• deweydecibel
    link
    fedilink
    English
    6
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    There are plenty of users. The issue is they’re not all working together on the same content.

    That’s the really the issue with federation as a solution for Reddit. Reddit was what it was because of a single, shared userbase all commenting and voting on the same things. Like /r/place, it was one canvas, all hands contributed to it.

    The fediverse was sold to us as working the same way but the results have been the opposite. It’s fragmented with invisible walls.

    • zkfcfbzr
      cake
      link
      fedilink
      English
      510 months ago

      While I agree that federation currently works against Lemmy, and I’ve written to that effect before (Though I think most such issues can eventually be fixed on the software side), I still disagree that there are plenty of users. The entire active userbase of Lemmy is still fewer people than are subscribed to /r/Montana. /r/AskReddit alone currently has more unique people on it at the time of this reply than Lemmy has had in the last month.

      So that’s our problem: We’re trying to take the amount of people who might browse /r/AskReddit at its peak on a Wednesday, and using just them trying to rebuild everything on reddit. The userbase here is spread too thin. Federation is artificially spreading them even thinner, but even without it we’d still be desperately in need of new users.