People want to be on social media where other people are. Lemmy isn't popular because lemmy isn't popular
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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It is more popular.
That probably doesn't make sense, but when I joined a few years ago, I could read every post across the entire lemmy-verse and be annoyed waiting for new content about anything. At the time, the survival of lemmy at all was in serious doubt.
Now I have my handful of groups that are generally active enough that I get a consistent amount of new stuff coming in. It's fairly low volume compared to other platforms, but it's growing fairly steadily and becoming more useful all the time.
The creation of communities happens with time. We're getting there.
Reddit was like this in 2009, here's a random thread from there to illustrate, 35 score, no comment votes. The years prior Reddit was even quieter despite having only one community they had to post to, before subreddits were a thing.
Give it time, promote it on Reddit if you want to !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com, tell your friends. As far as I know we are growing slowly, it will only blast up if Reddit does something extra henious again. Though the knee-high barrier of choosing a server and learning the etiquette will take a little time.
I think it's okay as is, it doesn't have to be more popular, but if it does become more popular then I don't mind that either.
because the interface is archiac, and the majority of topics are extremist.
normal people see the front page of lemmy and they see a bunch of weirdos going on about linux, communism, and trans stuff.
any of the big threads with 100s of comments are full of crazies going off about violence and hate towards mainstream political positions and lifestyles.
i am 'mainstream' and i have to block multiple users per day because i get constantly harassed by nutcases telling me how evil i am for using windows/mac, being a socialist democrat, and driving a car to work. if you disagree with the militant doomer wannabe revolutionaries you're not going to have a good time here.
I can agree with you, the initial experience can be daunting for new users especially since majority of communities are of political nature. This experience honestly is why i think most people now reside in such communities - as that's the experience with me.
In addition, I can agree with extremist stances being prominent on here. Eco-fascism is one of those that I found common even when I was only part of the "basic" communities.
Because there's still a handful of basic stuff that still hasn't gotten sorted out yet for some reason.
Like if I wanted to share your post with my friends, I'll send them this link: https://piefed.ca/c/nostupidquestions/p/377144/why-isint-lemmy-more-popular. If they're using a mobile app, then it might be fine. But if they're on desktop and want to comment or vote here but aren't already on my instance, they need to go back to their home instance, search up this community, and then search for this post. Why isn't there some sort of native way where I can just click on a button and have it open up in my home instance? Or even better: integrate something like threadiverse.link into Lemmy/PieFed so it immediately redirects me to my home instance's version on this post.
And before someone suggests using a different front-end or using a browser script, I appreciate you trying to help but my issue is why this isn't even natively part of Lemmy. And I'm not even sure if it's in the pipelines for V1.0.
Another issue is that there are still posts that don't federate properly. And it's not because an instance was defederated. What posts I see on this account might never be visible from a separate account. What is even more frustrating is that sometimes, I can't even force my instance to fetch the post. I'll give it the direct link and it still can't find the post on my instance.
As long as these basic issues remain unresolved, Lemmy will not become popular. A site can't be popular if I can't even share a post to my friends properly. Or if I can't even see the post, then I wouldn't be able to share it with anyone!
Edit: added clarification
People stay on mainstream corporate platforms no matter how badly they enshittify because that's where everyone else is. They don't want to jump ship unless everyone else will jump ship with them, and so nobody makes the first move.
Lemmy isn't more popular because Lemmy isn't more popular. Lemmy wants to be an alternative to Reddit, but the best thing Reddit had going for it was all the niche communities for fandoms, hobbies, and other interests. That's something that just can't exist here, because if you take a niche thing and multiply it by a niche platform, I'll bet that I might very well be the only person on this platform who is into some of my hyperfixations. So people who want to talk about topics that have no community here, leave and go back to bigger platforms.
I'm still here to try and push for a better future, but I honestly don't know how we can grow this place to the kind of critical mass it would take to really get the ball rolling.
network effect. There's fewer people here so there's fewer people here.
That said, I like it just how it is and would caution anyone against wishing for more users.
Don't focus on getting more users. Focus on making the content here the best it can be.
It's inevitable that the quality of the experience here will change with more users. Whether it's a net positive or negative remains to be seen.
To be sure, these are the "good old days" of lemmy.
As long as corporations and states can't get a foothold with their bribery, dark algorithms, and bots it should remain fairly decent.
Lack of marketing.
Whaaaaaat? It has a far better signal to noise ratio than those 'other' platforms. As long as you're into Star Trek memes and Linux.
I'm into Star Trek, and all set to switch to Linux this weekend!
Do it! I made the plunge and have zero regrets. Everything works, it's fun, and I get to annoyingly pester friends, family, and strangers about the benefits of open source software!
Thank you. My only real concern point now is running Adobe stuff in a VM. Other than that I think I'm good to go.
or ecology!
...or have ADHD
I don't know a single person that knows it exists other than a few that ive tried to get interested. I have told a few friends that use reddit but they just don't get it.
I started lemmy a few months ago, stopped using reddit completely a few weeks ago and I don't miss it other than all the dog posts...more people need to post pics of their doggos on here !!!!
Everyone to whom I mention lemmy - even some of those to whom I have before - responds by asking about a musician of whom I'd never heard before I started having these conversations.
To be fair, telling people it was founded by Motorhead fans is a better selling point than that it was started by Marxist leninists.
most of them are still addicted to reddit thats why, when you have all under one house, its hard to beat, and thier communities there is still large and eclipses lemmy.
plus most niches have been on reddit for decade+, it will be hard to convince like 20k-100k people to move to lemmy.
It's not necessarily a matter of moving. People who are into those niche subjects will gladly add more. I'm into guitars, and that's the only thing I really miss about Reddit. If I was in all the Reddit guitar subs, and found out about Lemmy guitar forums (which practically don't exist), I wouldn't switch to Lemmy, I'd just start browsing Lemmy's forums, too.
Start with Cats. Lemmy has a real lack of Cat material. Cats are like Artists in a run down neighborhood. Once the artists arrive, everybody knows the neighborhood will change over the next few years. Cats are like that in the Internet. Lemmy needs cats to attract more eyeballs.
Having to choose a server before you know what that means or the differences between the slightly different versions of federated networks makes it more confusing.
Yes, "it doesn't matter which server you choose," because you can see the posts from anywhere, in theory. Except, it also kind of does matter. Places defederate from each other. If you pick a smaller instance, it may suddenly just go down and then you're back at the start again.
Honestly, I've made... 5? 6? different versions of me on different instances. Kbin went down, didn't get into Mastodon, lemm.ee went down, didn't like Mbin as much as Kbin, tried fedia.io sort of liked it, ended up largely on piefed.social, but also like being on sopuli.xyz because it's defederated from less and has more global content.
It's confusing and niche. I honestly really love it even when I kind of hate it. I end up ahead of the curve in a lot of tech news because of the hardcore enthusiasts on here.
It's somewhat difficult to navigate at first and most users find the most popular platforms and don't have a reason to move on, simple as that. Ease of access and, unfortunately, advertising would lead to Lemmy being more popular. But who would fund the advertising?
most users find the most popular platforms and don't have a reason to move on
This is definitely a good point. Is even visible here, with not just Mbin but also Piefed still barely having users compared to Lemmy.
Guerilla marketing?
Wheatpaste posters or something.
Everything new starts in the underground.
Reddit has been around for 20 years and Lemmy not near as long. Reddit didn't really hit it big until Digg screwed the pooch driving away users around 2010. I don't see Lemmy hitting Reddit number probably ever, but reddit is one of the highest trafficked sites on the web. Lemmy is steadily growing, but I think to many non users, federation and instances is a confusing prospect, so they never try. As it grows, I would imagine it will get easier or at least clearer for the layman and the velocity of growth will increase due to that and a larger user base as a whole.
People tend to overexplain, just point people to an instance link and that's it
federation and instances is a confusing prospect
Which is why we shouldn't frontload people with that stuff. They don't need to understand decentralization from the start, let them familiarize themselves with the fediverse first before throwing that at them. Just recommend a default instance, maybe change which every few posts if centralization is a concern. They'll pick up the idea of instances as they interact with the fediverse.
only way lemmy will grow, if reddit is continously banning people, or enshittfying some major thing, that prevents a certain community to not be viable. reddit noticed of thier large purges were getting rid of too many people at once, they now do alot of background banning instead.
Also the client situation is confusing to normies. Search for Lemmy on the spyware cancer store and you’ll see what I mean.
Pixelfed and Mastodon have already figured that out.
Same reason Mastodon isn’t as popular as Twitter… a lot of people really don’t understand the concept of federation, or why it’s important in order to maintain a robust and healthy discussion. They’re fine with dictatorship as long as it aligns with their sensibilities.
Also, the concept of “one website, one app” is infinitely easier to comprehend than “many instances, many apps, still one protocol”.
Many reasons add up. PieFed is a bit better and evolving fast. In my opinion, it is primarily the scale and scope of niche content, and the toxic opinions of many towards genuine people.
A few of the big strikes have been the lack of moderator transparency, and occasional poor moderation. Tribalistic bandwagon behavior, unmitigated negativity by a few individuals, and astroturfing. The inability to block another user from actually seeing and interacting with posts. This place is not privacy oriented. The feed is unmanaged and the effort needed to block and filter the fluff is beyond the curation expectations of many.
These are all good points
!fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com il people want to help
To the biggest degree it's comfort elsewhere and numbers attracting numbers. To a smaller but still substantial degree it's the same reason the top 3 phone brands have less customization and a more plug and play experience than rooted phones. It solves a huge amount of the problems with Reddit, but reddit is simpler to join, simpler to understand, feels more secure, and has so many communities and active users that even inactive communities can look active by how many people mistakenly post there.
Critical mass does what they do.
For me I feel like to many instances to sign up to. Like . World. Ml .shit just works .etc...
I think whoever wants to promote anything on the fediverse should probably just pick an instance they enjoy and promote that, without caring to explain how it's all part of a federated network or whatnot.
Advertising. I'm not going to elaborate, because it's all just going to come back to that. Grassroots, paid, you name it. Advertising.
Because its got too much political bias and censorship which alienates one side and the centre. Elon did this by making twitter open all other platforms must be just as tolerant or cease to be relevant in the medium of the marketplace of ideas
If you think Lemmy is bad, then you were never on Reddit. Spez went full MAGA, and after the MAGA Inauguration, he permabanned all the active users who built the site. Now it's all MAGA trolls, novelty accounts, bots, Russian propaganda farmers, etc.
Meh. Reddit had a very strong political bias.
Lemmy doesn't have the same polish, it's a little more difficult to create an account, and doesn't have any marketing. Also success snowballs.
I respect the crap out of everyone that pitches in to make Lemmy as good as it is. But if I'm being real, I'm here to spite Reddit. Few people have that moral give-a-fuck. Spite is easy, following through to do something that is more challenging and pays nothing is not.