I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
Today is my first day here and I’ve mostly just been wandering hobby/interest groups!
I think the biggest barrier for new users is that the whole system here is pretty complicated with the “decentralized”/“federated” model. I don’t really understand what it means or how it works, and I’m sure the fact that you have to write all of these long posts to explain it to people doesn’t help. A platform like reddit (which I migrated from) is clean, easy to understand, and makes sense to the casual user.
As for the political stuff, why don’t people here engage more with positive content? Make the more wholesome, fun stuff popular? Make posts about the cool/funny stuff you encounter every day? Talk about the arts, your hobbies, etc.? In my exploration today I noticed those kinds of communities barely get any interaction whereas the news/political ones are always active.
This. This is the main complaining I see over the Fediverse when I try to suggest it to people. They enter Lemmy to give it a check and go “It’s all politics?”
did you mention that reddit is all politics as well. reddit is intentionally forcing politics to front page, and anypolitics adjacent topics. almost all sports, celebrity talk eventually leads to politics.
According to them, “reddit also shows some soccer and sporting stuff, this is just politics.”
Welcome! The thing worth knowing is that corporate social media has intentionally trained you to expect zero friction because that’s the basis of their business model - to trap you. Once you spend a bit of time or watch a YT video and understand how lemmy works, it’s not that complicated at all.
Consider that things worth doing in life are not so easy that they suck you in. No one gets in shape at the gym on accident. A small bit of effort pays off here.
First of all, welcome! Hope you’ll like it here.
Politics surely seems to drown the regular conversations at times. But some niche communities are quite active! Places like !newcommunities@lemmy.world , as well as general search might be of great help in finding your gems.
As per federation and stuff, I think Mastodon of all places does a more or less decent job on boarding new users, and Lemmy has a lot to learn from it.
Regardless, the core idea is that there are plenty of various physical servers operated by various people - you can be one of them, just rent/build a server and set some software up! They all are set up to know of each other and talk to each other.
For example:
So, there are three different physical places where the events are playing out. Yet, at the end of the day, you get my message and I get yours. And so do others.