this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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Asklemmy

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I discovered lemmy back when reddit started to charge for their API. However upon taking a look at it, it seemed that apart from like 8 communities,there was not much going on elsewhere. Things seem to have changed since then, quite a lot of active communities these days. So how many users do yall reckon lemmy has now? Is it close to 5M? or perhaps even higher?

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The worse two things to happen to lemmy when the reddit api migration happened is people created clones of their subreddits multiple times on different instances but when it didn't take off immediately they just abandoned it. The second was bot posting no one is going to engage when op is not real and thus you have zombie communities with zero comments. So it looks like a ghost town instead of a letting grow organically.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

When you are almost the only one posting for more thsn 6 months, it make sens that s lot of community owners stop posting

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

But that's my point it wasn't created organically one community at a time but a flood of clones with the same names at subreddits vs having there own identity. So instead of one community on one instance known for one topic you have twenty that are watered down and no one knows where to coalesce.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

But that’s my point it wasn’t created organically one community at a time but a flood of clones with the same names at subreddits vs having there own identity

I would argue that people like familiarity like linux distros that looks familiar to windows has grown in popularity. Therefore using similar names to the one on reddit makes complete since to me and I don't see it would affect the growth. As for have different content, since lemmy is less mainstream you will see less popular topics. Many communities has a good balance between mainstream topic and less popular content yet fail to make people participating

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You are also asuuming reddit was the default for a person coming to lemmy and that still doesn't explain the multiple communities created as clones becase the familiarity gets flipped on its head becase the person coming from reddit that would appeal to goes. It looks like reddit has the same name as my favorite subreddit. Why doesn't it work just like reddit? Then they say screw this I'm going back to reddit and thus you haven't dead communities hanging off of lemmy like a tumor. Hell the /c/name is not even shown in clients when you search it's the display name. So that makes it even more confusing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I don't see a reason to believe that the majority of users on Lemmy are Reddit refugees, because every time Reddit makes a bad decision, we see a boost in new users.

Technology is one of the most duplicated community name, yet Lemmy.world technology community is one of the most popular, so I don't see community duplication as the biggest issue. The biggest problem with Lemmy and other fediverse app , was always that most people don't understand the appeal of decentralization, because most of them never experienced censorship, so it doesn't directly affect them. I think decentralized app creators should stop using decentralization as the main selling point, and focus instead about the fediverse being open source and about the diversity of clients you can use to navigate them. While also simplifying things like adding an pick a server for me, ability to merge communities with similar or same names, simplifying migration to other servers with the ability to migrate everything including posts.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

not disagreeing with your overall premise, but do clearly labeled bot news aggregator communities need much interaction right now?

I read many of the articles on bot feeds and will sometimes comment on ones that I think should get a few more eyeballs. others do the same and I appreciate their prodding as well. for my usecase lemmy in its current state has been absolutely wonderful, and I am enjoying watching it evolve.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Yeah I'm glad it works for you but at that point you are using lemmy like a RSS feed reader and at that point just use an RSS feed reader. But my point was trying to explain the lack of engagement that drives more content. Sometimes the post is secondary to comments in some cases.