this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024

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How many subscribers does a community need to have to become self sustaining so that the active posters can retire? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Well, there's the The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality in Social Media and Online Communities, which suggests:

Summary: In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

So whatever number you're looking for, it's 1% of that. Not that subscriber count means much, especially for older communities that have 10's of thousands of subscribers who aren't even using the platform any more.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

Not that subscriber count means much, especially for older communities that have 10’s of thousands of subscribers who aren’t even using the platform any more.

Agreed, active users are a better metric.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

My god it's a power law! Like damn near everything in biology, sociology, history, politics, and economics.

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

I expect the numbers have probably gotten worse over time, but it is a decent rule of thumb.

It also requires making sure the community will accept content from new members. It is fine to enforce rules, but overzealous enforcement can push out other active members.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I guess it depends on the subscribers? Most of the time people just subscribe to communities because they want that kind of content. Look at stuff like the HistoryMemes community. It's got hundreds of subscribers based on the amount of upvotes posts get, but the only realy person contributing is PugJesus.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

There are more contributions now than there used to be, but if no one has posted in a day, I try to make a post.

... I still post most days.

It takes a large userbase. I remember on The Old Place a community might need 2 or 3 thousand subscribers before it became truly self-sustaining. The more esoteric and obscure the knowledge or material needed to post, the more subscribers you need - meme communities can hit it at 2-3 thousand, while others, like history communities, can reach 5k and still be reliant on a small number of contributors.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Lol I ask myself this all the time!

Just hit 3200 this week, and I get maybe 1-2 posts a month not from me. I get so excited when someone else does one!

I only started posting daily because I really love what I share, so I'd be sourcing all the stuff just for me. If you're doing this as a job, you're going to burn out. I try to post 3 or 4 things a day and have a week or 2 of posts built up in a drafts folder for slow news days or days where I feel like crap and I can keep it going. That's a labor of love though. If it's something I wasn't all in on, it would suck to do all that work for free.

Check out the [email protected] community if you want to discuss the growing pains here. It's mainly us crazy dedicated few talking about growing our communities.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You guys are fighting the good fight!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

It's funny, as I typically do not like attention, especially from strangers.

I do like researching and teaching people things though, so it is really fun to hear people say "wow, I never knew this was that interesting" or when they ask me questions I don't know the answers to and I end up reading about something I never thought to look into. I got asked some especially good questions this week, and it was a lot of fun coming up with good answers to share, so we all got a little smarter together. Fun stuff!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

at least one

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

I would say once the community you created reaches 300 subscribers, the community would care enough to take over and keep posting.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

What's the Lemmy retirement plan?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

Sorry but we're raising the minimum retirement age to 72

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

Babushkas all around

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

My community (on other account) has 200 subs and it dies when I stop posting so I'd say the answer is more than 200

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

5,000. That's really my sincere answer.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

i think this is one of the things that's going to end up driving away most of the reddit users in the future.

most people came to the lemmyverse because of reddit's enshitification and are trying to turn lemmy into diet reddit by recreating the things that they liked about reddit; but lemmy was always intended to be political at its core and that core is deeply unpalatable to most of reddit & its refugees so they've mostly self sorted into their own instances and doing so has caused further issues for themselves, including rendering most of their communities inactive.

lemmy works for me because i used to be active in reddit's political subs before the enshitification and that taught me how to tolerate shit takes from misguided tankies and clueless liberals alike and the people who are too rigid in their views to learn will leave.