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.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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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.
You make excellent points.
very well put
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.
at least with respect to this site: numbers do not. we do not place importance on numbers, only "do we have enough users to sustain a community" and "do we have enough people to properly and responsibly staff that community"
Simple. You need a minimum number of people to have a variety of active communities. What that number needs to be is debateable. We actually probably have that now. Before the migration Lemmy had about 1000 active users which was probably kind of thin.
On two questions here I gotten just as much engagement if not more than anything I did on reddit combined
That wouldn't have happened without the massive user influx over the last weeks. You need a healthy-sized community to get enough activity.
but wouldnt that mean i should have gotten that much more engagement on reddit?
I think you've hit on a good point - you want enough users for there to be engagement, but you also don't want so many users that people feel like they're a face in a sea of people that gets crowded out. What the appropriate number of people is depends on the culture and aim of the site more than being a static number to reach. Beehaw, for example, is trying to focus on creating a sense of community and connection rather than growth at all costs. That means Beehaw's "critical mass" is going to be lower than something like Reddit, where it's more of a free-for-all that seems to be trying to appeal by being a "loud" public square type space. Meanwhile, the tiny forum in the corner of the internet about a niche subject is going to have an even smaller goal because it's safe for users to assume that there won't be as many people and, if they're seeking out a forum for a niche subject, it's also safe to assume there won't be as many lurkers.
Numbers matter because activity is directly proportional to user count. A lot of mainstream users won't join a platform until it already has a critical mass. They don't want to be early adopters or trail blazers. They want to go where their friends and good conversations are.
We've got to set the table for them. With a lot of users there will be more buzz and more social gravity to pull people here. We're the first drunk uncle on the dance floor at the wedding that gets the party started. A dance floor with a few drunk uncles is fun for the uncles but until a couple nieces and a grandma join in then there's not a party.
People have been burned by so many hot new social networks that they're wary. They don't believe that they can have a good network that's not full of ads and selling their info.
But the time is now, the DJ has put on Montel Jordan's "This is How We Do It" and it's up to us, the drunk uncles of the fediverse, to get everyone onto the dance floor.
My question is, why do numbers of users matter so much to anyone really? Isnt activity what matters more?
It could be the diversity that comes with more numbers. There's definitely been a rather sizable amount of instances and communities created this week.
I think people just sees number and thinks the bigger the better. Doesn’t always mean that. It’s just society that thinks like that.
You're correct up to a point. A statistical bell curve is present in most things. You'll have those who lurk, those who comment, those who post, and those that will moderate in any group. Make that group bigger and each category will grow too. The group can skew the results, lower the lurkers for instance, by making them answer questions before joining. They self select themselves as being more engaged.
But I agree, the current business models are big on numbers and not necessarily what is going on with those numbers. We've been taught quantity over quality in real world applications to our detriment. It's sad really.
I agree with you, participation matters
I look at it from the standpoint of federated social media dethroning the reigning social media "monopolies". Companies like Facebook, Twitter, and now Reddit have shown that they want engagement at all costs and will prioritize profit over people. The faster they die, the better.
From this perspective, numbers and growth are important (although of course they're not everything): People won't jump ship to a new platform unless there is a critical mass of users, because a platform needs a sufficient number of users to provide the same variety of user generated content and communities that people have come to expect.
More people using federated social media also means more developers, better apps, and a better user experience for everyone using it.
There's a snowball effect, and maybe one day we'll get out from under our rich social media overlords.
Volume, and diversity of opinions.
On Reddit I browsed "new" or "rising" and just subs I was subscribed too was enough for a steady stream of content.
On Lemmy even including all instances, there's not a whole lot on "new".
Which is good, because it makes it easier to find communities to subscribe too and also the problematic ones so you can block them and never see them again.
But low users mean most communities are dead. There's a Fantasy Football sub for example, there's 3 other people on it tho, so it won't really be very useful this season.
I think the particularly tricky use case is someone who wants to browse just some specific topic like Zelda discussions or programming memes. If you're viewing /all, there's plenty of new posts. But if you're browsing a specific sub, you might only few a handful per day.
Awesome! Where is the fantasy mag/community?
I've always liked Reddit because it enables communities to gather around niche subjects. With less people those communities can't form.
If by "on reddit's side" it's because they're all nihilists from the previous attempt at migration and assume that Lemmy now is no different from how it was in 2019, especially after Ruqqus and god knows how many other "alternatives" failed miserably.
Its a big thing in the wrestling community: the fans of the evil empire lord over numbers over the little guy and concern troll about the "sustainability" of any competitor that threatens to take away from their empire. Dont worry about it. This kind of corporate tribalism doesnt lead to substantive discussions
I look at it from the standpoint of federated social media dethroning the reigning social media "monopolies". Companies like Facebook, Twitter, and now Reddit have shown that they want engagement at all costs and will prioritize profit over people. The faster they die, the better.
From this perspective, numbers and growth are important (although of course they're not everything): People won't jump ship to a new platform unless there is a critical mass of users, because a platform needs a sufficient number of users to provide the same variety of user generated content and communities that people have come to expect.
More people using federated social media also means more developers, better apps, and a better user experience for everyone using it.
There's a snowball effect, and maybe one day we'll get it from under our rich social media overlords.