User count has plateaued at about 420K

Active user count rose significantly between 2/24 37K to 3/24 51K

Hopefully users who signed up last year are coming back to use their accounts.

Maybe because they’re tired of ads on reddit?

Should we put together a collection and and buy an ad campaign on Reddit?

I can see it now:

“Ads suck. We’re ad-free forever. Join Lemmy.”

and

“He’ll never get us. Join Lemmy.” or “Don’t let him get you. Join Lemmy”

  • @darkkite@lemmy.ml
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    751 year ago

    ads cost money to increase users to eventually profit from them later.

    how would a decentralized lemmy profit from the increased users.

    Any money spent on ads would be better off hiring more engineering resources and improving lemmy for the next time Reddit does something dumb prompting an exodus.

    • @mondoman712@lemmy.ml
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      11 year ago

      The idea is for some users to pool some money together to buy ads, not for the platform to do it. I guess the idea is that as users, we benefit from the additional content that comes along with more users.

      • @Umbrias@beehaw.org
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        11 year ago

        Because of the flat and nonprofit nature of Lemmy “users pooling money together” is the platform allocating budget.

  • Otter
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    1 year ago

    My reasons against that

    • we’d be directly giving money to Reddit
    • users dislike the places they see ads about, and it would appear extra desperate because of the point above
    • money is better spent supporting developers and content creators on here

    Not to mention that Reddit will probably shut that down

    That doesn’t mean we don’t do anything though. A number of subreddits continue to have automod messages and pinned posts directing people elsewhere. There are a lot of people on Reddit who WANT things to succeed here.

    So some other ways to help.

    On Reddit:

    • work with subreddits to set up parallel communities here, and ease the transition of people moving

    • find subreddits that benefit from backups / fediverse communities, and work with them to improve things

    On the fediverse:

    • write up guides and update existing resources to help newcomers

    • Post interesting content on the fediverse. People use things they get value out of, and new people won’t stay if things are quiet here. Set up an RSS feed, share the cool videos you see, write about your thoughts on casual communities.

    Specifically financial:

    • Donate to the development of a project you like. If you can, reoccurring donations provide stability for the developers to work on things.

    • Donate to the instances that are running the services and platforms

    TLDR:

    • Money can help, but paying for ads isn’t the way to go (at least not yet)
    • Otter
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      101 year ago

      I do like your ad ideas nonetheless @zabadoh@lemmy.ml. If we were swimming in money, it could be more of a discussion

      A near black screen with small text at the bottom would be fun. “Ads suck, so we removed one for you. Come to the Fediverse for ad-free social media”

  • Maeve
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    301 year ago

    I’m probably the weird one, but I specifically make it a point not to buy anything I’ve seen in any ad.

  • Diplomjodler
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    261 year ago

    Fight enshittification through enshittification? Not really a good idea, if you ask me.

    • @jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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      31 year ago

      One of the effects of capitalism is that people are conditioned to think as growth in quantity is the end goal of all human activity.

      This makes it harder to realize that, as far as the Fediverse is concerned, at very least, Lemmy and Mastodon have achieved viable self-sustaining networks and that driving inorganic growth by targeting users in other platforms would reduce the viability of the network because it makes onboarding new users harder. An example of this even inside reddit was when a subreddit got a sudden large influx of new subscribers they invariably lost what made them stand out in the first place.

      • @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        21 year ago

        self-sustaining

        I’m hesitant about that. It’s still run by volunteers, and that’ll end when the volunteer gets tired of paying the bills for whatever instance.

        I think Lemmy needs to find a way to disassociate instance hosting from some individual kindly paying the bill. It doesn’t need to be profit driven, just a way to get people to donate enough to keep the servers going.

    • @zabadoh@lemmy.mlOP
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      31 year ago

      It’s fear of calcification. Lemmy is tiny, in terms of our user base.

      If we don’t get fresh blood, and most importantly the rare active contributors, we’ll just get used to talking to each other, we’ll get bored or burned out and leave.

      • @doublejay1999@lemmy.world
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        11 year ago

        I understand. I suppose it is a risk, but I prefer the arguments against inorganic growth, put by others here.

        A compromise could be, seeking to grow individual subs - so people come because of their interest superbowls for example - rather than an effort to attract every yahoo with nothing better to do on the internet.

  • @fishos@lemmy.world
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    121 year ago

    “are you sick of ads? Heres an ad!” Doesn’t have the same impact you think it does.

    Also, food for thought: you really want to invite the kind of people who can’t use adblockers here? Barriers to entry aren’t necessarily a bad thing. You want quality, not quantity. More people isn’t necessarily better. And the people who stuck by reddit and spez through all of that?

    • pruwyben
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      91 year ago

      “Ads suck, and Reddit sucks. So we paid Reddit to show you an ad.”

  • Lvxferre [he/him]
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    91 year ago

    Besides the reasons already mentioned by others here: not all users are the same, and we’re better off if some of them remain in Reddit. And yet this sort of advertisement is bound to attract people who are at the very least completely clueless (otherwise they wouldn’t be seeing ads), if not worse.

    Instead I think that a better approach is to simply use the platform. Create posts, insightful comments, use the voting buttons. Also, discourage people from derailing non-political threads with political content.

  • @Sam_Bass@lemmy.ml
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    51 year ago

    Up to you. But i wouldnt waste the time or money unless you want your site’s iq to fall at an accelerated rate

  • @guts@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I think just trying to gather any redditor is a bad idea, there are really bad twisted redditors.