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:

• Comment as much as possible! Sometimes you’ll be shouting at the clouds, sometimes you’ll lead by example and people will join the conversation;
• As a community, let’s get more people using Lemmy so that even with the same ratio, the absolute number of posters & commenters will grow.

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.

Yes I feel the same. I try to be more interactive in here, maybe that invites more conversation

Make an inflammatory comment or be wrong, and people are sure to start discussing how bad and wrong you are. Or don’t.

I suspect where there are more eyes, there are more active comment sections.