…relative to Reddit’s size?

I see so many posts and comments voicing disappointment with Lemmy’s lack of massive expansion.

I too want to see Lemmy gain more users, but I do not want it to grow to Reddit’s size. If Reddit is the yardstick, I’d say that a population that large attracts a lot of negative behaviours; degeneration of discourse, amplification of echo chambers and hive mind behaviour, etc…

I started on Reddit in 2010 and found that by 2016 things were really bad in comparison. A fun and engaging site was experiencing an obvious devolution that persists to this day, accelerated by Spez’s enshittification of the platform. Obviously the fediverse insulates us from that occurring here but I think you get what I mean.

Do you you think Lemmy is too small? I don’t. I’ve been here since the great migration last year and have had a really good time. I see a lot of familiar names in the comments on a daily basis. It actually feels like a community here. I guess I just don’t understand the fixation on the size of Lemmy’s user base. Curious to hear your thoughts.

[EDIT] Thanks for all the responses, everyone! Lots of perspectives I hadn’t yet considered.

  • wirelesswire@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1441·
    1 month ago

    The smaller population overall isn’t a bad thing, but it can really be felt in smaller or niche communities. Reddit’s huge size is a plus in this regard, because chances you can find at least a semi-active community for just about any hobby or niche interest.

  • gerryflap@feddit.nl
    491·
    1 month ago

    Because that’s what I’m missing. I like the apps, I like the site, but I need content. And not memes or politics, but specific niche topics. The nice thing about Reddit is that there’s more than enough content about basically anything. Non mainstream music (DnB, Hardstyle, Trance), games, hobbies. There are always hundreds ,if not thousands of people engaging. I don’t want a discussion with 3 other people, I want a large community that can actually provide me with a lot of new information and keeps itself going without any effort from my end.

  • GreenSofaBed@lemmy.zip
    39·
    1 month ago

    For example the Formula 1 live threads during a race has like 10 comments on Lemmy, while on Reddit it’s in the thousands. Just wish some communities were a bit more popular.

    • baatliwala@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 month ago

      Serious question, would having 100 comments every few seconds kill smaller instances? How well will the federation scale?

        • baatliwala@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 month ago

          Yeah, I just joined as a reddit refugee because lemmy.world looked appealing. Had no idea it would effectively become the “defacto” instance of lemmy. Would be nice if communities spread out more.

  • bstix@feddit.dk
    37·
    1 month ago

    Some years ago Reddit had such a large reach in the media space that you could be discussing something on there and news outlets would pick up on it. For a brief period it actually felt like a platform where ordinary people could get heard and influence the world outside of Reddit or at least sway opinions of other real users. The reason why it worked was the massive userbase. The high profile AMA’s drew quite the crowd. Those days are long gone. It’s been a long time I saw any serious news outlets report on what happens on Reddit. GameStop was probably the last big Reddit thing to make a dent on the outside world.

    I don’t want Lemmy to be that big, but it would be nice to know that if you make effort to write something that is important to you, that it gets read by more than two other people who already have the same opinion.

    • JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee
      2·
      1 month ago

      Late reply, but in English media articles, it’s still fairly common for me to see references to what people said on Reddit. AFAIK there are also still entertainment sites (“Caveman Circus” being one) that still regularly harvest expert or semi-expert takes found on Reddit in order to construct ‘best of’ articles.

      Though-- perhaps that activity is down somewhat, as you suggest.

  • jadelord@discuss.tchncs.de
    32·
    1 month ago

    The flagship communities are quite alive, but the niche communities have not really taken off. I am talking from both the absence of such communities, and my experience trying to migrate !fluidmechanics. The subreddit has around 10k humans (or bots).

  • morgunkorn@discuss.tchncs.de
    30·
    1 month ago

    It highly depends on what you’re here for. Some communities have gathered enough active members to expect a continuous influx of posts and comments.

    The strength that Reddit has built over the years is that many niche communities also thrived and turned into a rich repository of knowledge that was searchable. Lemmy isn’t there yet, if you’re into fishing, knitting, Japanese chess or sourdough baking.

    But it also doesn’t need to be a perfect drop in replacement for Reddit, it’s probably fine if it remains something different, slightly fringe and a friendly place that doesn’t require massive amount of servers and moderation staff.

  • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
    29·
    1 month ago

    it’s like 90% IT nerds here lol. whether you want growth or not depend on how okay you are with that. I love you guys but a lot of your hobbies bore me to shit and I want someone to talk to

  • adaveinthelife@lemmy.ca
    18·
    1 month ago

    I want all people to use Lemmy.

    I want us to stop the tribalism. What made reddit fail was the management, not the users.

    Yes some people suck, and if you ask me it’s most people, but diversity is powerful and without it we have no future.

  • StreetCash@lemm.eeEnglish
    15·
    1 month ago

    There are a lot of communities missing. I cant find anything financial related like /personalFinance, /financialIndependence, /povertyFinance, /frugal with any decent amount of interaction. Most with maybe 1 post or a handful of comments every month. Without gaining a lot of users there isnt enough content to stay

      • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
        3·
        1 month ago

        Yeah it’s a pretty rough gig to host retirement planning, which typically revolves around stock ownership in the end, on something theoretically dedicated to, you know, abolishing capitalism.

        You can do it, but it’s like “have 500k in your bank and move to Mexico, invest in commodities”

  • Chozo@fedia.io
    14·
    1 month ago

    I just miss there being more variance in the voices I see in the comments. On Reddit, the size made it so that you were pretty much always seeing new commenters, and seeing a lot of different discussions. But here, I mostly see the same ~50 regulars across all the communities I subscribe to, and almost all the same discussions being had.

    Overall I still prefer it here, but more users and more active communities would be nice, too.

  • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zipEnglish
    13·
    1 month ago

    As a mod of three niche Soulslike communities, one of which that probably has less than 10 active users at best, it’s really hard to put out quality content and keep a community alive all on your own. I had to resort to a bot filling two of the communities with regular posts so there is some semblance of life in the communities, but reception has been mixed so far and the engagement didn’t grow as much as I had hoped.

    Unfortunately, I don’t see any other way for these communities to be sustainable if like 95% of users on here are lurkers. Plus, I’m not the best fit for moderation and pumping out posts asking for engagement constantly since I’m a lurker at heart myself.

    ‘All’ is pretty good, though. It’s where I spend most my time on Lemmy.

  • Panda@lemmy.today
    10·
    1 month ago

    I don’t think it’s the size but more the number of communities and how active they are. So if there are more people here it hopefully means there will be more active users as well. And perhaps more niche communities.