I first joined Lemmy back during the big Reddit exodus of last year. I like many others wanted an alternative to Reddit, and I thought that this might've been the one. I made two accounts, one on lemmy.world and another on sh.itjust.works, in the June of last year that I used on and off for about 4 months.
At first Lemmy was exciting because it was so active. There were so many new users who were enthusiastic about turning this platform into a genuine alternative. There was a communal effort to create and interact with content, and for awhile it worked. Lemmy was truly interesting during the summer of last year. However, this stream of dedicated users started to slowly decline.
A lot of people hoped that if they were active, they would attract and retain more users to this place to the point where the community would foster interest specific communities like Reddit, but that never happened. After a few months, a lot of users lost interest and went back to Reddit where the userbase is so massive that there is an active community for just about anything.
With this reverse exodus back to Reddit, Lemmy ended up with the same groups that were active on it before hand: political extremists, tech nerds, privacy enthusiasts, and shitposters. To be fair, all these groups are larger now than they were a year ago, but that's all this platform has to offer. If you're into any of these things and primarly these things then Lemmy can be a good alternative to Reddit, but for the general masses? Lemmy is just not good.
For example, a NBA post on the NBA subreddit can get you thousands of interactions in a couple of hours. An NBA post on here will maybe get you a dozen over the course of a couple of days. The only content that will gain any traction here are tech news, political propaganda, and maybe some memes. I don't see this changing any time soon. Even if Reddit implodes, I still think Lemmy will remain a niche platform. I think this evident by the fact that this platform hasn't really progressed in a year.
Change is not easy, it takes time and people willing to help foster that new change.
I am one of those people that is really into politics, but I try to interact with other communities once in a while!
It is an election year, so politics is always in an all time high on any forums and social media.
I suggest, if you are willing, to step up your game and be really active in the communites you would like to see flourish.
It may be lonely, but it tends to be when starting new things!
We are all trying the best we can, when we can, I give props to the lemmyverse and fediverse for all they do!
Thanks for posting, even if you used a burner account!
That's kind of the point that I was making. This platform has little to offer outside a outside of politics, tech, and shitposting. Most of the active users are here for these specific topics, which is fine, but this places Lemmy as a niche platform not one that appeals the masses. A few dedicated people can't foster a genuine community out of sheer enthusiasm. If that was the case then Lemmy would've regressed after the influx of last summer. You could be right, maybe people like you will lead this platform to grow into something more in a few years. I just don't personally see that happening.