Fediverse

I'd like my special interest communities to be a bit more active...

If any of you like wresting please come post on !squaredcircle@kbin.social

If any of you read fantasy books please come post on !fantasy@lemmy.ml or !fantasy@kbin.social

Lemmy has cleared some early hurdles to grow from near-zero to 60k DAUs in a month. I’ve enjoyed talking to people over the past month in a more friendly and intimate way than on that other site. The main communities are fun and viable but the niche ones are mostly empty. I run a niche hobby community and despite having a few hundred subscribers <5% have ever commented, <0.5% have posted. I think Lemmy needs to be perhaps 10x larger than it is now to be self-sustaining for niche communities.

I think it's just okay. I very much wish there were at least 10x as many daily active users.

I think natural growth will be either very slow, or negative, for the time being. But I also think future "events" will probably end up being more effective - because with each new influx of users Lemmy will be more mature as a platform, and have a larger pre-existing userbase to fill it with content that isn't just about Lemmy or reddit - which was so bad when I joined that I nearly quit.

I hope they would find a way to minimize fragmantation, instead of having one well maintained (lest's say) ABC community we now have an ABC community per instance (abc@lemmy.world, abc@lemmy.ml, abc@kbin,...) with one half active and the rest barely kicking off with mostly copy/paste content from other similar communities.

I'm fine with how active things are. The most popular community I run (!bluey@lemmy.world ~750 subscribers) is receiving at least a post per day, sometimes up to five.

If another "event" happens, I'm sure we will get busier, but things seem manageable for the two of us so far. I'm not opposed to more traffic, however.

Some places seem to be gaining more members though. Maybe the current users are searching more.

It will probably take a big exodus from Twitter or reddit

Few thoughts:

• Plenty of (valid) concern about niche communities in here. I do wonder if it is something lemmy can help with some features.
  • A Best sorting algorithm is in the works, which would rank posts by how popular/hot they are relative to their community, and might be a great way to surface interesting stuff from smaller communities
  • Some sort of "Multi-Communities" that can be created and defined by the user would be wonderful too, especially in combination with the Best sort. All the news communities in one feed, sorted equally, eg. Could really be quite powerful IMO.
• A controversial thought maybe ... would getting more mastodon people over in some way or another be a good way to increase user counts? They're already on the fediverse and understand something about federation. How to get them over is probably rather non-trivial though.
  • Some sort of "campaign" to let mastodon people know about lemmy/kbin. You'd be surprised how little mastodon users are aware of other platforms.
  • Very controversial and probably very difficult ... adding some sort of microblogging interface to lemmy so that a mastodon user would feel more at home migrating to a lemmy instance that allows them to stay plugged in to their microblogging space. At the moment, mastodon's UI is not doing a good job at allowing federation between lemmy and mastodon to be functional, and that's unlikely to change any time soon, so it may be up to lemmy to bring microbloggers to here so that they can participate in both kinds of formats.

I wish more people were interested in association football.

according to that same website, kbin activity has been dropping

down from ~57,000 average at the beginning of July to about ~32,500 active users now

https://kbin.fediverse.observer/dailystats

I know I've been having issues with federation from kbin magazines to my lemmy instance, so I wonder if this is part of it?