The flagship communities are quite alive, but the niche communities have not really taken off. I am talking from both the absence of such communities, and my experience trying to migrate !fluidmechanics. The subreddit has around 10k humans (or bots).

Because there are only a handful of communities that have enough traffic to sustain a meaningful conversation.

Even popular activities have low traffic, god forbid you want to participate in a community based around a niche activity.

I love Lemmy and I’m not going back to reddit… But sometimes it feels like a desolate wasteland here.

Well, for me, the site has very little to offer because I’m not into USA politics (I check on them, but that is not why I was on Reddit to begin with), and that is more or less the only topic with a self sustained community besides meme pages. So yes, I do want this place to grow, not a little, a lot.

it’s like 90% IT nerds here lol. whether you want growth or not depend on how okay you are with that. I love you guys but a lot of your hobbies bore me to shit and I want someone to talk to

It highly depends on what you’re here for. Some communities have gathered enough active members to expect a continuous influx of posts and comments.

The strength that Reddit has built over the years is that many niche communities also thrived and turned into a rich repository of knowledge that was searchable. Lemmy isn’t there yet, if you’re into fishing, knitting, Japanese chess or sourdough baking.

But it also doesn’t need to be a perfect drop in replacement for Reddit, it’s probably fine if it remains something different, slightly fringe and a friendly place that doesn’t require massive amount of servers and moderation staff.

I want all people to use Lemmy.

I want us to stop the tribalism. What made reddit fail was the management, not the users.

Yes some people suck, and if you ask me it’s most people, but diversity is powerful and without it we have no future.

On Reddit I went to specific subreddits and things were bubbling there, on Lemmy I pretty much have to stay on All to get any active content. I really don’t want Lemmy to reach eternal September, but we definitely need much more activity and a much larger user base than we currently have.

There are a lot of communities missing. I cant find anything financial related like /personalFinance, /financialIndependence, /povertyFinance, /frugal with any decent amount of interaction. Most with maybe 1 post or a handful of comments every month. Without gaining a lot of users there isnt enough content to stay

Like others already pointed out, it’s not about the size per se. It’s about the small odd communities of specific interest that we miss. These usually only thrive with numbers.

Then again, I used Lemmy for over a year and didn’t get a single death threat. I went back to check my Reddit account and had two in my inbox, I didn’t use the site since the exodus. Soooooooo, yeah. You win some you loose some.

Because the communities I care about are getting less than one post per month.

Come join us at !androidgamers@lemmy.world

Does anyone remember the inside jokes in the early days of reddit?

When does the narwhal bacon? Orangered Chuck Testa!! Ridiculously photogenic guy And of course the long list of meme-level posts like broken arms, cumbox, celebrity AMAs

This type of community humor made a lot of people feel like they’d found their tribe on reddit in those early days.

I haven’t seen much like this develop on Lemmy yet, possibly because there’s so many disparate communities merging. I’m not really sure. Or maybe all those 20-something redditors are now pushing 40.

I think it will take a while for a lemmy culture to develop and the community won’t attract outsiders much until it does.

I want the world to use open source tools.

I’d really like to see more posts come through, without the dip into the “copy Reddit posts” kind of thing. When I open Reddit, I can read 100 posts of varying topics, refresh an hour later and have a lot of new posts to ingest. Lemmy doesn’t have that much activity, so I end up looking at a very similar “popular” feed this morning, this afternoon, this evening. And 1/4 of those posts will also be in my feed again the next day.

On !fedigrow@lemm.ee there’s a weekly thread called “How are you doing with your communities?” It’s for/by all the people who single-handedly keep niche communities alive by posting regularly. It can be a tough job, and easy to burn out. That’s because of the relatively small population here on Lemmy.

However, I agree that I like the culture here better. On Reddit, even when I blocked ads I still felt like I was being marketed to and manipulated.

I want more small communities with people who really like specific things. For example if you want to buy a robot vacuum going to a community about it is very nice to read up on what people find important and maybe issues with a particular model. Even the memes sometimes have great info (think something like a popular vacuum that doesn’t pick up anything with “At least you tried” or spongebob meme pointing at stuff of increasing sizes referencing areas the vacuum missed)