According to https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Lemmy has ~67,500 daily active users over the past two weeks (it did peak at around 72,000)

How do you feel about the activity in your communities?

Do you think it will take another ‘event’ on some other website for more growth, or do you think Lemmy can grow naturally from here?

Or are you fine with the current activity and don’t necessarily see the need for more users at this time?

Active Users Screenshot

  • maegul (he/they)English
    4•1 year ago

    Few thoughts:

    • Plenty of (valid) concern about niche communities in here. I do wonder if it is something lemmy can help with some features.
      • A Best sorting algorithm is in the works, which would rank posts by how popular/hot they are relative to their community, and might be a great way to surface interesting stuff from smaller communities
      • Some sort of “Multi-Communities” that can be created and defined by the user would be wonderful too, especially in combination with the Best sort. All the news communities in one feed, sorted equally, eg. Could really be quite powerful IMO.
    • A controversial thought maybe … would getting more mastodon people over in some way or another be a good way to increase user counts? They’re already on the fediverse and understand something about federation. How to get them over is probably rather non-trivial though.
      • Some sort of “campaign” to let mastodon people know about lemmy/kbin. You’d be surprised how little mastodon users are aware of other platforms.
      • Very controversial and probably very difficult … adding some sort of microblogging interface to lemmy so that a mastodon user would feel more at home migrating to a lemmy instance that allows them to stay plugged in to their microblogging space. At the moment, mastodon’s UI is not doing a good job at allowing federation between lemmy and mastodon to be functional, and that’s unlikely to change any time soon, so it may be up to lemmy to bring microbloggers to here so that they can participate in both kinds of formats.
    • @cordillera@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      I found Lemmy because I learned I could crosspost my relevant Mastodon posts to a Lemmy community. That’s an easier way to get more posts, because I can get engagement from either Mastodon or Lemmy and it doesn’t feel like I’m posting on a dead forum just to be forgotten about. Also I find myself checking up on that Lemmy community directly to see what other people are posting, because viewing the content from Mastodon is too messy.

      • maegul (he/they)English
        2•1 year ago

        Yep, this matches my impressions as well.

        To illustrate how “not great” the interface is between lemmy and mastodon right now …

        • the best way to post in a way that allows both platforms to participate is to post from a mastodon account and tag a lemmy community in that post so that it appears as a post in that community too. Lemmy and mastodon people will naturally start talking to each when that is done.
        • But … the best way to view that conversation is from lemmy as it provides threading and sorting while mastodon’s flattened reverse-chron feed is rather confusing and unhelpful.

        Because mastodon is unlikely to improve anything on this front any time soon … I think lemmy adding some sort of person-following blogging interface (as crazy or difficult as that might be), at this moment, could be an interesting idea for its future growth. I say that partly because I think momentum is growing behind the idea that the fediverse needs more than what mastodon provides. But also because I suspect a person-following interface really isn’t a radically different feature set but rather is or could be an extension of what is here already.

        I made a post about this (in !lemmy@lemmy.ml) asking for people’s thoughts: https://lemmy.ml/post/2432594

        • @what_is_a_name@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2•1 year ago

          Kbin?

          Could Kbin be the UI for this use case? I currently keep the two worlds separate. But I wonder if I need a paradigm shift.

          The other problem for me is that I am way more open about my identity on Mastodon (and post accordingly) but not in Lemmy/KBin - same as I was on Insta/Twitter vs Reddit.

          • maegul (he/they)English
            2•1 year ago

            Yea, kbin’s great. Two thoughts though:

            1. Kbin is still community/magazine focused at the moment. It integrates better with mastodon, allowing you to follow people etc, but it seems to really be about pulling mastodon content into the magazines as much as possible. For instance, there is no way to view a feed of just the posts of the people you follow, AFAIU. I’m not aware of there road maps on this though.
            2. Platform diversity is valuable for the fediverse, as no platform can make everyone happy, so two platforms having the same general feature (as lemmy and kbin do already with communities/magazines) is not only not a problem but a good thing.
    • @lackthoughtOPEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      the sorting algorithms definitely need some work, I try to use ‘Hot’ but it constantly shows me posts from 1+ year ago

      and multi-reddits were the only way I used that site once the feature was created so that would be a very welcome addition to lemmy!