I’ve noticed this in many places in the Lemmyverse in my first few days here. When first signing up almost all the instances were listed as having 2 or less active users. The biggest was Lemmy.ml at something around 1000. Then I’ve seen those numbers listed in other places including a post yesterday that is supposed to help bring redditors to Lemmy.
These numbers will just get most people to turn around and not even consider Lemmy as an alternative.
I saw a GIF today showing the growth of user accounts on Lemmy instances and Lemmy.ml (for example) was over 30000 and many of the other servers were in the 100s, approaching 1000. That’s a HUGE difference and indicates a community that is 10 times (or more) more active than the initial numbers presented indicate.
Any thoughts? Am I out to lunch?
First, stop posting to lemmy.ml, the admins there are crazy. Don’t give them more content.
We redditors have waaaay enough number to populate our own instances without having to rely on the moderation of crazy people. Look at the population of beehaw skyrocketing since the last few days, we are the king makers. lemmy has never seen such an influx of members.
So pick whatever instance you prefer and we plant our tent there, and we path the way for the redditors who will inevitable follow us. Don’t feed them the same horrible experience we endured for the last few days of being exposed to the crazy moderation, the crazy putin apologists and such, we need to guide the ex-redditors to our instances, where we completely keep the crazy population away.
Hey, what about joining an EU instance, so when we click “politics” we don’t have 90% american stories? Beehaw is already filled with americans. Do you want more american politics, more american gun stories and more woke war, more nba stories? I don’t.
I’m on solarpunks now (https://slrpnk.net/), which is hosted in Portugal. Come here guys, we recreate our reddit from scratch with a taste of Europe.
One of the devs also pointed out on GitHub that by showing total user count, it favors older instances, which is exactly the case with Lemmy.ml you are describing
True, we should do everything to make users spread over different instances, and not end up with a “main” instance like mastodon.social.
I agree. Here’s a mockup I made of an alternative design that I think would be much more effective at attracting new users. Instead of presenting user count as a raw number, we should instead present it as a level of network traffic, which is a more helpful way of thinking about it that won’t push prospective users away.
Thinking more about this as I respond to other people… Another good thing might be to present some of the most active communities on different instances. It would give people something more concrete to entice them into the ecosystem then the abstract “join this server that’s aspiring to be a safe space.” What does that even mean?
I also feel like new users (me) will get intimidated by having to choose a server, without knowing what it means. Are you stepping into a walled garden? Does the server you’re on matter? If it does, why? How do I choose where I should join? I think there is too much choice and not enough pertinent info for a new user.
