I have noticed that I interact a lot more in Lemmy than I ever did in any social media. Let it be Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter... I am used to be the lurker, but here for some reason things are different. Wonder if more people feel like I do.
It's not even comparable to reddit. Like 80% of posts I see are blatant political propaganda or rants at the system, the other 20% is memes and Linux discussions. Where are the niche communities we all wanted to see? Oh right, they are so niche that they are dead 👍
It certainly doesn't help that Lemmy had and still has absolutely no sensible way to actually surface niche communities to its subscribers. Unlike Reddit, it doesn't weigh posts by their relative popularity within the community but only by total popularity/popularity within the instance. There's also zero form of community grouping (like Reddit's multireddits) - all of which effectively eliminates all niche communities from any sensible main view mode and floods those with shitty memes and even shittier politics only. This pretty much suffocated the initially enthusiastic niche tech communities I had subscribed to. They stood no chance to thrive and their untimely death was inevitable.
There are some very tepid attempts to remedy this in upcoming Lemmy builds, but I fear it's too little too late.
I fear that Lemmy was simply nowhere near mature enough when it mattered and it has been slowly bleeding users and content ever since. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, though.
Agree to everything but the doom. Yes, most people will only give 1 chance to a platform, but we haven't churned through most people yet. Most people are yet to honor Lemmy with their first visit, at some point in the future. We will be better prepared than ever. This wil be true for a long while. So I think we should make (reasonable) haste, but nothing is lost yet. In the long run, we're still growing.