This right here encapsulates exactly what my biggest complaint with this platform is. A news post about a controversial topic in a completely unrelated community. I’m literally on my knees, guys. I just want to talk about drawing fantasy maps and developing conlangs. Worst part is that worldbuilding/conworlding is a perfectly acceptable way to articulate your worldview, and you might even get people to listen to you if you’re creative about it, but nah that’s not blunt enough.

And yeah, it could have been posted in error, but given what I previously described about !mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world, it very well may be on purpose.

Because Reddit exists.

Reddit itself didn’t truly take off to massive scale until some other players were out of the way. It was the underdog for a long time.

It’s a nightmare to even sign up.

Nothing else to it.

People will move en-masse to new platforms if the switch is easy. Nothing easy about using this platform.

Obv the people here are techy enough to surmount the initial hurdles, but don’t kid yourself, the average person doesn’t know a damned thing. Using tech and understanding tech are two vastly different skills. And you actually need to understand tech to even get started here.

Cos we’re all losers and no one wants to sit at our table

1. Because people still use Reddit (for some reason).

2. Because it is fragmented and hard to understand how it works for average person.

Same reason star trek and Linux isn’t more popular. It’s for nerds

People aren’t here for Lemmy in particular. They’re here to avoid the others. If all you want is content, you’ll just go to Reddit. If you are here, it’s because you recognized something of the awfulness in corporate reddit but liked the format. Lemmy is Reddit for people who pay attention and care.

not advertised, not run by a for profit company

Whaaaaaat? It has a far better signal to noise ratio than those ‘other’ platforms. As long as you’re into Star Trek memes and Linux.

network effect. There’s fewer people here so there’s fewer people here.

That said, I like it just how it is and would caution anyone against wishing for more users.

Don’t focus on getting more users. Focus on making the content here the best it can be.

It’s inevitable that the quality of the experience here will change with more users. Whether it’s a net positive or negative remains to be seen.

To be sure, these are the “good old days” of lemmy.

I’d say because it’s still new and the content is very nerd heavy as you have probably seen from all the Linux posts. Also, most user’s here come from the reddit exodus after the removal of third party apps.

One other thing is that when you link content from Lemmy you can just link the image directly instead of sending a link to Lemmy with a login screen. The adoption rate from people linking will be a lot lower since Lemmy is not sacrificing quality to increase numbers.

Either way, I like the size and it suits me, I can “finish” my Lemmy for the day in a reasonable amount of time and I get my fix of Linux news, memes and shitposts so it’s just a win for me.

Network effect. Reddit has more users and more discussion, drawing in more people and discussion. I’m not worried because enshittification and bots will run it into the ground

The verification aspect of signing up for an instance. People say they’ll leave Reddit but still go back to it. I was one of those until I remembered how they murdered my boy Apollo.

I don’t know a single person that knows it exists other than a few that ive tried to get interested. I have told a few friends that use reddit but they just don’t get it.

I started lemmy a few months ago, stopped using reddit completely a few weeks ago and I don’t miss it other than all the dog posts…more people need to post pics of their doggos on here !!!

counterpoint, lemmy is popular enough

I’m okay with having a lot less people in lemmy if it means there less nazis and less toxicity