this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Kinda A, and also a little D. It's disheartening to see new comms continuing to appear that cater to evermore niche interests, instead of people having the restraint and good sense to cooperate towards reaching critical mass on much broader subject comms first. Also, I'm still not exactly loving the UX on desktop (my primary interface) even with LemmyTools, but recently found the Connect for Lemmy app in the Play Store and that's helped keep me checking in regularly in spare moments during the day from my phone.
Some interests are niche enough to be a turn off to a general audience though. When a new user shows up for the very first time and only sees two dozen hentai feet pics or whoever the fuck Matty Perez is as their entire feed it can be confusing. When they need to actively seek out content with general appeal it will make it seem like this is essentially only a fetish community. At a certain point it does become a detracting factor towards attracting new users.
I agree that these things take time and that there will be more waves of new users once porn bans are in place on larger platforms, but unless there is a stable amount of content with general appeal as a 'hook' to keep people coming back it will be difficult to see any real growth.
In my opinion this entire instance seems to be having an identity crisis. It's trying to emulate too many different platforms at once without having the user base to successfully do this.
You're right that the default sorting being local-active definitely doesn't help. The new user experience for Lemmy in general has issues at its core unfortunately. Setting communities as default is an easy solution, but would have its own set of issues.
I don't think it's a bad solution to have defaults, but it would require pretty clear and heavy moderation, likely from admins themselves. This would also have the secondary effect of forcing admins to take a stance on what kind of content should primarily be on the instance. All of this also ignores how feasible something like that would be across all the varying apps and front ends, which I have no idea.
Very true about Rome not built in a day. I don't have any grandiose expectations, and I post here what I like, and if others enjoy the same, good. I spent over 5 years helping Reddit slowly grow along with the various subreddits I started from scratch and growth there was also slow and steady until the pandemic growth spurt came - so 6 months here is a good start. I spend only a quarter of my time now on Reddit just keeping various subs alive, and to raise awareness about LemmyNSFW to redditors.
Connect is good, but I've switched to using Boost for Lemmy (I had been a boost app user on Reddit so I like the familiar look and feel), for posting and browsing.
[Update: I'm not promoting, just a long time happy paid user of the Boost app: see improvements https://lemmynsfw.com/post/4259177]
I use the default browser UX mainly for modding. BTW, this default browser UI is the only experience afaik currently that allows tracking of crosspostings (example
,
so that I don't end up duplicating what's already posted
Also the autofill/complete when typing in community names starting with the ! is a big plus.