yup but its a good size from my experience when engaging with it overall. if we get larger we will definately need more niche things.
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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Asklemmy
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if we get larger we will definately need more niche things.
I can’t even count how many times I watched niche subreddits get ruined by the tyranny of the masses. As a niche thing becomes more popular, you get more casual lurkers. And those casual lurkers don’t typically have a strong knowledge on the subject. So they’ll start to upvote things that sound plausible and are eloquently written to make the reader feel smart for understanding it. But that doesn’t mean the info is accurate or correct; It just means the info appealed to the masses.
I work in a niche field of professional audio. The audiophile world has a lot of snake oil. Lots of people paying $2000 for solid gold cables when a wire coat hanger would sound exactly the same. I have seen “help, I have a buzz in my speaker and can’t figure out where it’s coming from” posts, where the top comment is suggesting a $7000 complete system rebuild… When all the OP needs is a 50¢ ferrite bead wrapped around one of their cables. But the “rebuild your system” comment was well written and sounded plausible to someone who only has surface-level knowledge, while the “ferrite bead” answer requires more in-depth knowledge on how interference is picked up in the first place. So the “rebuild your system” comment got pushed to the top.
Basically, nobody likes feeling dumb. And if a niche community gets popular, the laypeople begin to outnumber the experts. If a question has an answer that requires more than surface-level layperson knowledge, it will often get buried in downvotes from the laypeople. Not because it was incorrect, but because it made casual readers feel dumb. Even if the experts know better, they’re simply outnumbered.
On paper, Lemmy does look like there's a lot. In practice, there's not really a lot that reflects the total number of registrations.
Reddit, even with its bots and whatever, still has a large amount of active users compared to Lemmy.
Yes. Go up to someone on the street and ask what Lemmy is.
That's fine, though, we're not going anywhere, and we can only grow.
it can easily shrink
How? Something else would have to pull community members away from the fediverse. I don't know what that would be right now.
Meanwhile, non-federated platforms will enshittify, be bought out by a crazy billionare who wants to ruin everything, or (like has happened with other, older monopolies) be broken up during a dynastic feud. I see some strong parallels to how Linux has outgrown proprietary alternatives over the decades, and arguably it's even harder for an OS.
How?
The number of people who use it decreases when the number of people who stop using it over some period of time is greater than the number of people who join
Yeah, but like, I gave some actual reasons why that probably won't happen.
How?
It is difficult to find conversations on the Fediverse that don't boil down to "America bad" "Linux good" "is the Fediverse growing?" and if that trend keeps up for terribly much longer people will stop logging in because they've experienced all the platform has to offer. Even people who hate America and love Linux are going to wander off if you don't show them enough cat pictures.
Threads like "ask a question and my guinea pig will type the answer" are way too rare here.
That hasn't been the trend though.
Lemmy (also mastodon, in effect fediverse) is about quality and interaction, rather than consumption. So userbase being “tiny” is a feature. Here, your posts aren’t buried under karma farming accounts, your comments actually lead to discussions and get replies.
I’ve switched to RSS feeds for my consumption habbits
I agree. Lemmy today feels like reddit 15 years ago.
Well said, the emphasis here seems to be more about the content rather than the amount of upvotes you can get. But as this community grows so will exploiters as well. Time will tell I guess, but I really enjoy this platform more than any other.
I’ve switched to RSS feeds for my consumption habbits
are you using an app to do this?
I use NetNewsWire on iOS
No OC, but i "read you" on fdroid. Imo its the best option I've found for mobile.
On desktop there are a lot of options but i dont have a sigular recomendation.
Where does one find RSS feeds to subscribe to?
I'd like to know myself.
Plenty of blog sites support rss by just adding /index, /feed, /atom to the sites names Example: https://www.ntietz.com/atom.xml https://chriscoyier.net/feed/
So I've just been adding them gradually as i encounter blogs i care to read.
There are probably lists you can search online but I find that adding /feed or /rss to the URL of a page I want to see updates from does the trick. There is also at least one Firefox add-on that indicates if a page has an RSS feed.
Normally you can paste the blog url directly into the rss reader and it will find the feed automatically.
rss feeds
Can u elaborate how you are using it
I follow blogs, gaming news and various other websites via RSS, and check my RSS reader couple times a day for new articles. Whenever they publish a new article, reader fetches it and there’s always something to read
There are plenty of pointless posts and comments here daily, but let’s hope for a quality future
A particle on an object.
Reddit seems to be about 1000x bigger.
It should be noted that social media companies like reddit, facebook, twitter, etc all have major incentives to inflate their user counts (with bots, or counting inactive users). Those user counts are the product that they're selling to advertisers to set up on their platform.
We don't have that incentive, in fact its the opposite, we'd rather have less users that are more active, as more users require more moderation resources and time.
That is a valid point. If we take those numbers with a hefty heap of salt, Reddit would still be 10x or 100x bigger than Lemmy.
Atleast we are growing steadily. Never heard of misskey tho
Misskey is like "the default" fediverse software for Japanese and (Asian) ACG (Animation-comic-games) communities.
This side of fediverse is relatively big, but almost their community rarely reach out Western fediverse mostly due to language and law-related stuff. They have unique photography, online comic market, and and various creative centric community that rarely found on mainstream Western fediverse.
In fact, before Mastodon.social, the biggest fediverse instance is Japanese -- Pawoo.net. At that time, it was managed by Pixiv (Japanese equivalent of DeviantArt), but later sold to random corpo, the moderation collapse, and now abandoned by its community.
Yup, and Reddit started in 2005 (which is 2 decades ago now) with its large migration in 2010. Lemmy only really got going in 2023, and it's growing
Misskey is a Mastodon style platform, that is popular in Japan and existed from a while back. They added activitypub support in 2018
Not even comparable. /r has more users and bots.
Plot twist: reddit is one guy and all his bots.
Interestingly
https://lemmy.ca/comment/5057563
The original reddit was closer to hackernews than the generic site it is now. Not only that but spez has admitted that the original traffic was artificial, by which I mean, the owners themselves were creating fake engagement through various means, such as scraping and cross-posting content from sites like digg via sockpuppets to appear that the site had way more traffic than it had.
bot users? yes!
human users? well, yes.
Assholes? Yes too
You can see some stats here.
1337 you say
Haha. Obvs Lemmy is only for the leet.
Where do you see this chart?
On my phone. (In serious, the link to the picture is in the first comment of this thread)
Lol thanks for clarifying
Nice. How often is that updated?
Daily I think. It's an automated thing.
Pretty interesting how the number of active users per month has been fluctuating up/down but the number of comments and posts per month has been steadily going up