Be careful what you wish for. Increasing its popularity would also increase its bot attraction.

It doesnt need to be more popular.

IMO, thinking like that is one of the problems of the internet that led to google, amazon and the other tech giants that functionally own access to the internet now outside of small places like this.

If you want to see more content, set up some RSS feeds to news sites and join discords for memes and repost them here.

The front page is just VetOfTheSeas and everybody else lol.

Huh? I've been using Lemmy natively (i.e., no 3rd-party front-end or app) since the Reddit API fiasco (what's that, a couple of years?) and have never heard of this user. My instance is one of the most widely federated too. I just searched for them and noticed that they've posted a lot in the last 3 days, but it's not that many posts so it shouldn't be dominating your feed. What are your feed settings? I suggest trying hot, active, or top [whichever time frame you prefer] and all, unless you subscribe to a lot of communities, in which case you can select subscribed instead of all. Once you find a combination of scope and sort type that you like, you can set that as the default in your account settings.

In order to block stuff you don't want to see when you browse all, block any communities that focus on that stuff. For example, I block the vast majority of meme communities. It seems that Lemmy having too many memes is a common complaint, but I barely ever see any, even browsing all.

Nothing. Leave it small and tight-knit.

You say that you like it vastly more than Reddit, even though it's "smaller". I don't see a problem here. Quality over quantity.

I sort of just enjoy it as a real place on the internet, instead of worrying about growth.

First rule of fediverse club is you don't talk about fediverse club.

Don't need more chuds finding the real internet again.

Invite people. But part of the whole lemmy appeal thing at least right now is that the userbase is small enough so your individual input is far more significant than on instagram or reddit.

The one downside with less people is less posts which means you can't doomscroll on it forever. Wait did I say downside?

"More popular" is the wrong objective.

Focus on creative the best possible experience.

Better moderation, better content, better participation.

All the thing you say you like are because this is a much smaller place.

The front page is just VetOfTheSeas and everybody else lol.

The default Lemmy UI "front page" is posts that are "Active". First, try setting it to "Scaled" and you'll get much more variety of posts instead of just the ones with the most replies. You can set this as a setting each time you visit Lemmy, or edit your Lemmy profile so it defaults to "Scaled" all the time you visit.

Second, start cultivating Lemmy communities you like. "Subscribe" to communities and block the ones you don't like. Your "front page" will have lots more content you like and far fewer of things you don't care about.

Third, some poster are consistently too far away from from what I want to consume on the internet. You'll know them when you see them where everything they post something you wish you didn't have to see. Block these users and you won't see their posts or their comments on other posts. None of these change affect what other people see so there's not risk of harming others or censoring them for others. They are free to continue to be seen by whomever else doesn't want to block them.

With these three changes I have found Lemmy to be a much more engaging place.

I've heard this lack of content anxiety since 2023, have yet to see any evidence of it, while more and more content shows up by the second, and I have nearly all of the power users blocked.

Far fewer bots.

It's hard to say, it may not ever reach critical mass. A few power users have left over the last few years. It'll just take more folks stepping up and being the shitposters that they want to see..

Who or what is VetOfTheSeas?

You can get downvoted for saying stupid shit but you don't get silenced or punished for it.

New here eh? /s

The front page is just VetOfTheSeas

Never heard to them. Not sure if block'd or Tessaract'd. (Look up Tessaract in the search FYI)

Jokes aside, search for communities to get more content. Like I'm from lemmy.ca but I sub to a lot of the main .world communities and some from sh.itjust.works

I think there are also a lot of users like me, just reading with little engagement. But yeah, idk how we could get more active users. Although I have to say, I've come to peace with things not moving as quickly here, actually I kind of started liking it. Only thing that I would like to see more of are more active niche communities.

It's popular enough

More fart and shit jokes. Very bonding stuff

I used to want to be in a stadium, but now I want to be in a nightclub.

If the nightclub gets really popular and starts to expand, I'll probably just find another nightclub.

It's funny, just a few days ago I saw another wave of discontent on Reddit, with Lemmy mentioned near the top

https://old.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1v8y7o2/to_our_fauxmoi_community/

Needs more narcissism of small differences and other forms of purity testing of people who already are on your side.

I think if ATProto implements communities in a way fhat is compatible with threadiverse communities, we'll see a huge influx on the strength of Bluesky advertising.

Free pony on signup.

Nothing. Why can't we make it a slow growth? Why does it have to mimic companies who are funded by investors?

Less defederation

Things that I think would help:

• Lower barriers to entry, especially for non-technical users. One reason that Reddit was relatively successful was because they didn't even require an email address to create an account (dunno about now, but they did so in the past). I remember reading some Web UI design article once stating that a website has on the order of a few seconds to basically sell a user on viewing it, because there's so much useless garbage out there, so people filter by basically immediately dropping anything that doesn't immediately appear to be useful.

  A new user on the Threadiverse is immediately faced with understanding a lot of technical architecture: "what home instance do I want?" Just answering that question requires understanding something about how the system works. Yeah, if you're a sysadmin who is familiar with how Usenet or other federated systems work, this is just an "ohhh" moment conceptually, though you still might need to learn a bunch of details.

  I remember reading some articles about how a lot of mobile OS-only users entering college didn't really understand the concept of a file or where data was stored. This was kind of shocking to their professors, who were familiar with personal computers, and where this is a basic concept.

  searches

  https://old.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/1ftvyrb/do_many_students_nowadays_really_not_understand/

  Here are some examples of professors discussing it (the topic originally being brought up by someone who was apparently teaching a class in GNU R, so probably a data science or visualization thing).

  If that level of "where does data live" is alien and confusing to a lot of people, imagine how much more the concept of a federated system of instances is.

  I value the ability to choose different instances, different frontends, different clients, different server implementations. But...maybe throwing all of those options in a typical user's face immediately when they start using the things can be a bit overwhelming. Not saying don't have those options, but maybe people should be kinda directed towards a sane default at the get-go.

• The mechanism for remote communities to become visible to a home instance (needing someone to initially search for them) and for posts and comment in such a community to start becoming visible (at least one user subscribing to them) is not described in the Lemmy UI, is non-obvious, and impacts users.

• The syntax to link to communities in an home-instance-agnostic way is kinda complicated as well, requires people to understand something about federation to understand what it does and why you'd do it.

• Still no home-instance-agnostic way to link to posts or comments.

• A better initial set of content of interest and not having content that is objectionable to people. If you're a random person from the US and you wind up on, I dunno, lemmygrad.ml as your first impression of the Threadiverse, I expect that you're probably inclined to just walk away. Whatever is on someone's first view of the thing should be content that is something that more-or-less is something that (a) makes them want to view more and (b) not to walk away. I remember saying once that pretty much nobody objects to, say, cooking; that makes a good default.

• Discoverability of communities is still not great. Lemmyverse.net is a valuable resource, but either users need to be directed there from clients and Web UIs or some sort of vaguely-comparable functionality needs to be built into Threadiverse systems.

• Network effect still favors Reddit. I don't have a fantastic solution for this. In general, network effect massively favors social media incumbents

and I'm sure that that is why you have investors willing to sink a lot of money into getting first mover advantage in that area. That said, MySpace and Digg did ultimately become displaced by younger competitors.

• Making benefits to a given user clearer. If I'm angry about Reddit third-party client access, say, I have a clear reason to use another system. Maybe I'm an open-source developer and I'm familiar with the IRC or Usenet or mail server or XMPP ecosystems, and so "ah, it's like that, and we can have competing server implementations" just clicks. But if I'm Joe User who gets on the thing to talk smack about an opposing basketball team, maybe Joe doesn't immediately care about that or have any of that context. What's his reason to use the Threadiverse over Reddit? Are those benefits immediately clear to him?

Unfortunately because of how federation works you don't get a single All page that has everything already decided for you or linked to all that is out there. It sucks that it does require a bit of knowledge and effort before you start seeing things come in, and maybe one day there will be better newbie paths. It's better than it was early on where it was total confusion on how to pick an instance or how anything even works.

What's funny is that the best part of Reddit was always the small niche subreddits.

We need advertisers and a kickass algorithm to tell you what you want to see on your front page.

Just gotta give it time.

Back when Reddit was actually decent, it never had a lot of users.

But after a certain amount of time it hit critical mass and exploded, Lemmy will probably do the same.