I was initially optimistic about Lemmy but it doesn’t seem to have caught on much, certainly not enough to truly compete with the likes of Reddit. Also, it doesn’t seem to have caught on except for topics involving technology. Even as someone really proactive trying to branch out into forums, it is next to impossible to find forums analogous to the forums of the 2000s/early 2010s. Has it truly died out? Is there any way to replicate it?
The one thing I can think of is to have a foundation built firmly on open source principles, which works on its UI and marketing to the point where network effects can truly take off. Most open source alternatives really do not focus enough on UI and general appeal to make this work.
I’m happy to be proven wrong; if I’m just not looking in the right places, please do link them!
I don’t get what you want for Lemmy. Lemmy has 50k active monthly users. The forums I used to frequent 20 years ago had a fraction of that.
How many people are you expecting for your online forum?
I want avatars, signatures, “location” fields, and post counts back!
Maybe I should bug my admin to add LemmyBB.
“Reddit is still a monolith, therefore Lemmy failed” - OP
50k users and still every day when you open lemmy you see stone old posts or just copy pasted posts from reddit. 50k users mean nothing if most of them isn’t contributing anything (copy pasting content of reddit don’t counts).