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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
284 points (65.0% liked)
Unpopular Opinion
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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