A few ideas from the top of my head
- Flairs that can be allowed to filter content in a community
- Major online communites (can be subreddits, or other communities) moving to Lemmy
- Reddit removing old.reddit
- Reddit banning people using VPNs (already happening, see !reddit@lemmy.world )
- Lemmy becoming the reference source of knowledge for a certain domain
Second point is probably crucial, but I don’t see any major subreddit wanting to move here. StarTrek is the exception more that the rule.
As I’ve said since the beginning, I’d like to see more diversification of opinion in the userbase. There are a LOT of people here that are the kind of activist you’d see get banned on Reddit for being hyper-aggressive and it really turns neutral- or otherwise-thinking users off. They don’t discuss, they immediately attack and flame and it’s not good for building communities around except hyper-focused ones based on those issues specifically.
I want people who know the reason they think something and don’t just have an emotional response and stick with it, then strawman everyone else in the vicinity who deviates.
As we say in the main Rules for our Community ( !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca ), “Not everything is a genocide, and not everyone even slightly to the right of you is a Nazi.”
I also want MUCH better Community controls such as the ability to decorate, and disable downvotes.
Think about the experience new users have.
I bring this up a lot, but among the things putting people off from sticking to Lemmy, the new user experience is just not great. I’m not talking about choosing an instance, I’m talking about the general attitude Lemmy has towards content in the feed.
I know it’s a very popular idea that if you don’t like communities or instances or users, you can block them. Unfortunately, most social media users aren’t interested in spending a couple of hours curating their feed to make it useful for them. People are coming in to a feed full of a growing number of niche porn communities, and if they can sort through that, they find heavy-handed political messages, FOSS bros telling everyone how popular software sucks, repost bots with zero discussion, and small community moderators desperately posting dozens of links into the void, hoping for bites.
At the very least, Lemmy needs a sort algorithm that is capable of keeping a page of the feed from being dominated by one community. Going further, I think we could benefit from giving instance admins the tools to curate a default feed that appeals to a wider audience of users.
Maybe then the smaller communities would have a shot at growing.
You have a good point.
Most of the people here despise sorting algorithms, and are fine with doing their own filtering, but to appeal to a wider audience, there should indeed be a way to suggest new joiners that they subscribe to a set of general communities that can be appealing to almost anyone. Of course experienced users can disable that, but that would definitely help.
By coincidence, I had to come up with a list of “active communities that are not memes, tech, news or politics”, and here it is. It might be a starting point
Discussion:
Pictures:
Learning:
Entertainment:
Manual Hobbies
Art
Animals
I’ll upvote you as per my support for you in another reply…
But I notice an animal community egregiously missing from your list… 😅
Edit: Just checked the rankings. How am I below bats, racoons, and possums??? I don’t get these users sometimes! (kidding) But seriously, how are all of these above Dogs? I’d expect them to be up there with cats just do to, you know, they live in peoples’ houses with them.
how are all of these above Dogs? I’d expect them to be up there with cats just do to, you know, they live in peoples’ houses with them.
Yes, I’m not a pet person but I was surprised too. Maybe dogs just have less active posters?
I just looked at the stats quick and it’s somewhat insightful.
Dogs has the most subs (3.4k), but only gets a post every 2-3 days, so not as many daily users (42).
Opossums has about half the subs (1.9k) , posts once or twice a day, and has over 500 daily users, which I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten…great for them!
Bats and Raccoons fall in the middle of those numbers.
I’m killing it in total comments though and have more subs than all but Cats, which has an outstanding almost 18k. Out of 50k users, that is pretty dang impressive. I’d like to think at least a quarter of my subs are due to the work I put in, but I assume most of them came looking for a clone Reddit group.
Does any of it mean anything? Probably not. I’m glad to see them have a chance to shine. I like all the animals anyway. I enjoyed my ride on the first page of communities during Owl of the Year and picked up a lot of new subs during that, and I hope they make the most of it too. I don’t know how hard it is to find new and unique pics of some of those animals day in and day out though. Again though, I feel that would make Dogs higher up as many people can just glance down and see a dog! I guess Lemmy folk are just cat people.
