In recent days I have seen these two arguments repeated quite commonly. From reddits side it was all about how “noones using Lemmy anyway”
While from Lemmy it was “how numbers have been exploding”
My question is, why do numbers of users matter so much to anyone really? Isnt activity what matters more?
On two questions here I gotten just as much engagement if not more than anything I did on reddit combined
A community needs to reach a critical mass to live, but what is that critical mass made of is complicated to quantify in my opinion. It suffers a lot from Goodhart’s Law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure). What good is a huge user base if it’s just lurkers, inactive accounts and bots? What good is high activity if it’s just spamming? In the end what makes a community worthwhile is qualitative to me.
Yeah, I don’t think there’s some obvious number we can use to quantify the success of the Fediverse. It’s more of a feeling. How often do threads feel like they have good discussion? How many niche communities are available to you?
Past a certain point, more comments in a single thread doesn’t do much. You’d almost never read all the comments in a front page r/AskReddit post, for example. That’s too many comments on the same topic and past a certain volume, quality comments can’t rise to the top anymore, anyway. But there’s so many niche communities that don’t have enough people here yet to take off. Especially local ones.
You make excellent points.
very well put
Absolutely - that so much of Reddit’s niche and success was being a place where people already were. Folks who made memes or wrote articles went to the place where the audience for that content was pre-built and was focused in a predictable way. Folks who had questions or contributions to make went to the largest community they could find, tied to the content they were focused on.
Absolute reader numbers or absolute activity are only indirect metrics, what the community needs is a large-enough dedicated core to keep a sense of culture and continuity alive, a steady flow of new content or topics, and enough incoming members to replace natural attrition. I find that the last two tend to be strongly linked - for a niche-topic community, one of the best sources of content and activity is beginner questions. Experts often don’t have a ton to talk about day-to-day, unless some big news or development has happened, in which case the topic is explored until exhausted and then dropped. But have a steady flow of newbies there to ask the experts questions, and that will prompt not just responses for the newbies, but conversations among the experts on the side.