I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
We have to earn it if we want it. Oftentimes someone will mention some event or trend or something that happened and being only on the Threadiverse, not also Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or X or Bluesky or even Reddit I have no idea what they are talking about - it’s not good to be too isolated.
So… bring on the downvoting I suppose, because I started checking some of those places, including Reddit. Not like daily but not never either. That’s where the content is, so where else can I go to get at that?
It is so easy to say that “something should happen”. It’s much harder to MAKE that thing actually happen.
Maybe I should admit defeat and go back to reddit… Perhaps everyone is supposed to be slaves to the shareholders
It is your choice, but if you stay you could put in some real EFFORT to make things better. e.g. people keep saying how difficult it is to make an account - and as a result now https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser exists. There is no hexbear or lemmy.ml on there, but even if theoretically there was one day, there’s specifically an option for “Good for newbies”: Newbie-friendly vs. choose your own adventure, to accommodate both desires, effectively making such controversial places as opt-in rather than having to opt-out, which requires first understanding and awareness of the details and ramifications of the decision.
Another problem is community discovery: yes entire communities are dedicated to helping with out, but how does one find out about those communities in the first place? They are not mentioned in any instance side-bar that I have seen, and rather most side-bar links to places are to expired or dead communities, e.g. Discuss.Online points to !new_here@discuss.online with 3-year-old pinned posts and the most recent post was 1 year ago, plus only one more from all of 2025. But in contrast, PieFed has a new user sign-up wizard that asks the user questions and subscribes them to communities based on their interests - memes, news, whatever - plus long after that aids greatly in community discovery, e.g. with Topics, Feeds (user-shareable and customizable), and combining comments across all cross-posts.
PieFed gives me hope for the Threadiverse.
In the meantime though, if you need something specific, then yeah you have to go to wherever it is located at. I haven’t posted or even commented on Reddit, and made probably <5 votes in all of 2025, all to help promote either PieFed or Lemmy, but I do read it occasionally because that is the only place I know of where the discussions that I was looking for were taking place (other than Facebook or Xhitter that are 1000x worse). Call this defeat if you will, I call it strategic assessment of the current situation, even as we strongly push forward to make this a better place, i.e. realism.