They were here trying to participate at some point but lost interest. Why? Pretty solid guess is that they were still logging in to reddit for the special / niche interest subs, and after a few months got sick of checking lemmy.
IMO, dead special interest communities are the cancer consuming the fediverse. Nothing wrong with a small active community, but a small community with a half dozen posts from 3 years ago is a big sign saying “go back to reddit, this place is dead”.
This place has always been dead if special interest groups are a measure. There is nothing here and honestly never was…
I’m not disagreeing with you. I didn’t say “this place used to be a utopia of special interest content”.
There’s plenty but. It’s only dead if you think you need to be constantly engaged by your phone all day
This is empirically false. Given the context, it is more akin to grocery shopping at a gas station in the middle of nowhere.
No you’re wrong, using large words though really helps get your incorrect point across. Much further and you would be strawmanning it
Which word is big there? empiric? akin? or is it grocery? gas? station? middle? Did they edit it out and I missed it?
Good choice shorten the word you knew was the one.
I really though you were gonna choose akin because I don’t hear that one as often as 10 years ago (and I never used it I think).
I’m a non-native speaker and I use empiric and empirically at least once a week. STEM though, maybe I’m biased.
Yeah, if someone I’m speaking to believes I’m trying to “use big words” for the sake of sounding smart, I generally just stop engaging with that person…
That exchange was some Facebook level shit lol.
I checked the usage statistics and you are partially (85%?) right. Empirically is rarer unless you are(/were recently) in academia, then it is very common. Akin is rare in general but only in usage, everyone apparently knows it.
Ok
Would it almost be better to prune old communities? I agree it’s off-putting to find community for an interest and seeing last activity like a year ago, doesn’t make you want to post since it seems inactive.
One thing about how reddit/lemmy works though is people subscribed (assumedly still active on Lemmy elsewhere) might still see that content vs a forum where no activity means very few visit the site.
I kind of don’t like the idea of deleting posts.
Maybe we should put a pinned post at the top of each dead community that just says “go here instead”
Like if there’s a dead community for a game, there could be a pinned post that directs you to a more general community like for the genre
Like we could do [email protected] directing to [email protected]
That might be an option. I personally would be fine with that but I’ve noticed that many / most users get very upset about the notion that posts / communities / users are impermanent ?
Another solution is to simply promote these dead communities - if anyone is interested in warming them up then they should do so. If they’re consistent then after a few months ask existing mods to add them as mods, or ask admins to do so if the mods are not responsive.
This approach runs the risk that the person doing the work may not become a mod, but honestly I don’t think being a mod should be the objective of creating a community.
Yeah, I just thought about my suggestion more and one thing I think that has given reddit so much staying power is the fact content sticks around so long, I’d imagine many of us here would specifically search in reddit for reviews or help with something and found a like 3 year old thread with the answer.
So… Pruning is probably a bad idea lol.
Unfortunately threadiverse searchability is pretty bad, assumedly because of the nature of the fediverse with content being copied across instances essentially I am sure its a little more difficult for an indexer to properly handle it, not to mention somehow deciding which instance to specifically link to for a certain thread. On top of that, it wouldn’t surprise me if all the corpo search engines would deprioritize most fediverse sites out of self preservation 🤷
On the “warming them up” that makes sense in theory, but usually if I’m making a rare post it’s to engage with a group of people, if I don’t see the engagement I’m probably not going to go there again to post whatever it is because what’s the point if no one sees it anyway?
I mean “warming up” a community intentionally.
For example, one of the subs I regularly read on reddit is /r/audiobooks, looking for recommendations et cetera. The audiobook communities here are dead.
If I want to adopt one of those dead communities here, I could just decide to make several posts a week for a few months. Thereafter, if I’m still keen, and still haven’t had any interaction from the existing mods, I could approach the admin of that instance and make my case for being appointed as a mod.
Pruning is a bad idea imo. Old communities here (like on reddit) can be great resources for solutions to technical problems, for example. And weird one-off communities that have like 2 memes from a decade ago can be really funny when you get linked to them.
Perhaps a notification-type nag, a tab of “communities you used to use but haven’t posted to for a while” but with a snappier title, alongside “local” and “all”.
Just to give you an example, I help mod a community called [email protected] where we wanted to open up a space to discuss topics of interest to people in the USA, yet remain a safe space away from politics.
What then is there for us to talk about, these days, that does not involve politics?!?!? (this btw was the topic of my 2nd-to-last post, six months ago now)
I do not need a nagging reminder to help me realize what is happening here… :-(