I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
We need comments, that is the problem. Small communities don't get any positive feedback via engagement, which causes them to die as the owner/sole poster feels like no one cares.
Simply link dumping (effectively what most posts are on content aggregators) is the easy part. Seeing even 1 comment inclines someone to open up the post to read the comment, which makes them in turn likely to reply and it builds from there to a hot/active conversation.
If you can just aim to write that first comment on or two posts a day in more niche communities, it will help achieve growth.
Now this I do and I'm glad it helps
Thank you for your service o7
75% of small communities, if not higher, don't use lemmy-federate to expand the visibility of their community. The user makes the community, broadcasts a few posts locally and then gets sad that no-one replies (because it can only be seen locally). Nor do they make use of !newcommunities@lemmy.world or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca to advertise.
I use lemmy-federate a lot to help this, but it's sometimes too late after they set the comm up.
That's another good point.
PieFed has at least taken some steps to work on this, with it automatically posting new communities to NewCommunities and auto-subbing the instance to those posted there.
If the Lemmy devs stopped pushing ML propaganda, transphobia, and genocide denial and actually worked on the software, we might be in a better place today.
I have proposed piefed instances be able to opt into automatic federation with other selected instances when a community is made. I think it might work like that now via a toggle. Rimu would confirm.
Obviously smaller, personal instances would opt out of that but for general-use instances it makes sense.
Might be "Automatically add new remote communities" toggle on the admin side.
Then again if it's some guy in his corner doing stuff on his own, is it really a community ?
This is my analysis too. And why, instead of just upvoting posts that interest me, I try to think of something to say about them too. The dreaded "0 comments" is never a good look no matter how we much we tell ourselves that it doesn't matter.
For this reason I tend to believe that many communities just have too much primary content. Too many posts and not enough comments.
Thought experiment. 2 communities:
Which is the healthier community?
My experience is that it's more like this:
Not every post is a hit, so if you cast wide you're likely to get a greater return on comments as something is bound to attract attention. The way the sorting works is that the 5 posts with 3 comments will show at the top and the 0 posts will drop off view, showing an active community.
I'm trying to think of something to say in riposte in order to boost the comment count.
Riposte? What a fun word, I should incorporate that.
This thread is doing well for engagement, go sort by new and comment on something ;)
Maybe we need a sort/filter for posts with 0 comments, like a "Needs Comments" filter... Might be worth submitting a feature request on Lemmy and PieFed?
So saying something without much effort under a post wothout comments actually helps that post to become more populated?
As long as it's relevant, yes.
If you just posted say "I agree" or "Totally this" I don't think that would drive any further engagement.