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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
284 points (65.0% liked)
Unpopular Opinion
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I dabbled in them, but never saw a point in a community that small.
When niche communities have less than 10 active users there’s no point in continuing it. When a community can only get a few hundred people active at any given time on Reddit it has 0 chance of survival here without growth.
I’d rather a stream of crappy content to a trickle of ok content any day without a single bit of hesitation.
I noticed the community I was posting in only had like 5 active users but I get 20+ upvotes so theres more exposure than what it says.
Upvotes don’t matter if there’s no other engagement. They’re great in theory, but really don’t do anything. Without an algorithm they’re particularly meaningless since they’re not a metric for what’s being presented to users.
I do niche things like Simracing. The community is a tiny subset of a small subset of gaming. So there’s simply just a small pool of users to pull from. Niche specific communities are really struggling to take off here because there’s not a large enough user base to have enough people interested (and with the disposable income) to participate.
Lemmy is a great platform, but it’s not a solved problem. Growth is absolutely necessary for the platform to survive, or you’re going to quickly start losing users who are looking for specific niches. Also as far as I can tell there’s nothing else out there that has a decent amount of users.
Just gotta wait and see, redit was pretty barren in the early days too.
Absolutely, but growth is needed to make it less barren. Adding additional barriers to entry (what this OP was tangentially about) isn't ideal because the average user doesn't want to deal with instances or federation or managing multiple accounts across multiple instances (due to defederation) or anything technical before they even make their account.
We can't be hostile to less technical users. Not everyone needs to understand the ins and outs of federation and instances to be able to use the platform
You do you, I guess. We clearly do not see eye to eye on what “good” social media is or what it can be.
Clearly
I see a large number of users as a requirement for a successful platform
There many, many flavors of “success”. One is “having a large and growing number of users”. Another is “monetizing the absolute fuck out of anything you can, regardless of sustainability or ethics”. Yet another is “having a small, tight-knit, long-lived community that’s sustained itself for something like 2 decades”.
Just because you have a firm (yet simplistic) view of what “success” is doesn’t mean that anyone has to agree with you, be they users, mods, admins, or instance owners.
Then why are you here? Go back to Reddit where you can get your stream of crappy content.
Because I can’t browse Reddit on my phone anymore
Well, you technically can, but I can understand why using the Reddit app isn't seen as a viable option.