rglullis

@publiclewdness@gameliberty.club asked @PINE64@fosstodon.org if they were planning to have a presence on Lemmy, so that gave me the idea of adding it.

No one really depends on these corporate services. People are just too lazy and conformist to give up on the convenience that they bring.

I do not think more content alone would be sufficient.

I have actual data that support the idea that more content can create a virtuous cycle. People loved to complain about alien.top "spamming their feed", but when the mirror bots were active, the numbers of "organic participation" and subscriber count was increasing faster than the most popular communities on the bigger instances. I kept quiet about it to avoid "inverse Streisand effect" (like the haters pontificating about "these communities are only bots" and spoiling for those who actually didn't care about interacting with it).

Your assessment of Lemmy content seems to indicate you follow news and Fediverse communities.

Fediverse communities, yes. "News", not at all.

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See how fast the number of active users drop.

Truly diverse content will come with the users,

So we agree that we need to have more users, no?

For all "Reddit's troubles" last year, they still managed to have revenue growth of 21% to more than $800 million.

That won’t change until the front-end gets more development and features (...) not necessarily due to a lack of content.

I really disagree. Yeah, there are many issues to solve, but content is king and we simply don't have it. The current experience with Lemmy can be summarized as:

• Two Minutes Hate "news" communities: where everyone tries to out-do each other on their display of rage at $rich_person, $the_other_party and $big_corporation
• Meta-discussions about the Fediverse, like this one.

It's only appealing for the terminally online. There is nothing for normies to be minimally curious about. The reason that, e.g, my wife, still has Facebook installed and never cared about installing a Lemmy client is not because of "technical challenges" but Facebook has groups that she likes to follow and nothing interesting to her here.

I am talking about the ethos of open source and decentralized systems, not the general ethics or the values of particular people or instances that are here.

mass numbers of people means success

It's not so much about "attracting mass numbers of people", but becoming more than just a point for fringe groups. IOW, can we make it minimally interesting for normies? Can we go beyond the "techie/anime-manga/pretentious college student/socially awkward/neurodivergent" demographic? Could we perhaps make the Fediverse a place that can be attractive for, e.g, photographers? Car Enthusiasts? Fashionistas? Wood workers? Amateur triathletes?

IMO, reddit's value was never in the large communities. Aside from /r/soccer, none of the subreddits I joined had more than 500k subscribers. But the thing is: the reason that Reddit managed to have so many interesting communities in the long tail was because they managed to attract such a large number of people that even those in far tail end could still find like-minded people.

Doesn't "the only thing that the Fediverse has over the alternatives is the ethical superiority" answer that?

I am here because I want it to succeed, not because it has.

And to interpret my comment literally is utterly stupid.

My point is: this group here may have itself in high regard, but if you get out of the circle jerk you'll realize that the amount of pettiness, short-sightedness, egocentrism and plain meanness that you can find from people on Lemmy is not different from the average person on Facebook.

Right, you are so above all of this. You bring so much fun to the Fediverse and the rest of the world has nothing to offer you.

Because this will only become interesting once we have a critical mass. 50k MAU is far from if. If we grow 10% YoY, we will certainly lose out to someone else who is willing to grow faster.

I wrote to about a dozen journalists on Linked who loved to complain about Elon Musk on Twitter. A short paragraph saying about how Mastodon is growing and that the best way to combat Musk power would be by stripping his platform of reputable people.

Zero responses.