Whaaaaaat? It has a far better signal to noise ratio than those 'other' platforms. As long as you're into Star Trek memes and Linux.

network effect. There's fewer people here so there's fewer people here.

That said, I like it just how it is and would caution anyone against wishing for more users.

Don't focus on getting more users. Focus on making the content here the best it can be.

It's inevitable that the quality of the experience here will change with more users. Whether it's a net positive or negative remains to be seen.

To be sure, these are the "good old days" of lemmy.

I don't know a single person that knows it exists other than a few that ive tried to get interested. I have told a few friends that use reddit but they just don't get it.

I started lemmy a few months ago, stopped using reddit completely a few weeks ago and I don't miss it other than all the dog posts...more people need to post pics of their doggos on here !!!!

Cos we're all losers and no one wants to sit at our table

Reddit has been around for 20 years and Lemmy not near as long. Reddit didn't really hit it big until Digg screwed the pooch driving away users around 2010. I don't see Lemmy hitting Reddit number probably ever, but reddit is one of the highest trafficked sites on the web. Lemmy is steadily growing, but I think to many non users, federation and instances is a confusing prospect, so they never try. As it grows, I would imagine it will get easier or at least clearer for the layman and the velocity of growth will increase due to that and a larger user base as a whole.

People stay on mainstream corporate platforms no matter how badly they enshittify because that's where everyone else is. They don't want to jump ship unless everyone else will jump ship with them, and so nobody makes the first move.

Lemmy isn't more popular because Lemmy isn't more popular. Lemmy wants to be an alternative to Reddit, but the best thing Reddit had going for it was all the niche communities for fandoms, hobbies, and other interests. That's something that just can't exist here, because if you take a niche thing and multiply it by a niche platform, I'll bet that I might very well be the only person on this platform who is into some of my hyperfixations. So people who want to talk about topics that have no community here, leave and go back to bigger platforms.

I'm still here to try and push for a better future, but I honestly don't know how we can grow this place to the kind of critical mass it would take to really get the ball rolling.

1. Because people still use Reddit (for some reason).

2. Because it is fragmented and hard to understand how it works for average person.

It's a nightmare to even sign up.

Nothing else to it.

People will move en-masse to new platforms if the switch is easy. Nothing easy about using this platform.

Obv the people here are techy enough to surmount the initial hurdles, but don't kid yourself, the average person doesn't know a damned thing. Using tech and understanding tech are two vastly different skills. And you actually need to understand tech to even get started here.

Because there's still a handful of basic stuff that still hasn't gotten sorted out yet for some reason.

Like if I wanted to share your post with my friends, I'll send them this link: https://piefed.ca/c/nostupidquestions/p/377144/why-isint-lemmy-more-popular. If they're using a mobile app, then it might be fine. But if they're on desktop and want to comment or vote here but aren't already on my instance, they need to go back to their home instance, search up this community, and then search for this post. Why isn't there some sort of native way where I can just click on a button and have it open up in my home instance? Or even better: integrate something like threadiverse.link into Lemmy/PieFed so it immediately redirects me to my home instance's version on this post.

And before someone suggests using a different front-end or using a browser script, I appreciate you trying to help but my issue is why this isn't even natively part of Lemmy. And I'm not even sure if it's in the pipelines for V1.0.

Another issue is that there are still posts that don't federate properly. And it's not because an instance was defederated. What posts I see on this account might never be visible from a separate account. What is even more frustrating is that sometimes, I can't even force my instance to fetch the post. I'll give it the direct link and it still can't find the post on my instance.

As long as these basic issues remain unresolved, Lemmy will not become popular. A site can't be popular if I can't even share a post to my friends properly. Or if I can't even see the post, then I wouldn't be able to share it with anyone!

Edit: added clarification

It's somewhat difficult to navigate at first and most users find the most popular platforms and don't have a reason to move on, simple as that. Ease of access and, unfortunately, advertising would lead to Lemmy being more popular. But who would fund the advertising?

Because Reddit exists.

Reddit itself didn’t truly take off to massive scale until some other players were out of the way. It was the underdog for a long time.

not advertised, not run by a for profit company

Same reason star trek and Linux isn't more popular. It's for nerds

I think it may be more popular soon because other platforms are bringing in age verification.

That's one reason I am here and also Reddit mods are dicks.

Same reason Mastodon isn’t as popular as Twitter… a lot of people really don’t understand the concept of federation, or why it’s important in order to maintain a robust and healthy discussion. They’re fine with dictatorship as long as it aligns with their sensibilities.

Also, the concept of “one website, one app” is infinitely easier to comprehend than “many instances, many apps, still one protocol”.

Network effect. Reddit has more users and more discussion, drawing in more people and discussion. I'm not worried because enshittification and bots will run it into the ground

Comfort mainly. There is a small barrier for entry here, and the vast majority can't hurdle it.

I'm with you and wish lemmy was the default, but it takes time.

most of them are still addicted to reddit thats why, when you have all under one house, its hard to beat, and thier communities there is still large and eclipses lemmy.

plus most niches have been on reddit for decade+, it will be hard to convince like 20k-100k people to move to lemmy.

I'd say because it's still new and the content is very nerd heavy as you have probably seen from all the Linux posts. Also, most user's here come from the reddit exodus after the removal of third party apps.

One other thing is that when you link content from Lemmy you can just link the image directly instead of sending a link to Lemmy with a login screen. The adoption rate from people linking will be a lot lower since Lemmy is not sacrificing quality to increase numbers.

Either way, I like the size and it suits me, I can "finish" my Lemmy for the day in a reasonable amount of time and I get my fix of Linux news, memes and shitposts so it's just a win for me.

This is a really good question, and I suppose the answer is the same as to why Mastodon is not more popular.

I think it is a combination of several factors:

1. Not many people know about it. Really, reddit is one of the most well known websites on the internet. Very few people know lemmy/mastodon.
2. UI/UX issues. The more friction there is, the smaller the probability of someone using something. And Lemmy has TONS of friction. And the lemmy devs are not welcome to suggestions. Seriously, every suggestion that is made is probably answered with "I am against this". If the idea did not come from their heads, they are probably against it. This has been my experience with them, at least.
3. Lack of content. On reddit, there is tons of content. On lemmy, not so much. And people are generally not very principled. They want to consume, and completely ignore the ethics/morality of whatever it is they are doing.

I think this is not necessarily bad though. Lemmy DOES need more content and more users. But I hope it never becomes the size of reddit. Because reddit fucking sucks. People are stupid as fuck there now. The amount of low effort and low information content on reddit is astonishing.

Hopefully, Lemmy gets the smart, principled, interesting people and reddit keeps the influencers and onlyfaners.

The verification aspect of signing up for an instance. People say they'll leave Reddit but still go back to it. I was one of those until I remembered how they murdered my boy Apollo.

People aren't here for Lemmy in particular. They're here to avoid the others. If all you want is content, you'll just go to Reddit. If you are here, it's because you recognized something of the awfulness in corporate reddit but liked the format. Lemmy is Reddit for people who pay attention and care.

Popular platforms have big expensive algorithms that monitor user behavior and present content they're most likely to interact with when they're most likely to interact with it. Participation in those platforms isn't a deliberate act anymore.

Lack of marketing.

For an online service to get popular, it has to be either a new, really interesting thing with a lot of advertisement, have the support of some big celebrities (usually through advertisement too), or literally pay people to come en masse to artificially make it popular, so that more people comes organically (so, basically, a large advertisement budget). It also have to be easy because most people can't read more than a few lines of explanations on why things are different.

No lemmy instance have none of the pre-requisites, and the accessibility is not really there for the general public, due to various things. My main gripe is that federation and local moderation means you'll have to create multiple account to access content from certain groups of servers, which is a lot to ask to people that can't be asked to make even one account, but there are other minor things too. The sheer choice of instances and client, seen as an advantage by some, is simply a bothersome annoyance to people used to large platforms doing all the work of deciding what's good and bad for them.

To the biggest degree it's comfort elsewhere and numbers attracting numbers. To a smaller but still substantial degree it's the same reason the top 3 phone brands have less customization and a more plug and play experience than rooted phones. It solves a huge amount of the problems with Reddit, but reddit is simpler to join, simpler to understand, feels more secure, and has so many communities and active users that even inactive communities can look active by how many people mistakenly post there.

Having to choose a server before you know what that means or the differences between the slightly different versions of federated networks makes it more confusing.

Yes, "it doesn't matter which server you choose," because you can see the posts from anywhere, in theory.  Except, it also kind of does matter. Places defederate from each other. If you pick a smaller instance, it may suddenly just go down and then you're back at the start again.

Honestly, I've made... 5? 6? different versions of me on different instances. Kbin went down, didn't get into Mastodon, lemm.ee went down, didn't like Mbin as much as Kbin, tried fedia.io sort of liked it, ended up largely on piefed.social, but also like being on sopuli.xyz because it's defederated from less and has more global content.

It's confusing and niche. I honestly really love it even when I kind of hate it. I end up ahead of the curve in a lot of tech news because of the hardcore enthusiasts on here.

🤔

no startup/angel/vc/pe funds to burn in advertising to capture the market.

!fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com il people want to help

For me I feel like to many instances to sign up to. Like . World. Ml .shit just works .etc...

counterpoint, lemmy is popular enough

I'm okay with having a lot less people in lemmy if it means there less nazis and less toxicity

Critical mass does what they do.

Advertising. I'm not going to elaborate, because it's all just going to come back to that. Grassroots, paid, you name it. Advertising.

because at the moment Reddit is now mainstream, and reactionaries are taking over (FU spez). Therefore much of the far left and anarchists deemed "violent" by spez and Phony Stark have moved to Lemmy and Bluesky and made it their safe spaces for mostly politically-charged topics.

Because its got too much political bias and censorship which alienates one side and the centre. Elon did this by making twitter open all other platforms must be just as tolerant or cease to be relevant in the medium of the marketplace of ideas