User count has plateaued at about 420K
Active user count rose significantly between 2/24 37K to 3/24 51K
Hopefully users who signed up last year are coming back to use their accounts.
Maybe because they’re tired of ads on reddit?
Should we put together a collection and and buy an ad campaign on Reddit?
I can see it now:
“Ads suck. We’re ad-free forever. Join Lemmy.”
and
“He’ll never get us. Join Lemmy.” or “Don’t let him get you. Join Lemmy”
ads cost money to increase users to eventually profit from them later.
how would a decentralized lemmy profit from the increased users.
Any money spent on ads would be better off hiring more engineering resources and improving lemmy for the next time Reddit does something dumb prompting an exodus.
June is incoming. Some shit is bound to happen.
I’m probably ootl: why June specifically?
First quarter since IPO?
The idea is for some users to pool some money together to buy ads, not for the platform to do it. I guess the idea is that as users, we benefit from the additional content that comes along with more users.
Because of the flat and nonprofit nature of Lemmy “users pooling money together” is the platform allocating budget.
No. We should not give them our money.
If anything then we should post more links to relevant original Lemmy content on other platforms.
OC is needed and should then shared on Reddit. But Reddit has changed to incentivize content posted on Reddit, so any OC will probably be stolen.
Do not give Reddit money.
My reasons against that
- we’d be directly giving money to Reddit
- users dislike the places they see ads about, and it would appear extra desperate because of the point above
- money is better spent supporting developers and content creators on here
Not to mention that Reddit will probably shut that down
That doesn’t mean we don’t do anything though. A number of subreddits continue to have automod messages and pinned posts directing people elsewhere. There are a lot of people on Reddit who WANT things to succeed here.
So some other ways to help.
On Reddit:
-
work with subreddits to set up parallel communities here, and ease the transition of people moving
-
find subreddits that benefit from backups / fediverse communities, and work with them to improve things
On the fediverse:
-
write up guides and update existing resources to help newcomers
-
Post interesting content on the fediverse. People use things they get value out of, and new people won’t stay if things are quiet here. Set up an RSS feed, share the cool videos you see, write about your thoughts on casual communities.
Specifically financial:
-
Donate to the development of a project you like. If you can, reoccurring donations provide stability for the developers to work on things.
-
Donate to the instances that are running the services and platforms
TLDR:
- Money can help, but paying for ads isn’t the way to go (at least not yet)
I do like your ad ideas nonetheless @[email protected]. If we were swimming in money, it could be more of a discussion
A near black screen with small text at the bottom would be fun. “Ads suck, so we removed one for you. Come to the Fediverse for ad-free social media”
I’m probably the weird one, but I specifically make it a point not to buy anything I’ve seen in any ad.
I do this, too. I’ve noticed local companies who advertise heavily on local TV/radio often charge 2x as much as the competition who don’t. And the aggressive advertisers are often arrogant and difficult to work with.
And it pisses me off when I see giant insurance companies spending millions on celebrity spokespeople and Superbowl ads. That represents a lot of denied claims.
Beyond all that: fuck reddit. Don’t give money to spez.
Fight enshittification through enshittification? Not really a good idea, if you ask me.
I don’t want users who come over due to ads.
I actually think users who click ads are probably the ones who most need to learn about the alternatives!
yeah good for them but not for me.
lol fair. Whats good for me is more people educated on the benefits of open source!
What would be the point of trying to increase the user count, beyond “line goes up”?
Niche communities
Niche communities really only have value when they grow organically. Trying to artificially inflate them won’t make them better.
I find Lemmy is better with fewer users just like Reddit used to be.
I kinda miss a few subs but they’ve been replaced by new things I discovered here.
The websites can coexist and users can do as we please.
Lemmy(software) shouldn’t buy ads but I don’t think there’s any reason an individual instance shouldn’t buy ads if they choose to. Whether or not that will bring users that are worth having, is a different story entirely.
No. You don’t want people’s first exposure to the fediverse to be something annoying.
Also, anyone with a modicum of understanding is already blocking ads. Do we really want the dregs of the internet that don’t do so?
Why the growth fetish ?
It’s fear of calcification. Lemmy is tiny, in terms of our user base.
If we don’t get fresh blood, and most importantly the rare active contributors, we’ll just get used to talking to each other, we’ll get bored or burned out and leave.
I understand. I suppose it is a risk, but I prefer the arguments against inorganic growth, put by others here.
A compromise could be, seeking to grow individual subs - so people come because of their interest superbowls for example - rather than an effort to attract every yahoo with nothing better to do on the internet.
One of the effects of capitalism is that people are conditioned to think as growth in quantity is the end goal of all human activity.
This makes it harder to realize that, as far as the Fediverse is concerned, at very least, Lemmy and Mastodon have achieved viable self-sustaining networks and that driving inorganic growth by targeting users in other platforms would reduce the viability of the network because it makes onboarding new users harder. An example of this even inside reddit was when a subreddit got a sudden large influx of new subscribers they invariably lost what made them stand out in the first place.
self-sustaining
I’m hesitant about that. It’s still run by volunteers, and that’ll end when the volunteer gets tired of paying the bills for whatever instance.
I think Lemmy needs to find a way to disassociate instance hosting from some individual kindly paying the bill. It doesn’t need to be profit driven, just a way to get people to donate enough to keep the servers going.
[email protected] I want more then two others to discuss my hobby.
“are you sick of ads? Heres an ad!” Doesn’t have the same impact you think it does.
Also, food for thought: you really want to invite the kind of people who can’t use adblockers here? Barriers to entry aren’t necessarily a bad thing. You want quality, not quantity. More people isn’t necessarily better. And the people who stuck by reddit and spez through all of that?
“Ads suck, and Reddit sucks. So we paid Reddit to show you an ad.”
Have you used Lemmy before June 2023? I’ve been using it since late 2022 and it wasn’t fun
And you think that the people who already saw entire subreddits shutdown in protest, with Lemmy plastered all over the place as an alternative, who decided to stay after all the content creators left, THOSE PEOPLE, are the ones you want to now court over?
Again, quality vs quantity.
We already gained the quality contributors from reddit. Advertising now is just drawing from the bottom of the barrel.
Most people on reddit don’t even know about Lemmy lol. I’m sure a large chunk of users, particularly on lefty subs and programming ones, would love to check it out.
Ads definitely aren’t the way to go though since you’d be giving reddit money. Perhaps setting something up with mods of said subreddits?
Lmfao. Lemmy was PLASTERED on the front page. It was on r/place along with “FUCK SPEZ”. If you missed it, you’re just not even looking. And if you’re not even looking and don’t care and think reddit is just wonderful, again, do we really want you?
And seriously, with Lemmy being FILLED with “dae Linux?” and “communism good” posts and programming humor hitting my front page HOURLY, you’re honestly trying to tell me “the programmers and lefties don’t know about this place”? Seriously?!?!
Lemmy was PLASTERED on the front page. It was on r/place along with “FUCK SPEZ”.
Most reddit users aren’t on there everyday to see those. If you were talking about Lemmy on reddit for a month or two after things calmed down you’d see barely anyone there still know about this place.
Most reddit users are bots.
Most human reddit users are lurkers.What’s the ratio of active to lurker user on fediverse users?
testify!
You’d be surprised.
I have a RL friend who’s on Reddit all the time, and he didn’t even hear about the shutdown, much less /r/place, or anything like lemmy. I’ve been trying to sell it to him…
Re: The “We’re elite” becomes “We’re bored talking among the same old people” or “We’re burned out”, leading to users leaving and formerly thriving communities dying.
I’ve been around long enough to see this happen on multiple forums.
And if your friend isn’t convinced by you and somehow missed the months long protest, destruction of third party apps, and mass exodus, honestly they should stay in reddit. We don’t need another Facebook.
Plus, have you considered that Lemmy isnt singularly owned? You literally can’t say ANY of what you want to say in your ads. “We don’t have ads”. Really? You can assure me that no single instance has ads? Which instance are you even going to link to? Your own? What makes that one special? What happens when you advertise for “Lemmy” and people find the intolerant instances and assume that’s all of the fediverse? What about other offshoots like kbin and mastodon? Not gonna advertise for them? And why should I trust you with money in the first place? For all I know it’s just a scam to collect money and run. What happens when someone else pops up claiming that their donation campaign is the real one and yours is fake? Literally anyone can spin up an instance and claim to be “doing it for Lemmy!”
Yeah, hard hard hard no
The kind of people who would join this place are also the kind that would block ads.
Personally, I would never give Reddit a single penny. Their garbage CEO does plenty to get people to leave and I am sure it will keep like that.
Nah, fuck that. This place is already too much like reddit.
It will be like reddit for a bit, then new instances will spin up and we’ll still have the choice the fedeiverse offers
