Bigger isn't necessarily better
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Asklemmy
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As popular as that swamp?
Oh fuck no dude. Let's fucking not
- Be friendly to other Lemmites. Encourage them to post and comment.
- Post and comment whenever you can.
- If you have niche hobbies or interests, try posting about them into an appropriate community.
Social networks and message boards get more popular as they get more users. Bring friendly and posting regularly should help us maintain the user base.
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I don't really care. If it gets more popular, that's fine with me, but I'm fine with how it is now.
Please no
I personally enjoy that Lemmy isn't as popular as Reddit. It feels more home-grown and friendly because it's not as large. That being said, contributing to and engaging with the content you enjoy is a good start. Finding a niche here can be great and there are tons of interesting communities to contribute to!
Why would we want it to be? More people is what ruins websites. A big part of why reddit sucks is the large number of idiots.
Because there are not enough niche communities on Lemmy. For example as a queen fan, lemmy has no queen community but the r/queen community is thriving with many posts going up every day.
Also lemmy is currently very underfunded and the only way to really help that is by having more people.
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Reddit is a for profit website owned by rightwing idiots pretending to be a community space rather than a volunteer effort to help rich reddit chuds train their AI crap.. so the problem isn't inherently about the popularity here.
Regardless though, I want more people here based on the principle that when good things happen to me it is better if they happen to others and I should endeavor to destroy any barrier to seeing a fluid relationship between my wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around me.
Up/Downvoting is so 2015. Instead, comment on any interesting posts, and especially the ones with zero comments. This platform is meant to be about discussion, and not just mindlessly sharing links or memes.
I, personally, am more inclined to check out a post if it has at least one (non-bot, non OP) comment.
I couldn't agree more.
Why would you want that? I think of lemmy as an old message board. I think it's better that way.
Because of a severe lack of content. On Reddit you can find a community for basically anything. On Lemmy there are only a few alive ones. E.g. there are very few alive country communities.
Anything that gets that big turns into a shithole. Enshitification will find a way. So just don't.
Enshittification is a symptom of capitalism at work. Over time products are laser-focused to be as profitable as possible. Scale isn't the issue, capitalism is.
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I think this is a bad idea because it could turn into a second reddit.
Network effects are quite difficult to overcome. Lemmyβs largest influxes of users have been when Reddit does something unpopular enough to warrant people looking for other places. Same was true when Reddit became popular because Digg made bad decisions, or Facebook when MySpace did.
The answer is that Lemmy almost assuredly will never be as popular, but at least its future is not dictated by the profits of a company, or censorship imposed by or on that company.
The best we can do is make Lemmy a viable alternative (it is) and ensure it is of a high quality.
Pornography & Video games (let's say Walkthroughs)
porn walkthrough? That's an untapped market
What do you think JOI is?
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I think the ideal would be not how to make it "like Reddit", but how to help niche and smaller communities have more members. Unfortunately, I think the easiest way is just to get more users to Lemmy in general.
It is not just niche topics, I find quite a bit of things that are not (in my opinion) niche, yet there is very little participation in Lemmy. Take for for example Postgresql. By now it is one of the most widely used databases yet there is a minuscule number of posts and users in the related communities.
Another example. Just did a search for largest communities in Reddit.. One of them is music with an estimated 38 million redditors. In Lemmy the largest two music communities seem to be 9.9K (!music@lemmy.world) and 18.9K (!music@hexbear.net). That is an astronomical difference for something that is as mainstream as it gets given the broad topic.
I think the best each one of us can do is to participate and post as often as possible in the communities we would like to see grow.
But why ?
Porn.
Like any type of media, you win by getting porn on your side. Bring the NSFW content creators over and everyone else will follow.
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There only thing Reddit has over Lemmy is their awesome niche subreddits. Outside of that they have nothing and being more like Reddit is not something we want. With attention comes heavier moderation.
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Why?
I'd say concentrate on quality over quantity.
Exactly. I sort through the top 6 hours or top daily. Thereβs not a lot of posts, but they are all high quality ones.
Reddit is the opposite. I have to go through trash to reach a few good posts. Bigger =/ better
There's admittedly some things I miss from Reddit like bigger niche communities, but I would never want this to get as popular as reddit, because then you'll end up just getting the same problems as reddit down the road and we'll all have to migrate again. And who wants that?
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We should probably gate keep discussion to try keep the standards high in threads where it makes sense. But from what ive seen its already pretty good and conversation feels very human. If we got a influx from reddit id want them to adapt to lemmy culture and not come here and be redditors.
Lemmy must become the free pornography capital of the internet
i dont think the lemmy servers would be able to hold for that long
Ooooh, no thank you.
Have you seen that place? Gives me the icks.
I would rather not. Lemmy is not Reddit.
Keep the light alive as Reddit further enshittifies
I understand the motive, I too am on some niche communities that sometimes didn't have posts for months. For that i use reddit (but the old interface). Now let's see your question.
No, we can't make lemmy as popular as reddit, but we can turn lemmy into a reddit twin, and make it popular, by pushing only one instance like .world.
The social media that popularised fediverse the most was mastodon, and yet it's because they pushed mastodon.social as the default, making a large part of the userbase think that mastodon is only mastodon.social.
People do not even notice things more complicated than buttons "join", "login", or "post". They are lost on join-lemmy.org because they don't know why they should choose a server, read description, understand whatever is federation, and they'll prefer going back to their comfort zone.
But hey, social media experience enshittifies as the userbase gets bigger, and i came here by fleeing reddit so please don't
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if you mean all the niche communities, then sub Reddit could provide a link to a lemmy alternative but no sub Reddit allows promotion so it's pointless.
since being banned from Reddit, i have felt there is something missing since i can't interact in my niche communities any more sadly
- For one , think lemmy's default U[XI] could use some improvement
- Needs more diverse userbase that's not just (tech|news)
- Maybe ATproto support ? Wafrn (activitypub tumblr clone) seems to integrate it , bluesky has more diverse userbase (2nd point above's common complaint about activitypub side of the 'verse and wy peops tend to go to bsky instead)
BlueSky is partially centralized due to most users utilizing a specific instance. Not to mention that it's now unusable in the UK due to the Online Safety Act of 2023 now being enforced with age verification.
Bluesky is a for profit venture with a marketing budget it uses to sell the idea the platform is decentralized.
Bluesky is not decentralized and there is no realistic business plan proposed for how to lucratively monetize a truly decentralized network. Bluesky MUST turn a profit, this isn't an inconvenient detail, it is a crisis the company is on the clock to solve like any heavily speculative venture capital funded startup is.
The only way this works is if actual meaningful decentralization is always "on the horizon" for Bluesky as something the for profit company can periodically point to and say "look how close we are!" while never taking meaningful steps closer.
Bluesky silicon valley techbros will point to their cool blogpost about how they set up a hobbyist project on Bluesky outside of the central network and it will remain a pipedream or like the end of a rainbow for 99.9% of us, an impossible promise that flies away as fast away as we chase it.
I thought Bluesky was centralized, but not fully centralized. My producer thought this, but I wanted a second opinion on it. Do you happen to use Bluesky, by chance, and that happened to be how you know this?
Bluesky theoretically has the capacity to be decentralized. I am sure people will show up in this comment thread and provide a whole lot of technical specifications about mostly proof of concept features that demonstrate that Bluesky is in some sense technically decentralized. Maybe not anymore? That seems a bit less common these days it seems.
To all of those responses theoretical or prophesized lol I ask in turn -why then has the CEO of Bluesky not ruled out serving ads to users as a way of monetizing the currently unprofitable nascient social network?
This isn't a conversation about details no matter how much people will try to steer it there with an air of expert authority. This is a conversation about values and how we embue them in the structures of our communities.
Bluesky is a for-profit business with investors who will seek a return on their investment. Until proven otherwise we must assume they will monetize similarly to the way every other social media company has so far. The words that people who work for Bluesky are less important than this basic economic reality.
To Explain Specifically
The basic idea of the Bluesky architecture at least how I understand it as it is implemented now is that yes anybody can host their own node to a network in Bluesky, and one can theoretically form alternative private networks between these nodes that are unconnected and thus decentralized from Bluesky the corporation/central servers themselves.
However, to join the main conversation, the main endorsed centralized channels of conversation all the people you want to talk to are on, you have to fully subscribe to the centralized authority of Bluesky and their servers in terms of everything, content moderation, ads, whatever when you participate in that "channel".
This might seem like a small detail, it seems like I just said that Bluesky can be used as a decentralized social network and yes theoretically it can, but the fediverse, mastodon, lemmy, piefed, peertube and other software projects were designed to mitigate the suffocating of the periphery that the network effect creates. Communities here can grow from small pieces floating nearby other larger pieces, it isn't an all or nothing participation in one massive commons controlled by a centralized power that allows small private alternatives to hopelessly wilt in its glare...
So then what about Threads? That is a more interesting question, but even in this case my first question is why is Meta interested fundamentally in the fediverse... and why now? If they had any interest other than a narrow attempt to hedge their bets and jump on the bandwagon so they can say they are doing so, they would have funded tiny little accelerator projects exploring this kind of thing LONG ago.
If you listen to any of this long rant, please ask yourself this question. Why are massive social media companies, with so much cash on hand they might as well be small countries, only putting serious effort into creating decentralized social media technology and building out the infrastructure NOW after the path forward was already blazed? Where were they when the fediverse was still just mostly a cute idea without practical infrastructure built out and standards agreed to?
When talking about whether a specific corporate social media platform is decentralized or not you cannot ignore this context, these foundations had already been laid and fairly well built up by a small rag tag team of developers working almost entirely as volunteers funded on a yearly budget so small it wouldn't cover a single dinner check for the executives of Meta.
An aside... also consider the implications of the massive amount of computation that the architecture of Bluesky is set up to require for moderation of channels with the claims they are making about needing channels to processed by servers to be fed back to nodes in turn. Consider the difference in power/leverage between small nodes and massive communities in a situation where moderation is done by humans doing moderation (with automated screening tools to help maybe, but ultimately human) vs when moderation is done by applying a prohibitively expensive amount of computing power to the raw firehose of conversation. The difference is who gets to moderate public spaces and who doesn't.
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