Asklemmy

Just more people knowing about it. No one knows it exists.

Also, more normie subreddits. A lot of people join reddit for specific communities. The most active Lemmy communities are political or tech focused. Art communities like imaginarycityscapes or nosleep and fan communities for shows and movies draw in a lot of people. Lemmy's userbase is made up largely of people who are able to comprehend what federation is, which is limited to people who understand what a server even is, which has an impact on the type of content.

I'm not sure I agree with success = massive engaging community. One metric of success is if users engage and stick around... @nutomic posted a relevant point in another thread

For corporate social media it is definitely a competition, but I dont think it makes sense to see the fediverse in the same way. We dont make more money from having more users, in fact having more users results in higher hosting cost and more moderation effort. Maybe there will be more donations, but thats far from certain. So I am totally happy even if Lemmy doesnt grow, as long as it provides an alternative space that some people find useful.

Everybody seems to be in a rush to see this thing grow huge, or to solve all of their desires (federate with mastodon!) That people see it this way though and that make about it means they have a passion for it.

My 2c

• Donate funds to the devs to allow them to continue to develop or expand the project
• Post content outside the core foss/privacy loop

Besides being fully finished (it's not even on version 1.0 yet)? I'd say topic variety. Currently most of lemmy's content is very techy stuff, which is enough for people like me who are into that, but reddit has active communities for a lot of interests. Lemmy stuff is like, privacy this, linux that, tor this, development that, while reddit is more like, privacy this, conlang that, drawings this, water that, politics that other thing, etc

I think this is the kinda stuff that will come over time as people start using Lemmy, tho. Art nerds, water nerds, bird nerds, etc will come around and create communities for their interests, and people who are interested in those things will come to share their interests too

I have been Reddit user for years, because I found the technical communities there that I liked. Since a couple of weeks I am using Lemmy and didn't look back. Yes we need more people in the communities, but I already like the content I am able to find here. Reddit is more massive, but there is a lot more thrash there as well. I would like to see projects like LineageOS, Pine etc. moving their presence here.

Hey, I'm new to Lemmy and I can tell you about the missing part - clients.

I accidentally found Lemmy client in F-droid (lemmur) it's pretty good, but lacks a lot of QoL features.

I think, having multiple clients for all platforms will help with userbase and content.

Add Lemmy clients to Google Play, Apple App Store, Amazon App Store, Huawei App Store, etc.

More clients -> more people find out Lemmy -> more users will join Lemmy -> more content will be posted by these users.

Of course it's my own opinion, not pretending to be the only way

I think there's a lot of QoL features missing that make it less user-friendly than most sites and the difference is pretty stark when you compare it to reddit especially. Some examples:

-Being able to "view all images" so that you can just scroll down without having to open every image manually

-Being able to open videos from within the site

-More filters/sorting options. You can't sort by controversial comments, you can't search by community/post/comment, you can't view all submitter's comments

-Being able to hover over an image and have it open (with extensions like imagus, hover zoom, etc)

-Having a preview of your comment below (the preview button doesn't do that)

-A better search function. Right now it's not very accurate and sometimes doesn't yield results.

-Being able to expand the comment box you type in

-Smaller margins. Right now, everything is in the middle. This is fine for individual comments, but once you start getting lots of replies, where everything is inched over slightly, then comments far down the chain are basically thin strips of text.

-a phone app

These are some that stand out to me. I agree with other commenters that the site is still new, and unknown. But if people do discover this site and find it's functionality to be annoying, then they may be turned off from using it, especially when they're likely more comfortable on other platforms already.

Time.

I think something that definitely is still missing is an obvious way to migrate existing communities over to lemmy as gracefully as possible. Some kind of bridging, perhaps via bots, would be nice and it looks like I am not the only one thinking this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1542

There is one thing that none of the reddit-clones have -> languages.

Language-based sub-domains, just like wikipedia. The way reddit and lemmy do languages just isn't sufficient.

i wish there was some kind of moderation feed where i could see all the posts from communities that i moderate, where i could mark them as seen. that way moderation would be much easier.

also ability to search in communities. or alternatively some kind of tag system for search, where i could specify search parameters, for example query like that "problem -c:lemmur" could search only in community !lemmur the phrase "problem"

:)

It seems like there needs to be people who know how to build an instance community. It would be great to have a history, philosophy, psychology instance that someone builds into a thriving community of experts. Same for science, music, photography and a dozen things others are interested in. They don’t need to be niche or dogmatic, but there should be a reason to join.

Many people seem to think the constrained by design, under active development flagship is going to spawn reddit level communities, but the point of the whole thing is to go build or find your own. So far several of the instances have been regional or politically divisive which seems to serve a need, but online-extroverted leaders with a desire to put themselves out there seem few and far between (those can build are probably building for-profit exit strategy communities).

Anyway, if there was something missing, I would say community builders.

Large userbase without the xenophobic, homophobic, racist and discriminatory scum. Lemmy is growing in a slow yet steady direction, and I am here to assist admins in building it up (thanks Skeleton for bringing me here).

I do not like what and how Reddit is (50% USA 30% West EU audience), consisting of straight up racist discriminatory and even white/Anglo supremacist moderators, and power trippy moderators as well supported by corporate consumerist users, banning people without context and hiring pedophilics as admins like Aimee Challenor and protecting them via sitewide ban rules.

Lemmy is new. REALLY new. It's not as mature as other federated services and naturally also doesn't have their userbase. It's too early to say anything at this point. We need to wat for development to progress, users to come overtime and in the meantime share stuff from outside so we can have content to view here.

I plan on setting up my own server within the next couple months, but thorough tutorials would be a good way to boost the community I imagine.

Why to have massive community? More and more instances what is needed

A larger community.

From what I've seen when a community dies, you need to seize the moment and invite those people to come to a new place. Like for example, if r/GME finally gets banned, many would need a new similar place to lurk; after many are aware of it, it's only a matter of time.

I think better UX. Just writing this comment, I can see 25 button on my screen, 20 links, and everything centered towards the middle of the screen.

I think the community is ripe for discussion and doesn't have too much noise (which is a perfect ingredient for growth), but the UI could do better looking a little more like Ruqqus and less like Element (not the best example, but an example of cluttered UI nonetheless)

I know people will disagree with me that the "UI isn't cluttered", but I want to note it won't look cluttered through your lens if it's the same UI you've been seeing for months on end.