Since i was there i can attest that what you’re seeing is pretty much the early days of Reddit itself. At the beginning it didn’t even had comments, the purpose of the site was sharing interesting links. Then comments were added and people commented on said links. Of course, in nearly 20 years the site has evolved.

So, assuming and hoping that Lemmy lasts and grows, just give it time.

I’m going to take the opposite approach and say Lemmy is surprisingly active.

I wanted to check an idea of Reddit proportion of lurkers; didn’t find actual data and am definitely not emotionally invested enough to make my own, but it took me to the 1% rule, which states that on an online community, roughly 1% of people create content, 9% edit/update/upvote/comment, and 90% are passive consumers of content.

It’s very true that Lemmy isn’t very active (although it’s definitely been better recently!), but given this, I honestly believe it’s purely a matter of gaining a critical mass of users. So I see two main approaches:

• Comment as much as possible! Sometimes you’ll be shouting at the clouds, sometimes you’ll lead by example and people will join the conversation;
• As a community, let’s get more people using Lemmy so that even with the same ratio, the absolute number of posters & commenters will grow.

I’ve seen the issue on Mastodon when I joined a few years ago, and my friends and I make a point of not using “favs” too much, just boosting (which puts it in your followers’ timeline) and commenting/replying. It’s a small thing but it’s good etiquette and encourages others to do the same.

After lurking on reddit for years, without even having an account, it’s hard to break the habit and start commenting. I agree that there are not many discussions right now, but that is likely due to the smaller number of users.

But I will try to engage more on posts, because I also want this community to be interesting and alive :)

Truth be told, I never even considered posting links to something - the lurking mindset is still pretty strong.

Yeah I agree, I would really like to see more discussion on Lemmy and beehaw in particular. I think this is because:

1. There are less users here.
2. Comments themselves drive engagement. I am more likely to comment on a thread like this where I can see a discussion in happening.

One thing to bear in mind is that reddit started off by creating fake accounts that would post links and discuss things. It is definitely an option to do that on Lemmy and it might already be happening a bit with tools like gpt-4.

In my opinion, start conversations and let everyone join in after you. I won’t usually comment on something unless someone else has already commented something.

Another thing that I notice is that threads that somehow get traction and replies from mastodon tend to be very active.

So maybe we can encourage more people from mastodon to subscribe to communities and participate there, so lemmy content automatically gets federated to more mastodon servers, that then again have waaaaaay more users who might be interested and engage? Also users there should like the software and values anyways :)

The size and biased selection of the community, as mentioned in the other comments here are the main factor. Reddit is successful for at least two very different reasons, both depending on having a lot of users.

1. It has an ‘entertaining’ value through various hilarious or story-telling posts, such as those of the TIFU and AMA ones. Importantly, those depend on interactions and comments and ask for them from the beginning (‘ask me anything’).

2. It has an ‘educational’ value, mostly supported by specialists, sometimes in very narrow fields. The ELI5 posts are particulary interesting because comments can go a long way towards explaining complex issues in mathematics, physics or biology or illuminating little known areas of human history or behaviour.

Having specialists ready to provide thorough explanations about something, celebrities doing AMAs or people ready to expose their mistakes depend on a critical mass of people having adopted a platform. Lemmy is far from being there but I think it grows, like the community using Mastodon. The situation should slowly improve.

Communities have to build. The small parts of Lemmy that are already like this were mostly already either communities already (or… a banned or suspended sub that just came here).

That can take years. Lemmy itself won’t reflect those changes, but places in Lemmy will.

I think part of the problem is the smaller userbase.

Its time to do some recruiting

@metaltoilet I disliked this as well, at first. But on the other hand, discussions can tend to be very vitriolic and wherever there are lots of comments, you can be sure there is some polarization in the comments, sometimes turning ugly. This can be seen both on Reddit and on the main Lemmy instance. It almost never happened here from my experience.

Now, everything is up to you. You can choose more silence or more noise, at the expense of some sanity if you encounter people who think that trolling and enragement makes for constructive discussions.

I also know how hard can it be to be yourself a conversation starter. You only think about

• Oh, but what should I say?
• Is it okay if I say what I say? Will I offend someone if I say this?
• How will they react to whatever I say?
• etc.

At least that was my experience when first arriving on the Fediverse proper. If it weren’t for Musk to take over Twitter and start this whole exodus, I would have hardly accessed this network once a week.

As others said, try be more engaging yourself around this place. If you shout in the wild you might get an echo back 😉

Edit: Also, as have others noticed, there aren’t enough people to have a conversation around. In contrast with Twitter, Reddit feels more engaging and more interested into dialogue, instead of just shouting their thoughts in the abis and expecting everyone to agree with them. Mastodon is the same to some extent and Lemmy is the same. We just need more users in this dialogue, give it some time. I am really curious what will happen when the API changes of Reddit will come to effect. Will people suddenly wake up no longer being able to access Reddit on their 3rd party client of choice? Will they resort to changing it to the default one? Will they choose an alternative platform? Will they quit it altogether? Time will tell 😁

Lack of discussion on beehaw (and lemmy)

I have good news: we can change that 😃

@metaltoilet@beehaw.org Let’s try replying to this from Calckey instead of from my account on #Beehaw. If that works, I might try to boost it to increase visibility (of Beehaw, or of #Lemmy in general) on Calckey. Maybe that will increase visitors to both. ​:fediverse:​

I would highly encourage you to start said discussion. I think people are willing to engage, there just aren’t a lot of people initiating.

Being active yourself may encourage passive people to join in discussions, and the point @petrescatraian@libranet.de made about the signal-to-noise ratio was also good.

Does anyone else have a problem with this or am I just shouting at the clouds? Is there anything we can do about it?

Yeah I see this as well. I mostly try to at least provide some interesting content, stuff that I find and like. For some topics now and then a lot of people start discussing, mostly fediverse related ones. Otherwise it’s very quiet here often.

I think it’s too quiet as well, but don’t really know what to do about that, apart form participating more myself. We can just hope that more people find this place.

The people on chapo.chat for a while did a thing where they added a small banner to most of their memes and stuff, so if it was shared people would find out where it originated. But even for something like that we don’t have enough memes here ^^