I never was a big social media guy. Never had a Facebook or anything, except what google forced on me like Google+ and on reddit, I just used it for very specific tasks, when I couldn’t find answers anywhere else.
With the current shitstorm on reddit I decided that enough is enough and wanted to give this Fediverse I keep hearing about a try. With a little bit of searching around, I made an account, got the mobile app and things seemed settled. Until I tried finding stuff more targeted than a wall of posts on jerbil.
Granted, I haven’t read, let alone tried everything yet, but it seems limited, or most likely, I have no idea what I’m doing. Take for example emulation. One of the subreddits I was in, was about emulation since that’s a topic I’m passionate about. Good, went to the link provided to search for communities and got 11 results. As expected for the most part.
What was not expected was most of them being in the double digits of users with the biggest ones showing 3 posts and like…6 comments total.
I know that while the fediverse is not new by any means, there’s a large growth now with the shit happening over at reddit and is in by no means as populated or interacted with as the latter. But those numbers seem so small to me that I’m sure I’m doing something wrong.
Please help out an illiterate idiot?
PS. Emulation was just an example I was interested with. It’s not the point of my post.
A lot of niche communities haven’t jumped over in big numbers yet, we’re still in the phase where everyone has to congregate in the “general” communities. As those grow I think we’ll get the same thing we saw on reddit where niche communities splinter off when they start to overtake the conversation.
Yep! For now, sub to em all as you come across them to see the content.
The communities are still developing, but they’ll likely always be more fractured than Reddit was. Right now users, especially lurkers, are congregating to the most active instances and communities. Sounds like those aren’t the communities you’re most involved with.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the user history and contributions that Reddit is built on generally don’t exist here yet.
As you look around and get a feel for things I think you’ll find it feels more active and engaging than your initial impression.
Lemmy is still kind of rough around the edges and the mobile apps are still pretty immature. I think things will improve quickly as more people adopt the platform. Anyway you’ll have to put up with things being a bit green for a while, but they’ll get there.
I can’t speak for Jeroba since I mainly use a browser on PC, but the browser interface works well enough for me. Though I’m definitely looking forward to bug fixes and feature additions.
I’m here from Reddit. The big change for me is I’m subscribed to more communities because the population is a lot smaller. That’s good and bad, the good is I see a wider range of topics, the bad is I can run out of new topics to view. I can usually get my fill though.
I expect communities will grow quickly here in the near future. You can look for more active ones to subscribe to by checking out lemmyverse.net
The worst part about Jerboa is that up till now, I still have no idea how to search for keywords, I just get communities. It’s really hard to discover topics this way.
Not wanting to spam by replying to every post, this one is an answer to both TheOneCurly and solarvector. It seems I also figure out how to tag, yey me.
So you’re both saying that this is normal and not something I’m doing wrong, right? In that case, that’s fine with me, I can wait and totally understand the lack of numbers, I just assumed that even before reddit decided to fold over, there’d be some stuff around, even on niche communities. I wasn’t expecting a huge amount of content or discussions, but in the example given, there’s not even news posts about updates on software etc.
I’ll keep looking around. Seems interesting as a concept so far and I’m much more willing to spend time in lemmy compared to reddit or twitter or whatever gets plastered on my screen daily without my consent that I have to go out of my way to not interact with.
The more niche your interest, the slower it will be to build content. Certainly the most popular communities are already overflowing with content, while others have no home yet. But it’s all growing, and quickly. When LemmyNsfw launched, the only communities were the very obvious and popular ones. Those are now filled with a bunch of content, and more coming in constantly. But what’s more interesting is some of the more…ahem niche communities that have sprung up there, and are now showing signs of life.
There are sites like sub.rehab that can help you find where your content has moved. Not all of them are in the fediverse, either. But you may need to lump some of it into broader categories until interest grows. For instance, emulation might be covered under piracy, or one of the other subs on FMHY or DBZero. It won’t be exact, but it might be close enough.
You can also start your own community if you think there will be interest. Just be sure to prime the pump with some content right away to bring people in.
I’ll keep that in mind and wait. And if say a month from now things look the same on the subjects I’m interested in, I might give it a try at building something or most likely start posting stuff on existing but slow communities. At the very least, covering news wouldn’t be that hard and even if there’s no interest I can still use it as a personal repository later down the line.
I’ve also found that searching out more broadly focused communities helps. For example /c/retrogaming has emulation content, in addition to people with old hardware.
There’s something kind of refreshing about having to go out of your way to find content, rather than going out of your way to avoid it. It reminds me of the earlier days of the web with random geocities sites, forums, webrings.
But yeah even considering that it still feels kinda barren around here. I don’t think Lemmy was used much at all before the Reddit exodus - it’s still pretty new and heavy in development, and I don’t think was even really usable until recently. As many issues as it’s had supporting the massive influx of users, it’s lucky that it’s usable enough as a Reddit alternative with all the stuff going down over there.
Anyway, welcome aboard! Hopefully we can get things going soon enough :) I’ve only been around a few days but everything I’ve posted has gotten more attention and thoughtful responses than they would elsewhere, even with how small the communities are - I think once people see how much more rewarding it is to contribute here activity will start to snowball.
I’m facing similar problems. What helped me settle here, though, were the right tools. The most helpful being:
The Lemmy Explorer, which helps you find forums across all Lemmy instances: https://lemmyverse.net/
Lemmy Link, which make it easier to show forums on the lemmy instance you are using: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-link/
And, as a bit of a wild card, I made an RSS feed. If you don’t know what it is, it basically let’s you subscribe to websites so that any articles or threads show up in one big personal newspaper. That way, I can get both the few Lemmy topics that are here and supplant the rest with “loose” websites like blogs or news sites.
Lemmy is fully compatible with RSS as are many other sites. If a site isn’t, it’s fairly easy to make it compatible with a generator. After that, it’s just a matter of gathering the links you want.
I’d recommend checking out Feedly and just tinkering to see if it’s something you’d enjoy. It’s not a full replacement, but it does allow you to make things more personal.
