A million empty communities simply makes all of lemmy look like a barren wasteland nobody uses.
We, if anything, need to stop making a community for every single edgecase that someone might ever one day want to talk about, and focus on the basics, until there’s enough people interested in some random niche thing to justify adding the community.
That is to say, it should be organic community growth led by users making a more specific community from a larger community, and not server admins making, for example, 421,000 different sports team communities hoping users will somehow magically appear and use any of them.
Lemmy is still at the scale that a single /c/NFL could more than adequately handle the entire volume of people talking about NFL games, and we don’t really need a /c/ for each league, team, player, and coach or whatever.
There’s a balance to be made. Ultimate defederation is everyone on their own 1-user community.
At the moment, there are plenty of similar communities which coexist, struggling to stay active on their own, and could join just to have more activity. Note that I’m against the current LW-centralization trend, that’s another topic: https://lemm.ee/post/30444527
My read was ‘we need to make more communities, AND we need more users’ and I’m not sure why more communities solves anything since I’ve shown Lemmy to several actual real touch-grass kind of friends and they’re all like ‘but why? there’s nothing there.’
Which is both very wrong, and completely understandable because if you go searching for a community about something, you’ll find a whole lot of no activity ones and that’s just a misleading and confusing presentation which they’re taking the wrong impression away from.
I don’t think there’s a group of users who are just sitting out there waiting for a community about Longaberger baskets to make the jump off reddit, but there are a LOT of people who would move if it looks like it’s not just another “reddit killer” with lots of empty zones of nothingness.
I get downvoted everytime I point out that a healthy network comes with users. Lots of users. Users of all kinds. Users you don’t agree with. Users you do agree with. I said that the userbase of threads being on Lemmy would be a culture clash, but it would be a sign of a growing fediverse concept.
Everyone else says if the threads users federated with Lemmy, they would personally block the instance. Which just shows how much of a bubble the people here want to live in.
I work at an airport. You will never see a more diverse group of people from a bigger selection of places than at an international airport. I don’t agree with all of them. I don’t agree with the majority of them. But I can converse with them. I can make small talk for 10 minutes.
I treat the fediverse as I treat the real world. I wouldn’t look at these people and say “You’re banished from my existence for having conflicting politic or religious beliefs! Begone from my presence! You do not deserve to exist in my world!”
But thats how people here treat “outsiders” or “normies”.
I want the fediverse concept to grow. I want the idea of a concept that’s immune to corporate ownership by design to BE normalized.
Because right now, it’s a niche interest that 98% of people have never heard of. Corporations want to keep it that way…if they’ve even heard of the Fediverse. They might to be too busy exploiting labor, and polluting the planet with their private jets and resource sucking plants located in places that already have water shortages.
Yes I’m talking to you Nestle, and you Starbucks CEO. I don’t know how this comment turned into a rant against them specifically, but fuck Nestle, and fuck Starbucks.
Perhaps it’s just me having different priorities, but I have no interest in making small talk with lots of people. There’s plenty of spaces for that already whilst the spaces for enthusiasts have been sacrificed to the general public.
I’m not arguing this specifically about Lemmy, or trying to suggest policy, I’m just chipping in that there’s at least something to be said for not trying to make all social spaces for all people.
But please remember that in order to enjoy such diversity of opinions as you mentioned… we must become intolerant.
To the intolerant. There is no faster way to shut down conversations than to allow bullies to dominate everything within their reach.
So long as conversations can be kept “fun”, there will naturally be many more to follow, but when they cross the line, then fun-time is over and the people go home. Unfortunately, modding efforts are in short supply here - not as limiting as content creation, but still a constraining factor.
I was just pointing that with 44k monthly active users, interesting conversations are already happening. A few of them are reposted on [email protected] , we could probably do a better job to repost them there more
Not sure if that defines current reddit if you have a look at /r/TheoryOfReddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1gdpeyp/this_bot_thing_is_dystopian_bot_copied_my_post/
On the other hand, I found this interesting thread on [email protected] today: https://lemmy.world/post/21385568?scrollToComments=true
Feel free to have a look at [email protected] for niche communities
It’s not just about the communities. We push communities a lot, and we do need more communities. But fundamentally we need a lot more PEOPLE.
Hard disagree.
A million empty communities simply makes all of lemmy look like a barren wasteland nobody uses.
We, if anything, need to stop making a community for every single edgecase that someone might ever one day want to talk about, and focus on the basics, until there’s enough people interested in some random niche thing to justify adding the community.
That is to say, it should be organic community growth led by users making a more specific community from a larger community, and not server admins making, for example, 421,000 different sports team communities hoping users will somehow magically appear and use any of them.
Lemmy is still at the scale that a single /c/NFL could more than adequately handle the entire volume of people talking about NFL games, and we don’t really need a /c/ for each league, team, player, and coach or whatever.
I agree with you, but not sure if that’s what the person above meant.
But yeah, centralization should happen. We could probably close 95% of the existing communities and regroup on the last 5%
[email protected] for instance covers most of the needs for that sport
Fam, we are here precisely because we don’t want centralization.
If you want that, Reddit and Facebook and BS are that way.
There’s a balance to be made. Ultimate defederation is everyone on their own 1-user community.
At the moment, there are plenty of similar communities which coexist, struggling to stay active on their own, and could join just to have more activity. Note that I’m against the current LW-centralization trend, that’s another topic: https://lemm.ee/post/30444527
Example
My read was ‘we need to make more communities, AND we need more users’ and I’m not sure why more communities solves anything since I’ve shown Lemmy to several actual real touch-grass kind of friends and they’re all like ‘but why? there’s nothing there.’
Which is both very wrong, and completely understandable because if you go searching for a community about something, you’ll find a whole lot of no activity ones and that’s just a misleading and confusing presentation which they’re taking the wrong impression away from.
I don’t think there’s a group of users who are just sitting out there waiting for a community about Longaberger baskets to make the jump off reddit, but there are a LOT of people who would move if it looks like it’s not just another “reddit killer” with lots of empty zones of nothingness.
My point was that needing more people is the root issue. So while I didn’t explicitly make your point, I do agree.
Indeed. Trying to solve this with [email protected], but it takes time
Exactly! Yes!
I get downvoted everytime I point out that a healthy network comes with users. Lots of users. Users of all kinds. Users you don’t agree with. Users you do agree with. I said that the userbase of threads being on Lemmy would be a culture clash, but it would be a sign of a growing fediverse concept.
Everyone else says if the threads users federated with Lemmy, they would personally block the instance. Which just shows how much of a bubble the people here want to live in.
I work at an airport. You will never see a more diverse group of people from a bigger selection of places than at an international airport. I don’t agree with all of them. I don’t agree with the majority of them. But I can converse with them. I can make small talk for 10 minutes.
I treat the fediverse as I treat the real world. I wouldn’t look at these people and say “You’re banished from my existence for having conflicting politic or religious beliefs! Begone from my presence! You do not deserve to exist in my world!”
But thats how people here treat “outsiders” or “normies”.
I want the fediverse concept to grow. I want the idea of a concept that’s immune to corporate ownership by design to BE normalized.
Because right now, it’s a niche interest that 98% of people have never heard of. Corporations want to keep it that way…if they’ve even heard of the Fediverse. They might to be too busy exploiting labor, and polluting the planet with their private jets and resource sucking plants located in places that already have water shortages.
Yes I’m talking to you Nestle, and you Starbucks CEO. I don’t know how this comment turned into a rant against them specifically, but fuck Nestle, and fuck Starbucks.
Perhaps it’s just me having different priorities, but I have no interest in making small talk with lots of people. There’s plenty of spaces for that already whilst the spaces for enthusiasts have been sacrificed to the general public.
I’m not arguing this specifically about Lemmy, or trying to suggest policy, I’m just chipping in that there’s at least something to be said for not trying to make all social spaces for all people.
The idea is not to have to talk with everyone in the circle, but to have enough people to create a long tail of niche interests.
Small talk is important. It leads to big talk.
Small promo for [email protected]
Subscribed! Great catchall community.
Hope you’ll like it there, it’s quite chill
But please remember that in order to enjoy such diversity of opinions as you mentioned… we must become intolerant.
To the intolerant. There is no faster way to shut down conversations than to allow bullies to dominate everything within their reach.
So long as conversations can be kept “fun”, there will naturally be many more to follow, but when they cross the line, then fun-time is over and the people go home. Unfortunately, modding efforts are in short supply here - not as limiting as content creation, but still a constraining factor.
Feel free to join us on https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ to promote Lemmy (most of the other subs ban it)
I was just pointing that with 44k monthly active users, interesting conversations are already happening. A few of them are reposted on [email protected] , we could probably do a better job to repost them there more
I got shadowbanned from reddit before even making a single post.
I’ve said it before, I like reddit users but I hate reddit the company.
Do you invite ppl ?
I got shadowbanned from reddit before even making a single post. I can read but not interact. Fuckers.