I noticed during posting here in lemmy that there is next to no comments at any post here, regardless of the topic or the sub compared to any other website (reddit, quora, saidit, etc…) .
I started to feel that I am speaking to the void.
What is the real number of active users here?
Is there a growth plan for lemmy?
Lemmy is both a smaller community and a lot more “opt-in” than other sites. Each instance may or may not federate (read: link up) with others, and to find communities you have to explicitly search for them. There is no algorithm nor massive popularity to shove communities in your face, so less people are aware. What Lemmy needs is more adoption by people. Growth is going to be the only way that the community aspect survives.
It’s unfortunate, but we usually see the biggest growth when communities are forced to migrate when they get booted off other platforms.
Lemmy as a whole is still missing the community engagement necessary for people to want to start migrating on their own. The snowball hasn’t started rolling down the hill yet, but we’ll get there.
While this is true, I think we also need to do a post-mortem on the genzedong migration some time.
My impression is that a lot of people on lemmy.ml stopped posting afterwards as the genzedong people would dogpile on anything even slightly outside of their misguided hivemind ideas. It killed off entire communities on lemmy.ml for sure.
Overall it was probably a net negative in user numbers as a lot of the genzedong people also seem to have stopped coming to Lemmygrad after a short while.
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A few issues I’ve seen with adoption in the federated/open source world-
There is a technical barrier to entry. The fact that you’re on a website that’s connected to other different websites in the same interface is one that people aren’t particularly familiar with. For a social website, questions around moderation and who you’re interacting with are problems which are hard to address if you’re unwilling or incapable of learning the terminology you need to learn to understand how this works.
Each entry point into this website system is slightly different as well - how it presents itself, the design, who participates on that entry point, what kind of discussions exist. You might stumble across a lemmy instance as your first introduction to lemmy that doesn’t appeal to you and not recognize that it’s not everything that’s available on lemmy and discovering that can be difficult. The same is true of other federated websites.
As you mentioned there’s also issues with algorithmic feed. This is what leads a lot of people to stick with a particular platform. They want content to come to them, rather than searching for it, and they aren’t always aware what content they want. Federated content is much more pull oriented than push oriented and until someone codes an algorithm to push I think there will be a lot of resistance with a particular subset of individuals who are interested in pushed content rather than pulled