Hell, many of the communities barely show up when you search within Lemmy!

I know there are places on this site that I have no idea where they are, and I’ve been here like 2 months now.

This is one of the biggest opportunities in recent years for a new social media platform to come up and establish itself and Lemmy seems to be totally squandering the opportunity. The fact that the active user count is dropping so fast, should be very worrying.

I think a lot of it has been mentioned by @rr7@lemmy.world, but it isn’t just what is here, but also what isn’t there. Namely the lack of posts in communities outside a handful of political ones. Social media should be some form of conversation and yet if you go to lots of the slightly more esoteric communities and there are few posts and even fewer replies to those posts. You’ll basically be talking to yourself if you want to talk about cars or the latest gadget or asking for help on some DIY project.

There are like 50,000 active users. That is the metric that matters above all else.

People that make an account and never post (which is where that 400,000 number you are referring to comes from) means next to nothing. If the number of active users continues to decrease, then this site will be dead, regardless of what the user count it.

There is the old cliche that during holiday dinner there is always that one right-wing uncle who never shuts the fuck about politics (these days being during Thanksgiving and how great Trump is). Everyone finds what this uncle is saying is cringe as hell.

Well, that’s kind of what Lemmy is becoming, but for the far-left.

If it is in a political community, it is one thing. And to a large degree, I might even agree with most left-of-center views.

But there is an endless stream of edgy pro-commie and similar posts and a dearth of other light-hearted posts to counter balance it. Almost all communities outside the ones listed above get no traffic, so there’s no point in trying to start a conversation about cars or DIY projects or electronics. Hell, even the NSFW communities on Lemmy are rather lame.

They are laughing at you, not with you.

That worked. At least I believe it did.

I got no problems joining a community, but I don’t even see HOW to do so. Usually I see a “subscribe” button or something, but I have to sign in. But I am already signed in to Lemmy. Does this mean creating a whole new account? I don’t get how and why these various sites don’t work together.

There are sooooo many Linux folks here, it’s crazy. Which is fine if that’s what they want to use, but yeah this site has certain groups that overwhelm others.

So much this! Can there really be only a dozen or so posts in a community as wide as cars? Like seriously? I must have some setting messed up.

Homeassistant, HomeImprovement and woodworking are the only ones that I found that are mildly related and even then the traffic there is sparse.

I used the Communities link and searched for cars and DIY and engineering and subed to any of the ones which seem to have even a little bit of traffic (in the hopes that maybe things would increase eventually). For car ones, literally just “Cars” and “electric vehicles” are the only real one I bothered to sub to. Tried looking for Subaru or WRX stuff and that came up basically empty. For tinkering there is “3d Printing” and “woodworking” but I think the woodworking one is moving servers so it might disappear. Also “Machinist” but there’s no traffic in that one. Which is the case for far too many of the ones that come up.

I think the main subs are at a sustainable level, but not the niche subs. But Lemmy needs more than just politics and general news and complaining about Reddit to sustain itself.

As I replied to someone else, it doesn’t help that the content moves around. Was a post in one of the subs (are they even called subs here?) that they were changing servers which apparently would mean they’d disappear if you didn’t change your settings too. For such a simple thing, you’d think it would be automatic.

I have. And it did indeed get replies. Great! Then everything went dead again. Not so great.

Yes and it doesn’t help that communities change servers or something and apparently if you don’t change the settings you lose them from your subscribed list.

Seems like a rather shortsighted way of doing things if you ask me.

Also someone posted that the same name can be used on multiple instances, so like do you have to subscribe to all of them? Why have so many? Why would that be allowed? Makes little sense.

Man, I really hope more traffic starts heading into some of the more niche communities because getting a new thread every day or there and getting 1 or 2 replies - if that - is not how you sustain a site.

Are there really that few people into cars or engineering or DIY stuff on Lemmy?! Where the fuck are my fellow car and tinkering nerds at? And no one does projects around the house? So few posts in some of the home owner communities as well.

Seeing as how the servers keep on doing down or there are other similar problems, I’m not sure Lemmy could handle the traffic even if it did stay. And there are far too many subs with next to zero traffic which only makes the whole site look kind of sad. You are better off having 1/2 as many subs with 2x the engagement that they currently have.

I’m not convinced that anyone types that much that an extra few millimeters of finger movement amount to much of anything.

If people want to mess around with such extreme keyboards as a hobby, then have at it! But I’m rather hard pressed to believe in this day and age - especially since almost everything has a GUI - that people are typing sooooo much that an extra row of numbers or other keys and moving your finger that tiny distance means anything. I’ve replied to someone else stating that I used to work for a large high end furniture company which had tons and tons of studies on ergonomics and such in office environments. No one is going to convince me these ultra minimal keyboards are for ergonomics or speed. They’re for tinkering around, having something that others say “oh, that’s different” and a way to pass the time. Which is fine.

I have no idea where you think I wasn’t being “chill”. In fact I was reading your reply and was going to offer up suggestions in designing a tilt mechanism to get it to tilt away from you since that is just the kind of stuff I do for a living.

This reminds me of those lowered mini trucks. You ever seen those? They are slammed to the ground. They cut up the bed where yiu normally haul stuff, and fit it with airbags to let it drop so low. Even at their higher settings to drive it, they are so low that they sometimes get hung up on a speed bump. So it can’t haul stuff anymore. You can barely drive it, and almost all it’s functionality is out the window all for a hobby and aesthetics. Yeah, I think these kinds of keyboards are the lowered mini trucks of the computer world.