I feel like most posts on Lemmy are irrelevant to me, and they don’t refresh much, is this how Lemmy is like or is this just because I’m a new user?
From I gathered so far, lemmy is still pretty small, so unless you browse all local communities or all the instances it feels pretty limited.
I’m sure it will grow eventually.
Well, you’ve posted three things. The first saying goodbye to Reddit, the second asking which of two instances to use, and the third saying that most posts aren’t relevant to you. Might post some things that are relevant, as it’d help generate conversation on those topics.
Lemmy didn’t have really The Algorithm to feed your media consumption. You need to build your own diet by subscribing to communities of your choice. You can use this search engine to find ones that interest you. https://lemmyverse.net/
I am subscribed to a good bunch of communities I’m interested in, but even then I don’t feel like the posts are that relevant or interesting
What do you actually mean?
I don’t want to be mean but you have to actually use words to be a bit more descriptive than that and maybe think about it some more.
If the posts are irrelevant - subscribe to different communities? How do you normally decide on these things, like e.g. how do you find YouTube channels to subscribe to and how do you decide which of these to watch? Are you applying the same logic here? If not, why not? If yes, then what’s the aspect of the usual/expected outcome that is missing?
What are your expectations for Lemmy? How would the posts be more relevant or interesting? What are they lacking in exactly?
It’s really depends what your interests are, and what your expectations are. I think my interests are pretty lemmy adjacent (nerdy stuff like games, tech and such) and there’s daily posts on big general groups, but even slightly niche groups like c/dnd only get a couple of posts a week. And even when small communities are more active, it’s often just a couple of brave posters keeping things going.
Lemmy has a tiny fraction of the user base of a site like reddit (who claim 97 million active daily users, while lemmy probably has less than a million unique users ever). So, for now, your unlikely to see the frequency or range of posts and comments you would get on reddit. Tbh, for me that’s not an issue. I feel like the conversations and chat that happens even on main communities like asklemmy feels personal and more interesting, and I’d rather read four interesting comments than scroll through a hundred hot takes and dumb jokes.
I think lemmy is at a difficult point where people who use it need to step up and post more, and be the community they want to see.
I find the best sorting is Top -> 6 hours. Then just remember that Lemmy isn’t some insane corporate project designed to maximize engagement at all costs for endless growth.
New user. Build up your subscription list across instances, don’t rely only on local communities.
You should search and subscribe to the relevant communities. “All” section is, of course, just a pile of unsorted craziness.
There is no “algorithm” on Lemmy. One of the reasons why I like it. No tracking in the typical sense. Simply subscribe to communities which you want to see, then browse “Subscribed”. Alternatively, some people like to browse “All” and block any content they do not wish to see. Me personally, a mixture of both. Every now and then I scroll “All” to find new communities to subscribe to. Hope this helps :D.
Unlike proprietary social media, there isn’t an algorithm showing “tailored content for you” too which you add “way less users” and no “big influencers”
To have content, you should subscribe to more communities, also please feel free to post content in order to create some conversations
Being honest, a lot of it probably is because Lemmy is so small. I’ve subscribed to basically every even vaguely relevant community to me, and I still only get about a half-dozen posts a day in my subscribed feed.
Also while there’s a modest amount of people here (I’d reserve small for under a thousand online, personally), many of them seem to have a rather narrow set of interests they like to engage with. Namely technology (self-hosting & Linux in particular), news (primarily to do with politics), and memes (a mix of things but largely politically-tinged, old memes, nostalgia-tinged).
Outside of these interests the next most active may be cute animals, comics, and video games with some gradually rising gardening, stitching, woodworking, art, and certainly other interest communities I’m forgetting or haven’t noticed.
Also while there’s a modest amount of people here (I’d reserve small for under a thousand online, personally)
Honestly, I’d be curious how many active users we actually have. I wouldn’t be suprised if it was fewer than 1000 who contibute (including just voting) when excluding the authoritarian instances and spam.
Do any instances publish these stats?
I don’t know how accurate the stats are, but around the bottom of each instance sidebar they have a breakdown of users per day/week/month. I think that’s supposed to pull not from signed in visits but whether they were active by voting/commenting/posting.
Excluding the instances you mention, there’s still a sizable amount of people active if those stats are reliable.
You can see the weekly/monthly stats aggregated in the list view of instances on Lemmyverse:
What are your interests? Are you looking at Local, All?
Lemmy has a lot, but it is nowhere near Reddit. It is growing, but slowly
You have to add yourself to communities that have things you’re interested in and then sort by “subscribed” to see the relevant post. Theres not nearly as many people on Lemmy as a lot of the other social media sights, but there’s also somehow more “real” people too. Like reddit gets a lot of activity on post but a good percentage of that activity is from bots and children and you don’t really have valuable discussions anymore. Lemmy reminds me of reddit before the cool kids found it.
Spend some time finding stuff you like and subscribe to those channels.
A few ways I’ve found communities that interest me:
-
Community promotion communities such as https://lemmy.ca/c/communitypromo provide pointers to topics of interest.
-
A good Lemmy client goes a long way toward facilitating content discovery; I’m a Voyager user, and it supports sorting Home (subscribed) and All (unsubscribed) post feeds in various ways including New, Active, Scaled, Controversial, etc.
-
When I was new to Lemmy, I used Voyager’s subreddit migration tool to match communities with my interests (see https://vger.app/settings/reddit-migrate ) – I believe Artic and a number of other clients have similar functionality.
-
Just browsing the All feed has helped me find communities (and compile a list of things to block!)
https://feddit.nl/c/trendingcommunities Is also a good source of active community information.
-
Usually it takes some days or weeks until you have curated your community subscriptions. Even more so on Lenny as it’s pretty small yet.
