• DogWater@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It has zero niche reach. Unfortunately, that’s really important for the people who try to switch from Reddit. You can’t compete with Reddit when your favorite hobby sub there has 20,000 members or even many more and meaningful daily activity.

    The people here are mostly more techy and nerdy which leads to niceness but also holier than thou attitudes everywhere.

    The content here turns over slower, which is another big sticking point, but the bones of the site are good.

    It’s suffering from being new and different. If it can hang on long enough for Reddit to go full Facebook, maybe it can hit a stride and prosper but I honestly don’t know.

    • CashewNut 🏴󠁢󠁥󠁧󠁿@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It has zero niche reach

      People can’t expect a Reddit-clone. I thought when I saw the proliferation of UK communities that they are going to end up dead. They did. My old Reddit account is 15yo so I saw Reddit grow organically and it went like this:

      1-2yr old Reddit Top level subs: e.g. AskReddit 3-5yr old Reddit: Secondary level starts: r/unitedkingdom r/ukpolitics 6+ years third level: UKFood, AskUK, CasualUK.

      Each time Reddit grew subs were created organically after main subs got fed up with a certain type of post. AskUK formed in response to users getting fed up with questions in UnitedKingdom and people wanted UK specific questions of AskReddit. UnitedKingdom spawned as more UK users visited. CasualUK spawned when some people wanted less politics.

      It was organic and subs spawned when required. So subs rarely died because they only came into existence when there was demand.

      “I feel thin like butter scraped across too much bread”

      When there’s fewer people you can afford to shove everything into higher level subs and if you want it to be specific put it in the title like this:

      • Brits - what’s your fave tea?
      • [Yanks] Whats your fave eagle?

      Putting posts into communities with 3 people that never gets viewed is pointless. I basically stalk just a few subs and make sure anything I’d ask in a more specific Reddit sub gets posted in the most generic but relevant I can find. E.g. I asked about HaikuOS on the Linux community - it’s not even a Linux distro but it’s open source and it’s the closest-big community that would know anything about it.

      People need to treat Lemmy like early Reddit. Don’t think you can clone reddit’s vibe and operation in a year.

      I think oldschool Redditors need to WAKE UP and remember wtf it used to be like before the Digg exodus exploded Reddit into mainstream.

      N.B. everyone’s comments are worth a shitton more here because there’s fewer comments. You aren’t shouting into a storm, your voice gets heard here. Embrace that people. Stop with the low-effort humour to get karma and put some thought into what you want to say. If nothing else it’ll improve your mental health.

      • OneShotLido@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This is such a great point that your voice gets heard. When I read that, it finally clicked with me. When I click through, it’s rare that I don’t read every comment. On Reddit, I rarely did because there were so many comments. Here, I’m usually reading them all. Your voice is being heard. Nice.

      • ryathal
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        1 year ago

        You aren’t wrong, the problem is much of lemmy is against anything that could lead to growth to hit levels where nice communities could exist.

    • JGrffn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s suffering from being new and different. If it can hang on long enough for Reddit to go full Facebook, maybe it can hit a stride and prosper but I honestly don’t know.

      I’m starting to lose faith, but we’ll see in the long run once Meta enables federation. It may be bad for the fediverse, or it could force unprecedented growth. My main fear is that activitypub ends up the way of e-mail, regulated by the big players. I’m too dumb to figure out if it can happen, though.