Lemmy is a much closer analog to Reddit than Mastodon is for Twitter. While Mastodon has similar basic functionality to Twitter, it lacks a lot of the features that make it easy to find new content and new people to follow.
Pair that with some very polished third-party mobile reddit apps with large, loyal followings transitioning to Lemmy and it became way easier to abandon reddit for Lemmy than it was to leave Twitter for Mastodon. I’m a huge open source supporter, but the average user doesn’t care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.
Mereo@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Exactly. Users who are involved in extremely niche communities will probably not find a place on Lemmy/Kbin yet. In 2008, reddit was the same. The politics subreddit only had 50,000 subscribers.
It’s all about momentum. The more users we have, the more engagement in niche communities, the more it’ll attract and retain users.
ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And loads of people hear the buzz, try it out and leave when they grow bored.
romkube@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Just to chime in, please correct me if I’m wrong, but Lemmy only counts activity as someone who’s posting or commenting (citation needed), so as more people go back to their old ways of lurking, activity will drop as browsing isn’t counted as activity
Redecco@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Us lurkers are still here (hopefully) but it’s easy to go back to the ways of scrolling without engaging
ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That is true.
Ashtear@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Why I’m encouraging anyone who will listen to participate in their fledgling niche communities here. Even if it’s just a little bit.
One can simply lurk on the niche subreddits. Growing fediverse communities need active participation.