For the unaware, Lemmy is a Fediverse alternative to platforms such as Reddit and Tildes. I've been using Lemmy as one of my main social platforms for the pa...

I made a blog post on my biggest issue in Lemmy and the proposed solutions for it. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

  • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    It’s about consolidating discussion so that communities (especially those with more niche appeal) can have a sustainable userbase

    Great, so let’s talk about how we can increase the overall userbase instead of worrying about whether we can optimize the system for the small number of people that happen to be here already. There is no point in designing that tries to help, e.g, 5 people that like Yu-Gi-oh!, when in reality the most likely thing to happen is that they will just leave it here and go to /r/yugioh which has 500 thousand subscribers.

    • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
      2·
      11 months ago

      But if you increase the userbase, you’ll end up with more ppl who like yugioh and want a community which leads to duplicate communities. But for niche topics, the duplicate communities are likely to end up with userbases too small to sustain enough activity. A way to combine communities makes it more likely that users find other users who want to discuss niche topics with them. That helps to grow the userbase.

      There is no point

      Yes, there is. If we can keep those 5 users here, its better than them being on reddit. There’s no reason not to work on this. We have multiple projects, each with multiple contributors, so we can do multiple things at one time.

      • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
        3·
        11 months ago

        But if you increase the userbase, you’ll end up with more ppl who like yugioh and want a community which leads to duplicate communities.

        Why? That’s a pretty big assumption to think a significant share of people will default to create a new community, when the most likely scenario is that they will browse around their own instance to find out what is already here.

        Even in the most extreme cases, we have 4-5 “repeated” communities and they all eventually consolidated into one.