Excuse the off-topic nature of this post but I am keen to see non-Reddit online communities succeed and wondered if others feel similarly.
Lemmy.ml was unfortunately a widely shared instance for Reddit migrants and became massively oversubscribed by users and new communities. I for one joined up here before I fully understood the nature of the Fediverse.
What I have noticed (and is widely reported elsewhere) is that lemmy.ml isn’t federating properly with other instances, likely due to overload. The result is that users from other instances are missing huge chunks of comments or even entire posts from lemmy.ml based communities such as this one. Subscribe requests sit at pending perpetually. The result is a big barrier of entry to the community. The issue appears two way which communities form other instances not federating properly to lemmy.ml and lemmy.ml communities not federating properly to other instances.
Seeing this I recently created a new account on a different, quieter instance. On there my subscribes to non-lemmy.ml communities has been near instant. My subscription to this community and another on lemmy.ml is stalled.
Due to the nature of Lemmy, being on a popular instance provides clear visibility benefits to those who are users on that instance but at this time appears detrimental to those on others.
Is it worth considering moving this community to a less populated instance while it is still small so as to provide a more reliable experience for new users who otherwise may just quit due to tech frustrations and an apparent lack of content?
Unfortunately I’m not yet a DN so I’ve little to contribute right now but I loved lurking on Reddit and really don’t want to go there anymore. I’d love to see this place become a success.
I just wanted to put the thought out there given the lack of movement on here (despite your best efforts). My concern with lemmy.ml is its lack of reliability right now for federating to other servers. Subscription requests stuck at pending and posts and comments not making it to other servers so things look dead when they may not be (seen this when viewing lemmy.ml communities that have had more traction from other instance accounts). That being said lemmy.ml has a large (too large maybe) local user base that can look at the original local copy so maybe that offsets the federation issues.
I don’t know. I just wanted to put it out there that lemmy.ml has been unreliable and I ended up making accounts on other instances to be able to reliably see what was going on their communities and the same for here. wayfarershaven.eu is a reliable instance focused on “Creating a space for inspiration, creativity, handwork, reading, travel, etc.” which has onebag and solotravel communities on it. The instance admin was interested in perhaps hosting a DN community but I told them there one was already running here. Maybe that would offer a more reliable home than lemmy.ml which is overloaded and really originally focused on tech like privacy and FOSS.