It’s been a while since I last seen anyone posting graphs showing user base growth. Are we past the initial rush and bleeding numbers now?

  • Spectator@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think while the general communities have made it, a lot of niche communities failed to attract enough population to keep on generating more content. As an example, just search for the “Imaginary” series of landscape art communities on the Fediverse (eg. ImaginaryVistas). Many of them don’t have any recent posts or 1 post per days or weeks. That’s not enough to keep people invested. Even the largest digital art community is still mostly carried by 1 person.

    • QubaXR@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Yes! I think we have many communities that are either:

      • way too specific
      • carbon copies of identical topic on another instance
      • Zeth0s@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Carbon copies are actually quite of an issue on the long term. It is difficult to understand the best one for a topic unless one visits many of them.

        Also because the number of subscriptions that one sees is only from their instance

        • Halosheep@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          As someone who mostly lurks/occasionally comments and someone who likes to view hot/active posts from all communities, repeat posts from similar communities in different instances is something I find really annoying. I’ll see the same post four or five times as I scroll. It can make things feel really empty to see the same things more than once.

        • Amju Wolf@pawb.social
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          1 year ago

          Also because the number of subscriptions that one sees is only from their instance

          Huh is that actually a thing? That’s kinda dumb, but explains the tiny numbers I’ve seen a few times.

          • xapr@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, unfortunately that is a thing. Example:

            https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/collapse@lemmy.ml (lemmy.sdf.org’s local view of Collapse @ lemmy.ml) shows 22 subscribers. In effect, this is the number of people on lemmy.sdf.org who have subscribed to this remote community.

            https://lemmy.ml/c/collapse (the original/direct view of Collapse @ lemmy.ml) shows 2.11k subscribers. I don’t know whether this number shows only subscribers from lemmy.ml or an aggregate of all subscribers across the fediverse.

            Unfortunately, another issue even if the count on the direct link to the community is an aggregate, is that it’s probably not counting people who are stuck in a “subscribe pending” state. A ton of the communities I subscribed to weeks ago still show in this state on my communities page. I understand that what this means is that I’m subscribed on my end so that everything works for me, but the original community hasn’t acknowledged my subscription, so I expect that this means it also doesn’t count me as a subscriber.

            • Amju Wolf@pawb.social
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              1 year ago

              Ahh interesting. Well, that’s growing pains, and fairly minor ones I’d say. Let’s hope it’ll eventually get better.

              Also thanks for explaining “subscribe pending”, I was wondering about that.

              • xapr@lemmy.sdf.org
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                1 year ago

                For sure. The growing pains haven’t been too bad for me either. I think that things will definitely get better with Lemmy.

                You’re welcome.

    • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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      1 year ago

      Maybe we got to ambitious with niche communities and should have stayed broad.

    • Nighed@sffa.community
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      1 year ago

      I think a lot of the imaginary communities were on one of the .ml instances so are currently in suspended animation. That domain shutdown was really badly timed…

      Otherwise, it’s the standard problem that only a small % actually post and Lemmy is much smaller. I do think that a better/fixed hot algorithm would help with post discoverability for smaller communities though.

      ( I mod a niche imaginary community for the Cosmere book series(es))

      • Amju Wolf@pawb.social
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I don’t think asking communities that are already fairly small on Reddit to create the same community on Lemmy was a good idea.

        For something like this it’d be best to start with a single community for the whole broad topic (like, ImaginaryStuff). Hell, Reddit used to be a “single subreddit” originally. And the niche subreddits didn’t pop up until fairly recently where they were actually able to entice enough people to use them.