Creating private chat groups is another matter. I honestly think Matrix chat is the best approach for secure and private group connectivity in the FediVerse. Though some might argue for Signal.

I was just passing through and thought I would throw in my two cents on this, as someone with a bit of experience. Session and SimpleX both work as ‘secure and private group chat’ platforms, as they are E2EE and require no phone numbers/other private information. SimpleX is a little more feature rich, but I’ve found Session more stable (although SimpleX is improving. They also lack the geek-curve @[email protected] mentioned, as you don’t have to do much more than pick a username to start chatting (unless you want to dig into all the technical settings). Depending on what you are looking for in a chat app, you may want to check them out.

e: fixed the link for SimpleX

Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll check it out. Funnily enough, I get a lot of the content I post from Reddit.

Yep. If the communities here could attract some high quality OC posters (especially ones who don’t also post on Reddit) that would lead to some major growth, but that goes back to the same problem of OC producers not coming here because of low view counts…. I think at the end of the day, Lemmy is going to struggle to compete unless Reddit does something crazy and completely bans NSFW content or something.

You may be right about the inactive accounts, and you are definitely correct about the dead imgur content (although I’d put the number more towards 50-60 percent), but I’m afraid those factors aren’t quite enough to make Lemmy attractive. Imgur struck a blow towards the NSFW side of Reddit, but it has recovered.

Another draw Reddit has that I forgot to mention is the prevalence of OC content. That can have it’s own problems, with spam and excessive advertising, but the big upside is if a user finds something they like, with a single click they can go directly to the source to find more of it.

RE: My community Yes, and no. With the type of content it is focused on, I have a slight bias towards illustration, and I’m basically the sole poster so that affects things. But, more than that, I haven’t found any non-illustration content that would fit. With that said, it certainly isn’t meant to be an illustration only community. I’m not attempting to actively remove or suppress non-illustration content.

I’m somewhere between A and B at this point. The community I mod is fairly niche, so I was not really expecting a massive flood of interaction. It did grow pretty quickly at the start, but that growth has slowed down a fair bit since then.

The main challenge for me is that, aside from 1-2 posts by others, I am the only one who has been finding and posting new content, making me the only one keeping it ‘alive’ so to say. I’ve been managing alright, but I wonder what will happen if I get busy and am unable to make new posts…

I think the major problem with Lemmy (not just NSFW Lemmy, but I’ll focus on that side) is one of user count and volume of content. On Reddit, there is a massive collection of populated, active subs, spanning all manner of desires and kinks, from common to rare. This simply does not exist on NSFWLemmy at the moment. For example, let’s say a user is looking for content focused on female abs.

On Lemmy, there is:

• !fitgirls with 5.39K members
• !thickfit with 500 members, and no new posts since 5 months ago
• !fbb (female body builders) with ~400 members, and no new posts since 23 days ago
• no communities directly focused on abs

Over on Reddit, there is:

• r/fitgirls with 1 million members
• r/FitNakedGirls with 1.2 million members
• plus a lot more ‘general’ subs I’m neglecting

as well as subs focused exactly on what the user is looking for, all with a very large member count, when compared to LemmyNSFW’s most populated communities

• r/HottestAbs with 55k members
• r/SkinnyWithAbs with 173k members
• r/PetiteWithAbs with 10k members

The problem with this, is a prospective user is being asked to choose between a platform that has a steady stream of fresh, high quality content of exactly what they want, and one that is offering less, more infrequent, and more general content. From a pure consumption standpoint, there are really very few reasons to pick Lemmy over Reddit. I think, until there exists a compelling reason to use Lemmy, powerful enough to start self sustaining growth, this platform will continue to struggle with the problems that come with a low user count on a site focused around content consumption.