I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
Part of the issue (I feel a large part ) is that the learning curve is too steep to get on Lemmy
Now I’m not saying it’s hard at all; but it’s significantly higher than simply “go to a main page and create a user name and password”. Lemmy needs a sign up page that just random signs you up to an active instance (per the instances permission) and automatically subscribes you to the 50 most active instances to just get you started up.
Making a getting started page that’s as idiot proof as any .com would probably go a long ways into upping our numbers here.
Random instances are problematic. As others have said you might end up on one of the weird instances. More likely though… you just end up on a dead instance, take one look at the “local” feed and think that’s all the content.
I felt I was being pretty specific about “the most popular”. If the most popular instance is dead, we got problems.
The random one can send you to places like hexbear.net (I’ve tried the randomizer, and I’m not joking it actually truly did pick that very instance for me). Have you ever visited that place? It’s like being sent to a leftist MAGA rally. If I was sent there, I’d nope out and never return to the Threadiverse again.
Another place the randomizer can send you is lemmy.ml. Have you seen all the posts calling for outright murder of people living in the Western world? Well, let’s just say that a mainstream non-technical normie user who is currently living in a Western world is not likely at all to feel terribly welcomed there.
Hexbear is nothing like a leftist MAGA rally. It’s more like a MAGA rally.
i call it the mirror version of conservatives, they talk like right wingers, respond like them, post nonsense like them, and often uses the same BUZZWORDS. they think they are clever buy calling things shitlib, if its not just a shoe-in for libtard, and wokeness.
I’ve seen the same arguments against liberals here used against Bernie Sanders on Instagram. “Why aren’t you doing more about Palestine?”, “Why’d you let this happen?”, “why are you too powerless to influence policies?”. I know some bots follow a script. The only difference here is the framing.
And it worked. So many did not vote for Harris… (tbf the electoral system in the USA is fairly bork3n and complexicated, with the vast majority of votes not actually mattering, especially in blue states that would have voted for her regardless) and looking back, who can say if the campaigns had any effect? Though they did seem to try to have an effect, and that alone should mean… at least something to us? (in terms of actions taken, it seems to have not, but should it have?)
Just as there are facts and then there are uh… ah… “alternative facts”, so too there is an Alt-Right, and they represent basically an Alt-Left.
Or something, I have no fucking clue what is really going on over there. It does seem more like whatever they are, their beliefs are not genuine - as in they even troll themselves so hard that some of them forgot that they were doing it!?!
I gotta say, Xi’s version is way more effective than Donald’s
even the banners and display they use its obviously very “pro-communist”
all yea, new users are more likely to get confused that you can only sign up for 1 account per instace, and not 1-for all like with reddit, so they get fustrated because they couldnt understand why they made a lemmy account on world, and cant login in anorther.