Then the question is, why is it when users come from reddit they don’t hang around? they don’t tell their friends, hey this is a place that’s awesome!

Some do. I would argue that most social media websites sign-ups become dormant accounts very quickly. Whether its Reddit, a large Discord server, a reddit alternative etc. The retainment rate of most social media sites is and has always been quite bad. People are fickle, or not as interested as they thought, or just sign up to have a better look. I don’t think there’s anything special about Lemmy or Piefed here, and advertising it isn’t exactly easy nor even welcome.

Does Lemmy/Piefed have the best design? No. Is it uniquely bad? Not at all. I think Reddits is pretty poor in areas, but that doesn’t seem to be an encumbrance to it.

It’s slowly declining. I don’t think it has anything to do with usability, or lack of - but simply that these platforms usually get boosted by Reddit doing a scandal rather than anything else.

Communities are organised by activity on Piefed, so you can see what people are using.

Tbh, and I plan to do this for piefed.social soon (and rimu has given me the go-ahead) - abandoned discarded communities with literally zero posts need to be purged by instances. It’s just clutter.

If a community was active and then isn’t, that’s fine, but a lot of communities are made and then never used.

https://piefed.social/topics

I think you can unsubscribe from whatever topics you subscribed to here, and it should auto-unsubscribe you from those communities.

@wjs018@piefed.social See!? SEE?!

Lol, I’ve specifically directly bought this up in conversations about this. Don’t worry. I don’t think the auto-subscribing to all the communities in a topic is a good idea.

So what a new user is presented with are topics, not feeds. The only difference is that topics are handled at the instance level - by site admins - and have more visibility and populate the “Related Communities” feed. Where-as feeds are the same thing, but user-made. Click here to see them.

You can make feeds containing specific communities on piefed that would combine all like-for-like communities.

Just lemm.ee

That’s partially true, but not all true at all. Piefed development is way faster currently than Lemmy.