I discovered lemmy back when reddit started to charge for their API. However upon taking a look at it, it seemed that apart from like 8 communities,there was not much going on elsewhere. Things seem to have changed since then, quite a lot of active communities these days. So how many users do yall reckon lemmy has now? Is it close to 5M? or perhaps even higher?
The worse two things to happen to lemmy when the reddit api migration happened is people created clones of their subreddits multiple times on different instances but when it didn't take off immediately they just abandoned it. The second was bot posting no one is going to engage when op is not real and thus you have zombie communities with zero comments. So it looks like a ghost town instead of a letting grow organically.
But that's my point it wasn't created organically one community at a time but a flood of clones with the same names at subreddits vs having there own identity. So instead of one community on one instance known for one topic you have twenty that are watered down and no one knows where to coalesce.
not disagreeing with your overall premise, but do clearly labeled bot news aggregator communities need much interaction right now?
I read many of the articles on bot feeds and will sometimes comment on ones that I think should get a few more eyeballs. others do the same and I appreciate their prodding as well. for my usecase lemmy in its current state has been absolutely wonderful, and I am enjoying watching it evolve.
Yeah I'm glad it works for you but at that point you are using lemmy like a RSS feed reader and at that point just use an RSS feed reader. But my point was trying to explain the lack of engagement that drives more content. Sometimes the post is secondary to comments in some cases.
I know I engage way more on lemmy than I ever did on reddit. I think I posted more on here in the first year then I did the whole 11 years on reddit. Lemmy reminds me more of the old forum days than reddit or Digg. I wish lemmy would have followed the forum model more with an instantce having just 2 to 3 communities all around similar theme like how the star trek instance does it vs everyone trying to be an mini reddit. Also I know it's ironic me saying that with my account being from .world
Mastodon is the biggest fediverse platform and that has just short of 900k MAU (monthly active users) with around 8M registered users.
In terms of non activity pub but federated protocols, matrix is probably the biggest with a user count in the hundreds of millions. They also market very well to goverments and the public sector tho so they get lots of users from massive deployments with millions of users on one server.
Doesn't matter as much for lemm.ee as it's more of a utility than an instance, but I see instances more like traditional "subreddits" and comms within them as "hashtags" and categories. Hexbear's "games" comm is very different from Lemmy.mls, as an example.
I remember in the early days people saying that Lemmy wasn't succeeding. Very frustrating to hear because it was like the very early days. And look at it now!
Me too. On Voyager you can add personal tags for people. It also displays how often you're upvoting or downvoting each user account. Very helpful for keeping track of who's who!
https://lemmyverse.net/ in there you can search instances and communities, and If you Have an account on a y lemmy servwe you can use Its search function or if You use clients as Jerboa you can search communities with Its search function.
I follow a lot of communities on Lemmy most of them are not as actives as their peers on Reddit but there are
I guess the question is “is bigger better for an internet community?”
Like, old forums were a lot more interesting then today’s giants (Reddit etc), even if not much was posted from day to day