The fanbase is still large, but the Lemmy community hasn’t quite caught up yet, and now there is a transitional period where the audience is smaller.
The fanbase is still large, but the Lemmy community hasn’t quite caught up yet, and now there is a transitional period where the audience is smaller.
This is true, but there are good reasons it’s shaking out this way:
Lemmy.world has had some of the most open signups compared to other major instances
Discovery of communities across instances is a little harder, specifically natural discovery instead of directly searching
It is easier to just tell incoming users to sign on to the instance your community is hosted on because you know it’s safe and they won’t ever be locked out by defederation
I think the rise of more topic-specfiic instances like ttrpg.network will help spread the load out.
Natural discovery needs to be worked on.
just raise awareness about tools like this one https://lemmyverse.net/
Never underestimate the importance of convenience and the lack of work most people will do in most circumstances— and I’m not even blaming those people. A third-party tool will never catch on the way a built-in, organic convenience will.
I also think that something like LCS or Lemmony should be recommended and/or included in the default Lemmy
docker composefile.That way, when new Lemmy servers get spun up, they will automatically get seeded with content and communities from other existing Lemmy servers.
Right now the process for me finding a new community is find the community, go to the search page in my browser, type in the community, search for it, wait for it to show up, and sub to it, restart my app. That sucks.
Everyone here by now knows how to find a community. Getting to that community fucking sucks.
You left out the 20% or so chance the subscribe button just doesn’t work. Also the 30% chance you find a community with 1 active user and less than 5 posts total, none of which point to a functioning community with a slightly different name.