At least on the communities i follow. Every so often I come across a thread where i recognize most of the users there even in the big communities with over 30k members and I haven’t even been on lemmy that long.

  • @Crackhappy
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    32 months ago

    Shouldn’t popularity be based on activity, not membership though?

    • Andrew
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      32 months ago

      It’s a useful metric. Maybe it’s the better one, but personally I’d like to see good data from both.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 months ago

        Lurkers need to subscribe for the content to appear in their Subscribed feed. Kicking them out may simply result in them rejoining again. It would be a constant struggle against that.

        Plus, if such purges occur routinely, then what about a major poster who takes a break, even if for like a year (let’s say they have a baby)? Actively getting rid of lurkers sends a signal that they are not welcomed. Especially if in the future Lemmy adds the ability for mods to have to approve join requests.

        Whereas simply using “monthly active users” avoids all of that. Do as you please with any of your communities - in which case it would be helpful for the sake of transparency to literally add it to the rules (those who don’t participate will eventually get purged) - but I thought I would list out some of these issues, in case it helped!:-)