I’ve subscribed to a plethora of communities that really interest me and actually have posts and discussions in them, but I have to go to the specific community to see this. My “Subscribed” feed only contains a few of the same posts that I’ve seen for weeks in Hot, the same posts from even longer ago in “Active”, posts from the same communities as the ones in “Hot” in New and no other communities, and pretty much only posts from the Meme’s community I unsubscribed from when sorted by “All”. I also see a majority of posts barely have upvotes or comments on them at all from the “bigger” communities. Is this just the growing pains of this site? Am I still doing lemmy wrong? Is it the instance I’ve chosen to join?
UPDATE I want to thank everyone who posted and gave me helpful advice on this matter. It turns out that there are still lots of people here on Lemmy with me, I just couldn’t see you because I was sorting my feed incorrectly. I’m excited that there are more people here and I’m excited to continue to contribute to Lemmy with you! Thank you all for the help, I really appreciate it. The solutions are to continue to subscribe, contribute to my favorite communities, and sort by top day, 12, and 6 hours. It really helped liven up my feed!
That isn’t true. It is not a numbers game. Reddit didn’t start off with numbers. Facebook didn’t start off with numbers. Tumblr didn’t start off with numbers. Twitter didn’t start off with numbers.
They all started small. Growing gradually. People stayed because they enjoyed the content and the community.
Hype and influence only attract a certain type of person. Fools. That will just create an inferior community. You’ll have a digital Fyre Festival that way.
Artificially inflating numbers creates a community with no respect of the community itself. There’s no thought in that. When you put no thought into something the results aren’t good.
This is already started. Those things started out small but succeeded because of aggressive marketing practices and huge investmentments. That could be the next phase for Lemmy. Growth can happen without but it will be slow and there is high risk of implosion during that period of slow growth.
When I joined Facebook in ~2006 there was already a decent amount of people using it. There was enough interesting content for me to stick around.
When I joined Reddit ~2009 it was also starting to really become popular. The Digg exodus helped tremendously.
The difference between them and Lemmy is that they already felt polished compared to Lemmy. Lemmy feels almost as though it’s in Beta. Lemmy goes down practically everyday for me. There’s not a lot of original content and it’s a very different experience than any other social media sites. Honestly, it’s complicated compared to the straight forward nature of other social media sites.
Instances, communities, Fediverse etc. I’m going to say that a lot of people will not like the hassle.
Can there truly be an implosion of Lemmy? I thought the nature of the Fediverse was that it can’t be controlled by a single entity? If an instance goes down, can’t there be something to replace it? As long as there are servers and people willing, it will remain. Right?
If you are experiencing downtime, you might want to create another account on another instance and clone your subscriptions using https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
Yeah, maybe implode isn’t the right word. Remember what happened to slashdot? Sad fizzle is more like it. Hard to kill Lemmy maybe, but I can easily see this devolving into a few grumpy communists and crappy ads for diet supplements. I sure hope not, but there’s no reason to be overly optomisitic about the tech world these days. It’s all so damn sad.