this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Asklemmy
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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.
It's a bit sad that there's very little content (if any) about more niche topics though
I just want some skateboarders to head this way man. And some death metal folks to show me new music.
Well, a few niche topics are well/over represented. Linux & Communism are very niche in real life, at least in my experience, but quite well represented here.
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.
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.
Yes, ads would be unavoidable, but there would be the possibility of distributing the revenue more fairly. Otherwise, the only option would be to accept donations to accounts, but no one would likely use that. I'll say it again: ads are not an option in the Fediverse, not even in a transparent way, and not even though ads not only finance the internet, but have also traditionally been a major source of funding for things like quality journalism (subscriptions have never been the main source of income here). Nevertheless, it remains a fact that good content costs time and skill, and therefore usually money. Without monetization methods, there will always be a shortage of content that is more than just reposts from elsewhere. So it seems to me to be an unsolvable problem. But of course, I also completely understand why the Fediverse fundamentally rejects monetization—at least in the form of ads.
Even if ads were a thing, they would be instance specific, unless they just took the form of posts advertising things (much like Reddit has) which personally I find to be toxic as hell. How would that money make it to content creators?
Personally, I'd prefer to read posts from people who want to post them because they have something interesting to share or something they want to discuss, rather than people who are trying to maximize engagement because engagement = income. There's plenty of other places to go if you want to be fed that kind of content.
I think the sweet spot was 20-25 years ago when we had special interest forums with tight-knit communities around specific topics. It would be nice to get more engagement on Lemmy in niche communities, but I'd argue the way to achieve that is to go to other places where that content is posted, and share links to content on Lemmy, as a way to spread the word. Part of the problem there though is recognition, and if people see links to 20 different lemmy instances, they won't associate those with lemmy as a whole, they'll see it as all disparate things, and I'm not really sure how to solve that.
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.
Yes, that's clear. I didn't mean to imply that anyone here is getting paid, except for the operators of instances and Foss developers—and they presumably get far too little for their efforts.
I'm referring to Reddit: niche subreddits didn't get a lot of traffic, and prolific posters wouldn't see money for their efforts.
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
I actually disagree, but partly on the basis that the Fediverse is inherently fragmented and therefore even if a million people came to lemmy, how many would even appear to the average lemming? Maybe we can let a million flowers bloom, as they say.
I also quite like the smaller feel, but I will admit I miss having a ready stream of really cute animal photos and videos. It's a double edged sword.