I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
I advertised Lemmy to my friends a few times and they have now stopped replying to my messages :P
Same. It greatly did not help that Google searching for “Lemmy” used to go straight to lemmy.ml (as the first hit to a specific instance, after the stuff about the singer), which if you take a look at without an account you will see shows “Local” rather than “All” posts.
Just imagine: you sent a Westerner to a place that routinely and literally calls for the actual murder and downfall of all of Western society, with such posts peaking just before any election in a Western nation. YOU might block those types of posts, but I am explaining what the people that you mentioned Lemmy to almost surely saw? (although immediately after the USA election I started noticing a shift away from it being more confined to just the triad and instead spread more throughout the entire Threadiverse - MANY people now routinely call for the guillotine, with ever-decreasing ratio of joking to serious, and remember that can be shocking to mainstream people?)
Yeah.
Although I usually tend to send a link directly to the post (which is relevant to what is being discussed), the things around that might change their impression. And considering that their is more political stuff than plain tech stuff, almost everywhere on the internet rn, that kind of a result is expected.
Oh yeah, I concede that there are great discussions there, including some that are nowhere else (more or less, as in with much lower intensity). Certain communities are fine (in terms of their content), and direct links are just flat good scholarship to cite your resources.
That said, the wording of both of our messages here would also, in theory, apply to Reddit, X, Facebook, and even Truth Social, so it makes sense why we are being downvoted, bc the arguments going against moral purity testing are heavily unpopular here. And to some degree rightly so, since we need to separate ourselves as much as possible from such.
You might consider sending people links to those messages as accessible via programming.dev rather than lemmy.ml? Perhaps that approach would have more success at enticing people to join the Threadiverse who absolutely would not if you sent them a link to lemmy.ml and then they explored around that instance a bit and, not liking what they see there (understandably) nope right out of the whole affair.
People are not as simple as (most) programming - there is such variety and the less deep thinkers, who nonetheless have great skills in other areas that you lack (e.g. artists, or woodworking) may need you to do some of that more detailed thinking for them. If you want to - i.e. if you want the benefits that having done so would offer.
I just keep sending them memes I know they’ll like. I’ve had 3 friends joing various instances so far, because after a while they just go:
Man…where do you get these memes?!
Not memes but I keep the address bar in the screen shot.
Fair play, whatever works is what’s best
Ah well, I am not good at that.
The best I have gotten people to say is how I “know so much” about stuff at work and the best I can point them to is Wikipedia, StackOverflow and the like, which of course they aren’t really interested in doing and their lines are probably just a way to try and flatter me.
At least they’re flattering you 💪
Honestly, it is not fun being flattered in a way that makes me try to give them an answer that they will ignore.
Imagine a C++ compiler with feelings, reading your code ignoring the return value of a
[[nodiscard]]function.Ooft… yeah, fair enough. I don’t get the joke, but I got the sentiment.