Coelacanth

Yes, definitely! Using the !community@instance.tld works well for communities, but linking to posts is a bit of a headache honestly.

Sounds like programming.dev might be a good fit, or perhaps dbzer0?

The original poster was @mizu6079@lemmy.world who seems to have deleted his account and the original post. It was archived in various places though, sadly without the original comments (which had some back and forth with the OP that only increased the mystery). It was the top upvoted post on Lemmy as a whole for a while. Here is a link to an archived version of just the OP:

https://lemmy.world/post/616615

No-poop guy truly was a Lemmy moment.

Thanks for your efforts keeping the Poetry comm alive! I know I mainly lurk there but I appreciate your posts!

Its just that I see people use a lack of population in ‘niche’ communities as a failure of Lemmy overall, and using some subjective made-up number to justify Lemmy’s overall failure, when there’s obviously traffic to major communities and ‘life’/activity on Lemmy on a daily basis.

It’s not so much a “failure” of Lemmy as it is an assessment of the situation (at this point in time). I wasn’t suggesting Lemmy was or will be a failure, nor that it’s dead. I like it here and I’m active most days. There still isn’t enough activity in niche subs for Lemmy to have mainstream appeal, though. Even a broad subject like Poetry is carried by a handful of people, and that is a fairly lively “niche sub”.

We’re currently still in the phase where determined, committed individuals have to spend concerted effort into keeping small subs going, rather than them being self-sustaining.

I do like it here, though, and I really hope the growth continues.

Yeah, I feel that. Formula 1 does okay (maybe unsurprisingly due to it being tech adjacent), but even huge sports like soccer are mostly ghost towns.

To confirm, you don’t think we have a minimum population base currently on Lemmy?

I mean, depends on what you view Lemmy as, right? It’s a great place to hang around and chat (depending on your interests). The people here are generally polite and friendly, and most interactions feel meaningful. It does not currently have enough content volume and niche communities to provide a viable Reddit alternative to most people.

If so, how do you make that judgment? How are you measuring that? How are you quantifying that?

Completely subjectively, though I didn’t think it was an unpopular opinion. I thought most people agreed niche communities struggle here. The exact number of users needed to reach critical mass I have no idea on, just a best guess extrapolating between where we are now and where Reddit was a decade ago. You can use Mastodon as another data point. I’m not on there, but I’m under the impression that Mastodon, too, has a little low userbase to truly feed niche communities, and it’s noticeably larger than Lemmy.

Both sides have their benefits, and it’s a shame there is no good best-of-both-worlds. I get where you’re coming from, I never felt the urge to participate on Reddit because it was so often just shouting into the void and getting buried in hundreds of one-word replies and in-jokes and memes. Here I feel seen, and often feel like my contribution (although mostly just small comments) makes an impact.

At the same time, a huge critical mass of a userbase is completely necessary for niche communities to survive. Maybe not as overwhelmingly massive as Reddit’s, but magnitudes larger than Lemmy has right now. Lemmy has a very distinct userbase slant and if you’re in the target audience (tech, FOSS, Linux etc) you’re probably great here. But even common interests like sports struggle for traction, and true niche stuff has an extremely tough time.

God I wish you get that grant. Your Fediverser project is super interesting and promising, and I think could be a great boon.

Commenters were already counted, though, so this bump is really just the vote-only population getting added. Which is still important to maintaining a healthy and varied front-page, mind you.

Leaving Lemmy for Threads was never really a concern I heard from anyone, they are completely different services. Like you say, Mastodon is more at risk.

What people on Lemmy were concerned with was rather whether undesirable users on Threads could filter onto Lemmy and negatively affect the user experience here. With the magnitudes larger userbase, Threads users could potentially dominate the Hot feed if they started posting to Lemmy communities.

I see. I did get some bad vibes from him from the off so I’m not completely surprised. I’m glad I never invested any time or effort into that site. I hope some of the users leaving found Lemmy.

Define display. Subscribing to a Lemmy community on Threads should “work”, but won’t be a pleasant viewing experience for your feed most likely.

They can, however, post directly to Lemmy communities should they wish, by @-ing the community.

Intermingling requires Threads users to specifically and actively seek Lemmy out.

What was the Squabbles drama? I remember that site being touted by some as a Reddit alternative during the APIcalypse but I never really cared for it for various reasons, both with the site itself and its founder.

I never really followed it further beyond making an account, though, as I ended up here.

In the long run it’s about the community. All the philosophical stuff people mega into Mastodon rant on about doesn’t matter to regular people if Mastodon doesn’t have the content they want.

In addition to content itself there is also ease of finding it and how it’s presented. People on here tend to hate algorithms but honestly Mastodon never clicked for me because (when I checked it out) you were stuck with a chronological feed. I dabbled with it but like you I could never get it to serve me content I wanted the way I wanted. Algorithms can be dangerous yes and I don’t condone Twitter’s and Facebook’s outrage baiting, but Mastodon currently just seems to demand too much work out of me.

There are enough people here to have some nice chats, and to consume some content (depending on your interests). It still hasn’t reached critical mass if you’re looking for a 1-to-1 Reddit replacement. If your main interests are news/politics (with a US slant), tech and gaming you’re probably alright here.

Niche communities struggle if they exist at all and even those that actually are represented here are mostly barren. Sports coverage is also pretty poor.

Completely agreed, and it’s one of the things keeping me off Mastodon honestly. I don’t have a close group of friends on it, and for the purposes of following a bunch of strangers/outlets and whatnot I want a better sorting algorithm to actually show me interesting posts when I check in the morning.

Well, as mentioned that is also covered by the Monthly Active Users metric that already is available. But in addition to that, I think it would be interesting to see the number of users who read and vote but don’t post or comment. Even though posting and commenting is the biggest part, actively voting is still an important part of the ecosystem.

I find the terminology of Kbin confusing and it’s one of the things putting me off it, personally. I don’t think referring to a shitposted meme as an “article in a magazine” makes a whole lot of sense, and from an onboarding perspective it seems more intuitive to work with familiar terms like “community” and “post”. Especially with the microblogging integration: if you want to make a thread somewhere you have to click “create article” because “create post” will have you make a microblog instead.