For the whole thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1ouk003/reddit_no_longer_allows_api_access_without_an/
It's okay, if Reddit is what "has users" looks like, then I'm perfectly happy to have "no users" over here on the Fediverse.
It would still be nice to have more than one active poster on topics as general as
You're not wrong. I think we need to start de-specializing some in compensation on the Fediverse. Like maybe there's not enough content to specifically support a !television community at the scale you'd like, but maybe there's enough content if we rolled them together into !entertainment or !media.
But also, no community happens out of a vacuum. If we want a viable community here, sometimes that means putting in the work of regularly contributing posts knowing fully well they'll be ignored and receive no engagement until doing so has proven enough continual activity that people feel worthwhile investing into.
But yes, in general I agree, it would be nice if we had a little more activity around here. But I'd still rather us be on the smaller size than the too large to manage size of Reddit, given the option.
I think we need to start de-specializing some in compensation on the Fediverse. Like maybe there’s not enough content to specifically support a !television community at the scale you’d like, but maybe there’s enough content if we rolled them together into !entertainment or !media.
This is a valid concern for other communities, but interestingly enough in the case of two two, there are enough posts and comments to still keep them separate, the issue is that most of the posts come from a single poster on each topic.
If we want a viable community here, sometimes that means putting in the work of regularly contributing posts knowing fully well they’ll be ignored and receive no engagement until doing so has proven enough continual activity that people feel worthwhile investing into.
Indeed, look at the weekly posts on !fedigrow@lemmy.zip
Even some of reddit biggest comms like games, still have one primary user posting
Ye, it's underestimated how many communities are reliant to one passionate enthusiast.
yeah also the r/MarsSociety community for example. mostly one user posting all the news article, though maybe 5-10 people actively commenting.
There's a sweet spot with internet forums, and the exact number varies by community, but every forum I've ever been on got shit after getting too big.
Yep! As soon as a comm gets big the quality plummets and bots swarm to it, I'd rather have small but quality
no users. Lets stop pretending we can fix this by moving to yet another different platform
"We can't fix the 'no users' problem by adding more users"
I was really puzzled by that. Like, obviously you can fix stuff like this by moving to a new platform. It's a natural part of the internet. Reddit only started being used because of a mass exodus from Digg. Discord killed Skype and Teamspeak and Ventrilo and Mumble and Curse Voice because people moved from those things because Discord was better. As an aside, I can't fucking wait till the next thing kills Discord because Discord suuuucks
It's only natural that as Reddit enshittifies further and further, we'll move on to the next thing. Until it gets really big and enshittified and on and on we go. The internet is a graveyard. You can keep standing on old graves or you can come help us dig the new ones. There's no third choice.
Also commercial platforms try to maximize their user count so they can sell more ads.
Meanwhile, fediverse has little interest in increasing its user numbers, because we don't generate money from it. In fact, more users would probably mean (slightly) higher infrastructure costs, though i'm not sure how much they actually are or whether one could consider them "negligible".
Anyways, if we had more users, we'd also have more diverse content on Lemmy, and i would definitely appreciate that. Honestly, it's a bit sad that 50% of the posts on the frontpage are about US politics, but i guess it's just a topic that gets a lot of traction because it affects a lot of people and also because there's not so much other content on the platform yet. I hope we'll get more communities about somebody's fringe favorite topics. :D
Especially when each Lemmy user is valued at 342 times the worth of a Reddit user.
How dare you insult all lemmings with that low estimate haha
I'd rather take 38k active monthly users than the maybe 20 non-bots and 3 billion bots on their landfill they call a garden.
Personal experience: the smaller group is, the more friendly and stick-together group will be.
Reddit had bots for a fucking long time. And since they allowed to close up user profiles post/comment history, tracking who is who became harder. There is no way that wasn't by design, it most certainly is. There is no secret that reddit is in cahoots with LLM companies. They will use (or already are using) bots to populate their site and probably will skew public perception in a desired way using bots.
Not like Lemmy has no bots. But it's so much more peaceful here.
It's frustrating to see people considering 4 upvotes something to be frustrated about.
Drives me nuts with games too. Some games NEED a huge userbase for balance and ELO and whatnot, but it's always wild to see a solo or team-based PvE game billed as "dead" because it has only 5k concurrent players.
If it is a skill based PvP game it needs a constant inflow of new users or people that are just permanent bronze and happy with that. It's considered "dead" by those players that have peaked at gold or platinum and angry at a team mate that they lost a game
Are there really that many bots on lemmy? I really only ever notice the couple RSS bots that float around between me blocking them.
Occasionally I'll see one acting up and filling the frontpage with spam but Beyond that I don't see many. There are a few users I suspect are chat GPT agents, but that's gonna be an issue anywhere.
The ratio of bots to humans is significantly better on lemmy than on reddit. In fact that's another reason that the dork in OP is wrong about "no users," because absolute numbers don't matter very much if you're interested in conversations with actual human beings, what matters is the likelihood that it's just bots responding and upvoting (or the opposite) and with reddit your odds on that are shit.
Seriously, this platform is far from dead. Lemmy is not quite the same depth of niche content as Reddit was, but it's certainly usable. If you can recognize Reddit's practices are a problem then with a bit of effort there is another option.
