fizzle

You said sign up to a random instance and subscribe to 50 most active instances. I assumed the second “instance” was a mistake because you dont subscribe to instances.

I mean “warming up” a community intentionally.

For example, one of the subs I regularly read on reddit is /r/audiobooks, looking for recommendations et cetera. The audiobook communities here are dead.

If I want to adopt one of those dead communities here, I could just decide to make several posts a week for a few months. Thereafter, if I’m still keen, and still haven’t had any interaction from the existing mods, I could approach the admin of that instance and make my case for being appointed as a mod.

I’m not disagreeing with you. I didn’t say “this place used to be a utopia of special interest content”.

Yeah. I lurk reddit via a redlib instance - so I can browse content but can’t log in or of course comment. Often I see some situation unfolding and want to discuss it, but there just isn’t any relevant posts on the fediverse.

That might be an option. I personally would be fine with that but I’ve noticed that many / most users get very upset about the notion that posts / communities / users are impermanent ?

Another solution is to simply promote these dead communities - if anyone is interested in warming them up then they should do so. If they’re consistent then after a few months ask existing mods to add them as mods, or ask admins to do so if the mods are not responsive.

This approach runs the risk that the person doing the work may not become a mod, but honestly I don’t think being a mod should be the objective of creating a community.

Here is my super unpopular take: ultimately you / some / we have misunderstood “quality over quantity”.

It doesn’t mean “we don’t want more users”, it means that the best way to attract more users and growth of the platform is to focus on being the best fediverse we can be. Actively trying to attract more users is a foot gun - even in the unlikely event you’re successful, you reduce the quality of the experience for everyone.

Focusing instead on the health, vibrance, management, and activity of the platform is the best way to attract more users.

Perhaps another way of saying the same thing: the most fertile market segment are those users who used to be active monthly. They were here trying to participate at some point but lost interest. Why? Pretty solid guess is that they were still logging in to reddit for the special / niche interest subs, and after a few months got sick of checking lemmy.

IMO, dead special interest communities are the cancer consuming the fediverse. Nothing wrong with a small active community, but a small community with a half dozen posts from 3 years ago is a big sign saying “go back to reddit, this place is dead”.

Random instances are problematic. As others have said you might end up on one of the weird instances. More likely though… you just end up on a dead instance, take one look at the “local” feed and think that’s all the content.

I don’t have the data to refute this but it just seems nuts to me.

Surely there are apps that allow signups from the app itself and suggest a default instance.

Focusing on quality does not discourage quantity. On the contrary, the phrase “quality over quantity” is intended to imply that the best way to improve quantity is to improve quality.

Yep.

Even the politics stuff, it seems to lag behind reddit by a half day or so.

WDYM? That will just make the graph look less terrible but not address the problem.

I just don’t have conversations with people in which I proselytize internet aggregators. I just don’t talk about this stuff to people.

Besides which, I disagree that the issue is that people don’t know. They don’t know because they haven’t invested the 3 seconds to search “reddit alternatives” and they haven’t done that because they’re happy wherever they are.

Like “most” users think advertising is “good” because it might remind them about things they want. They think it’s “good” that some algorithm might curate content they’re more likely to be interested in. They think it’s fine that there’s a new AI chat bot.

Having an awareness that alternatives exist does not solve these fundamental impediments.

All the numbers in that article seem pretty meaningless to me.

"Most people are not stupid enough to complain about putin. Some people want the war to end.