this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2026
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First and foremost, before the usual argument happens, I know that more is not necessarily better.

Having said that, it would be better if lemmy's userbase were much bigger. There are many, many, interesting communities that are basically dead. We need a bigger userbase to drive some content to those communities.

If person A wants to discuss topic X, but there are barely any people with whom to discuss topic X, person A will go back to the usual for-profit corporations to do just that. This is obviously not good, for obvious reasons: just look around.

And an equally important point: for profit services, such as reddit, need to die. The userbase create the content and a select few get rich from it? Fuck them.

So the question is:

  • In your opinion, what can we do to increase the userbase?
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[โ€“] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 62 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (14 children)

Less politics, less news, less "I'm mad about this so you should be mad about it too" rage posting/armchair activism, less "ist's and ism's". Less preachy shit about capitalism bad, communism good (or maybe .ml should just be blocked by default?). Less bitching about Reddit (I swear, I've heard less about friends' exes than some people bitch about Reddit here). Less "hurr durr power tripping mods" circlejerking.

More content about cool stuff, hobbies, amazing feats, movies, books, TV shows, etc.

This place has much of the latter but it's completely overshadowed by the former to the point you have to almost dig for it. Even blocking the overt news, politics, and political "humor" communities, it still seeps in to comics and memes and unrelated communities.

There's still plenty of good in this world, but you'd never know it from looking at what's always topping the feed here.

And a new user checking this place out is going to be immediately hit in the face with all of the former and probably not even see the latter.

[โ€“] percent 11 points 1 week ago

Yep. When I visit Lemmy, it tends to feel like a dark place. I don't think news and politics should be dialed down to zero, but the overall negativity here is a bit heavy, and likely a deal-breaker for many exploring Lemmy for the first time.

For comparison to another decentralized social media platform: Nostr generally seems like a pretty positive place. The people tend to be friendly, and it's quite common to see them saying "good morning" to each other for seemingly no reason (aside from having a nice morning, I suppose). Conversations generally seem civil and mature. Unfortunately, there's LOT of Bitcoin stuff to wade through over there.

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