I'll use the Casual Conversation community as an example. They started out on Lemmy.World. They had 6.7k subscribers. They moved to lemm.ee, which was shut down. Now they are at piefed. One of the biggest communities migrated multiple times and has lost almost 20% of the subscribers.
One could argue that this is the purpose of decentralized social media, but my point is that constant migration and evolution, while not exactly dubious, will keep casual users away.
Most of the initial communities made primarily on lemmy.world benefited from the initial flood of users joining from Reddit after the API fiasco. Most of them didn't stick around - but their presence on as subscribers on those communities still persists. It's a false number.
Subscribers aren't a great metric to determine community viability in many cases.
One of the biggest communities migrated multiple times and has lost almost 20% of the subscribers.
Subscribers are a poor metrics. Active users is much more relevant, and !casualconversation@piefed.social is as active as the previous versions used to be
Yeah, I wish there was a good technical solution for this baked into the Fediverse. PieFed has some of that, you get some features for migrating communities there. But all of this is integral part of this place. We also have like 10 technology communities. It's not obvious what to subscribe to. Some formed due to growth and changed dynamics. Some because someone was against AI and someone else pro AI, and they split off and made yet another community with the same name. None of that is intuitive to newbies. You can of course subscribe to all of them but then you'll regularly get the same post 5 times in your timeline because it also leads to cross-posting and all kinds of things... This is by design, though. And it's difficult to design online platforms to be easy to use, cater to all people, grant freedom to everyone... I think we still got some room for improvement 😉
@feddit.uk
Memes about the Fediverse.
Rules
General
- Be respectful
- Post on topic
- No bigotry or hate speech
- Memes should not be personal attacks towards other users
- We are not YPTB. If you have a problem with the way an instance or community is run, then take it up over at !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com.
- Addendum: Yes we know that you think ml/hexbear/grad are tankies and or .world are a bunch of liberals but it gets old quickly. Try and come up with new material.
- This is not the place to start flamewars between Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed.
Elsewhere in the Fediverse
Other relevant communities:
go to feed...
@feddit.uk
Memes about the Fediverse.
Rules
General
- Be respectful
- Post on topic
- No bigotry or hate speech
- Memes should not be personal attacks towards other users
- We are not YPTB. If you have a problem with the way an instance or community is run, then take it up over at !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com.
- Addendum: Yes we know that you think ml/hexbear/grad are tankies and or .world are a bunch of liberals but it gets old quickly. Try and come up with new material.
- This is not the place to start flamewars between Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed.
Elsewhere in the Fediverse
Other relevant communities:
go to feed...
Another migration. I know I'm sure I'll be told I'm a ding dong, but all these migrations are the reason why decentralized social media will never be popular. Some probably think that's a good thing, but 90% of the posts here are the same person posting hentai.
save