First off, I want to say that I love what the people here are doing but I do have a problem. There is never any conversation about posts. There are tons and tons of links shared but most of the time they’re just articles that someone found interesting. I never see any true, meaningful discussion the way I do on reddit. Does anyone else have a problem with this or am I just shouting at the clouds? Is there anything we can do about it?
I’m going to take the opposite approach and say Lemmy is surprisingly active.
I wanted to check an idea of Reddit proportion of lurkers; didn’t find actual data and am definitely not emotionally invested enough to make my own, but it took me to the 1% rule, which states that on an online community, roughly 1% of people create content, 9% edit/update/upvote/comment, and 90% are passive consumers of content.
It’s very true that Lemmy isn’t very active (although it’s definitely been better recently!), but given this, I honestly believe it’s purely a matter of gaining a critical mass of users. So I see two main approaches:
I’ve seen the issue on Mastodon when I joined a few years ago, and my friends and I make a point of not using “favs” too much, just boosting (which puts it in your followers’ timeline) and commenting/replying. It’s a small thing but it’s good etiquette and encourages others to do the same.