We might finally get a triumvirate of generalist, centrist instances!
…or .world will crash, burn, and implode
The best feature of Lemmy is that it isn’t as big as e.g. Reddit. I much prefer the size we have now to some big mega-site. Yes, there’s less content. Who cares? None of us need a constant stream of new content 24/7. It’s OK if you’ve viewed everything on your feed. It’s more reminiscent of forums from the late 90s / early 2000s, especially in the more mid-sized communities. I like that.
About 5 million people is the sweet spot. Went through it with digg. Went through it with Reddit. The amount of content here is enough for general content absorption, but not enough for any niche interests. For instance, on reddit there was a sub with 40k members for yo-yo’s. Here, one doesn’t exist in a usable form. 5 million is enough for most niche topics, but still manageable for controlling and keeping out all of the bullshit. By 10 to 15 million all the advertisers and manipulators and bots and money interests start taking over.
The irony if I stopped using Reddit because there wasn’t new content, at least not in popular. Once I saw the same stupid, fake story on wholesome for the seventh time in a week from yet another repost bot, I left. Lemmy revisits shit from like 10 years ago but at least if there’s a bullshit wholesome repost, it’d promptly get shit on. Lol
It’s a bit sad that there’s very little content (if any) about more niche topics though
I also care that there is very little content. I’ve tried getting conversations going on niche topics. My posts get upvotes, but no responses. It’s discouraging.
Preach. I tried getting some street photography going but nobody else posted and I gave up
I have nothing but respect for the users who are posting stuff into otherwise dead communities for months on end. Sadly, I don’t have that kind of dedication.
That’s the downside of having few users. In terms of basic principles, Lemmy is no different from other social media apps: The lion’s share just consumes, few comment, hardly anyone posts anything. In fact, it’s anything but a community approach, but rather the merit of a few “power users” who provide the vast majority of the content.
In addition, there are no monetization opportunities whatsoever. Many people see this as a good thing, which is understandable, but in fact there are perfectly normal people who try to make a living from their content or at least want to earn some extra money. I don’t think there will ever be any understanding for this on this platform. Therefore, there will never be such content here, because without monetization opportunities, there is no motivation to provide such content here instead of on mainstream social media platforms. I can imagine that the Fediverse could develop remuneration models that are much fairer and more sustainable, but this will fail from the outset due to ideology.
I think that’s a shame, but I think there is 0 chance this could even be discussed in the Fediverse.
The subreddits that I’m part of are too small for monetization. There are prolific posters (like our pugjesus), but nobody is making money from it.
I can imagine that the Fediverse could develop remuneration models that are much fairer and more sustainable
What do you even imagine that would look like, without degrading the experience for everyone else? Not throwing shade, just curious what you’re thinking of. Like, who is hypothetically paying in these scenarios, and where is the money coming from? I think everyone would agree that if it’s coming from ads or anything similar, nobody is interested.
Aside from the opinion on whether that would be good or bad, I think the infrastructure wouldn’t be able to absorb so many users in such a short time, unless many of them host servers, something that seems unlikely, even if they donate to existing servers I think many would crash or the admins would be overflow
Quality goes downhill. We’re far above mere adequacy right now.
I think the decline in quality is true. Any time a community gets big enough it becomes a target for manipulation and bots. We try to defend against these, but it’s hard.
Not sure the Lemmy community is at adequacy, but I think we’ve definitely a quality+quantity threshold high enough to be engaging and have new content every day, without having to scroll for hours to see things.
90% of the memes I see are posted by about 3 people that I know by name.
Speaking of which, nice username
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though I’m not sure I get the “train” bit
The servers would crash
My instance is more reliable than reddit ever has been
Yeah I agree but it simply cannot handle that volume. Lemmy servers are self hosted by hobbiest who simply don’t have the infrastructure for 1mil so suddenly
I guess it depends on how many inadequate people join them.
One million people will be posting here.
I would love it.
In the meantime it’s up to you and me to post half a million times each!!
A million? It will break.
Ten or a hundred thousand would be good, though. I expect as it grows it will follow the community trajectory of Reddit pretty well, although we’ll know not to nominate ourselves detective when there’s a marathon bombing.
the majority of instances would not be able to handle the load, leading to the smaller ones shutting down and the larger ones having to pay for increasingly more expensive cloud hosting, unless they want to spend a lot of money on upgrading their server(s) and internet connection
