I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.

the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.

So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.

edit: source for the graph

    • squaresinger@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      3 hours ago

      Because Lemmy, to this day, doesn’t do what Reddit does. Yes, the UI is similar, but there’s two big downsides to Reddit. One that’s important now, and one that’s important later.

      • Lemmy is tiny. Like, really small. The Linus Tech Tips form and the Crackberry forum each have more users and more activity than all of Lemmy combined. That means, you can talk about general things of Lemmy, like e.g. US politics, but there aren’t a lot of niche communities. On Reddit I can post a photo with some weird electronics component from the 60s and within minutes someone will post an answer identifying the component and telling me where to buy a replacement. On Lemmy, a corresponding community doesn’t even exist.
      • Lemmy scales terribly. Every instance holds a copy of all data that was ever posted in any community that any user on that instance ever subscribed to. That has two very negative effects:
        • Storage requirements are insane. Since most traffic is in big communities and most users will subscribe to the big communities, most instances need to store a copy of almost all of Lemmy. If Lemmy were to ever get to the size of Reddit, every instance would have to store data in the order of magnitude of all of Reddit. Imagine small hobby admins having to host data in the region of Petabytes or Exabytes. Nobody can afford that.
        • Admin work is insane. Since every instance holds a full, independent copy and doesn’t only cache, they are legally responsible for the content and have to moderate it. So if someone posts e.g. illegal pornography on one instance and it’s federated to another instance, the admin of the second instance needs to delete it or face legal consequences. That means, instead of the mods or admins of the original community/instance being solely responsible for keeping their stuff clean, everyone is responsible for everything and the same work needs to be done hundreds of times, once per instance.

      This horrible scalability means that right now instances are getting close to their limits (see e.g. lemm.ee closing down exactly due to these reasons).

      Lemmy has 40-50k monthly active users. Reddit has 5.16 billion monthly active users, so about 100 000x. If everyone on Reddit were to move over to Lemmy, Lemmy would be done. Just one day of Reddit-level traffic would be enough to jam up the history of Lemmy content so much that nobody could ever afford hosting a Lemmy instance again.

      • Butterphinger@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        I don’t know if you’ve convinced me to stay or go, but you’ve certainly convinced me of either or.

      • Arrhenius@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        2 hours ago

        Linux is actually a superior operating system with real benefits.

        Lemmy’s only benefit is more freedom of speech, which is valuable, but lemmy’s userbase is so much smaller that it’s kinda meaningless

        • Bazell@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          4 minutes ago

          Personally, I like the smaller userbase. Higher levels of freedom speech are still valuable even if only 1000 people may see your post/comment, rather than having you blocked by incompetent AI filter with no way to fight back.

    • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      3 hours ago

      Because reddit coddles nazis and lemmy doesn’t.

      Also niche communities exist on reddit that lemmy doesn’t have the population to support.

      • Arrhenius@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        2 hours ago

        Not true. I’m pro Trump, pro ICE and pretty transphobic/homophobic, all those stuff that you liberals consider nazism, but I get banned all the time.

        Truth is that any opinion that may offend anyone is banned on reddit. Reddit is gone

      • dudesss@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        3 hours ago

        I disagree. If Lemmy was plagued with Nazis, it would down the shitter pretty fast.