In recent days I have seen these two arguments repeated quite commonly. From reddits side it was all about how “noones using Lemmy anyway”
While from Lemmy it was “how numbers have been exploding”
My question is, why do numbers of users matter so much to anyone really? Isnt activity what matters more?
On two questions here I gotten just as much engagement if not more than anything I did on reddit combined
Volume.
On Reddit I browsed “new” or “rising” and just subs I was subscribed too was enough for a steady stream of content.
On Lemmy even including all instances, there’s not a whole lot on “new”.
Which is good, because it makes it easier to find communities to subscribe too and also the problematic ones so you can block them and never see them again.
But low users mean most communities are dead. There’s a Fantasy Football sub for example, there’s 3 other people on it tho, so it won’t really be very useful this season.
I think the particularly tricky use case is someone who wants to browse just some specific topic like Zelda discussions or programming memes. If you’re viewing /all, there’s plenty of new posts. But if you’re browsing a specific sub, you might only few a handful per day.