Bigger isn't necessarily better
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
73 points (80.2% liked)
Asklemmy
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This.
Yeah, sure , but I believe there is a Goldilocks zone we are not yet in
That's not what she said :'(
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- Be friendly to other Lemmites. Encourage them to post and comment.
- Post and comment whenever you can.
- If you have niche hobbies or interests, try posting about them into an appropriate community.
Social networks and message boards get more popular as they get more users. Bring friendly and posting regularly should help us maintain the user base.
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I personally enjoy that Lemmy isn't as popular as Reddit. It feels more home-grown and friendly because it's not as large. That being said, contributing to and engaging with the content you enjoy is a good start. Finding a niche here can be great and there are tons of interesting communities to contribute to!
Network effects are quite difficult to overcome. Lemmyβs largest influxes of users have been when Reddit does something unpopular enough to warrant people looking for other places. Same was true when Reddit became popular because Digg made bad decisions, or Facebook when MySpace did.
The answer is that Lemmy almost assuredly will never be as popular, but at least its future is not dictated by the profits of a company, or censorship imposed by or on that company.
The best we can do is make Lemmy a viable alternative (it is) and ensure it is of a high quality.
Anything that gets that big turns into a shithole. Enshitification will find a way. So just don't.
Enshittification is a symptom of capitalism at work. Over time products are laser-focused to be as profitable as possible. Scale isn't the issue, capitalism is.
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Just look at every single big subreddit lmao. The only way to use that site is to leave every single default and join smaller communities.
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But why ?
Why would you want that? I think of lemmy as an old message board. I think it's better that way.
Because of a severe lack of content. On Reddit you can find a community for basically anything. On Lemmy there are only a few alive ones. E.g. there are very few alive country communities.
Why?
I'd say concentrate on quality over quantity.
Exactly. I sort through the top 6 hours or top daily. Thereβs not a lot of posts, but they are all high quality ones.
Reddit is the opposite. I have to go through trash to reach a few good posts. Bigger =/ better
There only thing Reddit has over Lemmy is their awesome niche subreddits. Outside of that they have nothing and being more like Reddit is not something we want. With attention comes heavier moderation.
+1
Reddit can keep all the gigasubs. Let the niche fandoms trickle over hereβ¦
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Why would we want to do that? Please don't.
Why would we want to do that?
So that we can discuss more niche hobbies with other people who love that hobby.
if you build it they will come
Factually untrue. There just aren't enough people interested in certain topics who are regular users of Lemmy & Piefed to have those communities be thriving.
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Ooooh, no thank you.
Have you seen that place? Gives me the icks.
Porn.
Like any type of media, you win by getting porn on your side. Bring the NSFW content creators over and everyone else will follow.
There's a whole instance dedicated to porn, isn't there? At least there used to be, is it still live? My instance is defederared from it so idk.
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There's admittedly some things I miss from Reddit like bigger niche communities, but I would never want this to get as popular as reddit, because then you'll end up just getting the same problems as reddit down the road and we'll all have to migrate again. And who wants that?
If we could somehow keep the bigger Communities the same size they are now, while growing niche Communities, that would be ideal. It's logically impossible though.
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Please no
As popular as that swamp?
Oh fuck no dude. Let's fucking not
I would rather not. Lemmy is not Reddit.
Up/Downvoting is so 2015. Instead, comment on any interesting posts, and especially the ones with zero comments. This platform is meant to be about discussion, and not just mindlessly sharing links or memes.
I, personally, am more inclined to check out a post if it has at least one (non-bot, non OP) comment.
Keep the light alive as Reddit further enshittifies
Why would we want it to be? More people is what ruins websites. A big part of why reddit sucks is the large number of idiots.
Because there are not enough niche communities on Lemmy. For example as a queen fan, lemmy has no queen community but the r/queen community is thriving with many posts going up every day.
Also lemmy is currently very underfunded and the only way to really help that is by having more people.
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I think the ideal would be not how to make it "like Reddit", but how to help niche and smaller communities have more members. Unfortunately, I think the easiest way is just to get more users to Lemmy in general.
It is not just niche topics, I find quite a bit of things that are not (in my opinion) niche, yet there is very little participation in Lemmy. Take for for example Postgresql. By now it is one of the most widely used databases yet there is a minuscule number of posts and users in the related communities.
Another example. Just did a search for largest communities in Reddit.. One of them is music with an estimated 38 million redditors. In Lemmy the largest two music communities seem to be 9.9K (!music@lemmy.world) and 18.9K (!music@hexbear.net). That is an astronomical difference for something that is as mainstream as it gets given the broad topic.
I think the best each one of us can do is to participate and post as often as possible in the communities we would like to see grow.
I understand the motive, I too am on some niche communities that sometimes didn't have posts for months. For that i use reddit (but the old interface). Now let's see your question.
No, we can't make lemmy as popular as reddit, but we can turn lemmy into a reddit twin, and make it popular, by pushing only one instance like .world.
The social media that popularised fediverse the most was mastodon, and yet it's because they pushed mastodon.social as the default, making a large part of the userbase think that mastodon is only mastodon.social.
People do not even notice things more complicated than buttons "join", "login", or "post". They are lost on join-lemmy.org because they don't know why they should choose a server, read description, understand whatever is federation, and they'll prefer going back to their comfort zone.
But hey, social media experience enshittifies as the userbase gets bigger, and i came here by fleeing reddit so please don't
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I don't really care. If it gets more popular, that's fine with me, but I'm fine with how it is now.
Why do people always go for Reddit as this comparison? It's not even the most popular social media. Is it because the question "How can we make Lemmy as popular as Facebook" makes it clear why that isn't something the users would want?
I imagine it's because Reddit is closer to the format of Lemmy and it's something we're more familiar with. I also wouldn't have known that Facebook was more popular because it's not something that anyone in my circle uses, but a lot of them use Reddit.
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lemmy is better than reddit, popularity will ruin it.
we dont.
I don't think the majority of people here would be happy if that happened.
We should probably gate keep discussion to try keep the standards high in threads where it makes sense. But from what ive seen its already pretty good and conversation feels very human. If we got a influx from reddit id want them to adapt to lemmy culture and not come here and be redditors.
Keep bringing it up on Reddit.
When I'm on Reddit, which is only if I fully exhaust myself on Lemmy that day, and I see someone complaining about Reddit, I make a point to let them know about Lemmy.
I donβt want lemmy to become as popular as Reddit
if you mean all the niche communities, then sub Reddit could provide a link to a lemmy alternative but no sub Reddit allows promotion so it's pointless.
since being banned from Reddit, i have felt there is something missing since i can't interact in my niche communities any more sadly
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