Comment on lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

• JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Unfortunately, that’s not what I’m talking about, either.

  What I’m talking about is something like a sufficient, critical mass needed to help .ee (and any other place) survive in the long run. Two years ago I thought there was a real opportunity and possibility based on what the Reddit execs were publicly doing… how many users it both pissed off and motivated. That in turn brought about a burst of user energy, directly reflected by the significant migration to FV, which of course included participation, and at best, valuable content-creation, curation, useful posts & comments, and responsible moderation. That was a significant, known movement, and IMO a positive one, even if it wasn’t going to last indefinitely.

  As a personal example of a ‘motivated user,’ I saw the need for a certain community which was nowhere-else present across the FV, and decided to create it. Over the past two years I’ve populated it with 400+ posts, most of them in the form of mini-articles. Other people also chipped in here and there, and there have been healthy comments and subscribers to sort of flesh the whole thing out over time.

  For the most part it’s been a fun (if sometimes extremely frustrating) little hobby, but it’s still basically a one-man show, despite almost 2yrs and 1,210 subscribed accts. Point is-- at the end of the day it’s been a small project that I thought worth maintaining as both a thank you to .ee and a tribute to the FV as a whole. Lemm.ee didn’t necessarily need that kind of contribution from more than a handful of users, but as said above, it needed a certain critical mass to make it work across the server as a whole, and a minimum of posters contributing vile content or simply being disruptive assholes.

  At one time I thought community spirit (for what that’s worth) would kind of tilt things in a long-term sustainable direction. But it seems I was mistaken, and thus we have the announcement today. IMO I’m not pointing fingers; I’m observing.

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  • Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Niche topics were always going to be dependent on numbers.

    I’m the single contributor to !lego@lemm.ee , one of the most popular toys on the planet. And I didn’t expect another regular poster to appear before we reached 60k monthly active users.

    “Build it, and they will come” isn’t really true nowadays. We’re competing with Reddit, but also TikTok and Discord, where people seem to spend most of their time.

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    • JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      “Build it, and they will come” isn’t really true nowadays. We’re competing with Reddit, but also TikTok and Discord, where people seem to spend most of their time.

      And that’s fine. At a certain point I understood that what I was running was essentially a ‘blog+,’ and didn’t have a problem with that, evidenced by my willingness to keep posting and composing content on a regular basis, seemingly much like yourself.

      FWIW, and not unlike as with Legos-- European Comics are indeed a major industry and consumed around the world, altho not so much in the States and Japan. So, “niche” in the FV-sense, but by no means the real-world sense. This gave me a certain amount of motivation & hope to keep on truckin,’ no matter what…

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  • rglullis@communick.news ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    At one time I thought community spirit (for what that’s worth) would kind of tilt things in a long-term sustainable direction.

    Community is not enough. I wrote that in 2022 with Twitter and Mastodon in mind, but the same principle still applies for Reddit vs Lemmy.

    Lots of people say they want to “stick it to the man” but very feel are actually going to put in the work and/or money required to actually succeed.

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    • JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Well, yeah. In .ee’s case, one might surmise that Sunaurus was a whiz at backend-stuff, but maybe didn’t have enough experience as lead admin in the specific capacity of dealing with multitudes of ‘people fires.’ (not that he wasn’t absolutely wonderful and professional in everything he handled IMO) But, a lead admin would ideally be a manager dealing with direct-reports, not the guy who had to do it mostly alone for a long time, as I think he did.

      What the community contributed (in the positive sense) to Lemm.ee was more than enough AFAIK. What was critically needed, rather, was a robust admin crew, be it fully volunteer and/or partly paid by donation. Maybe various tasks could have been rotated too, such as: “I’ll handle the reports this week, Ilona will handle requests, Tomaso will handle documents, and Rafo will handle mod interactions, then we’ll switch roles next week.” Or something like that… Anything that worked, really.

      Indeed, it would be really interesting to see how other big instances are handling all this, specifically the bad actors that all sites must deal with, and which ultimately seemed to bring down Lemm.ee.

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    • kichae@wanderingadventure.party ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Weirdly enough, community might actually be enough, but the Fediverse doesn't really have much in the way of communities. As I think you yourself point out elsewhere, the Fediverse is lacking the connective tissue of shared ideology, goals, or even interests. It's also both too large to create the familiarity that binds people socially, while also being too small to sustain itself off a donation model that makes sure there are professional admins and server mods. It's too big to be a hobby, and too small to be a job.

      Aping the aesthetic of commercial social media is a significant issue here, because form follows function, and the function of commercial social media is not community, but convincing end-users to be content generators. People on Reddit and Twitter are accustomed to an endless stream of input generated by nameless, faceless entities that they don't give two shits about, with some celebrities and internet-famous people interjecting from time to time. That requires tens of millions of users fighting for fleeting attention from fickle consumers. We have tens of thousands of people who -- as far as I can tell, based on the types and volume of posts -- are mostly interested in consuming, not fighting for attention.

      These are not the people who fund these kinds of endeavours. Neither group is -- the content generators are no more interested in paying to get attention than the content consumers are to give it. So, without the firm social ties that motivate keeping the lights on, there is only burnout for the few who are willing to materially support the place, and gradual decay for everyone else.

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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        It’s too big to be a hobby, and too small to be a job.

        Facebook allegedly extracts $14/month of value from each of their US-based users, ~$12/european user, $7/month for Latin America and $4 from Southeast Asia.

        If each active user contributed $1/month for their instance and $1/month for the developer of the software they use, the Mastodon developers would have an operational budget of ~$800k per month, the Lemmy developers would have $50k/month.

        I don’t think that the problem is we’re “too small to be a job”. I think that the problem is that the average “enthusiast” is an hypocrite. They will profess their hatred of the business practices of Big Tech, but they will look for any and every possible justification to excuse themselves to contributing to the pool.

        We have tens of thousands of people who (…) are mostly interested in consuming, not fighting for attention.

        Sure, but what I don’t get is this: why is that people are absolutely fine with paying 10-20€/month (or $50-$70/month in the US) for their mobile phone service but expect that the server hosting service and software development service to fall from the sky?

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