Hey, “long-time” posters of fedinsfw, and lemmynsfw before that. Our opinion us that there was a real shift when switching servers. On Lemmynsfw, the community was smaller, but more diverse and engaged. We can’t remember a time when one of our posts got left with 0 response. And most of those were of course horny, but also interesting and engaged. When the server died down, fedinsfw took some time before appearing, and our feeling is that this caused a lot of folk from the previous instance to not make the jump. In the same time, fedinsfw appeared to people who perhaps were not aware of lemmynsfw, and as such fedinsfw got a very fast increase in population, but from a less diverse userbase (lots of solo males). We could see the differents in post response as a couple : our post of her solo actually make more upvotes than before, our couple pics are less upvoted and commented, and we almost stopped posting solo him content because it got downvoted.

This isn’t to say there is no good engagement here ! We’d have stopped posting if it was rhe case. We now have regulars in our comments and DMs whom we love to interact with ! But it is true the the larger and less diverse userbase tends to drown the good engagement among low quality or even adverse reactions.

It is also on us to try and change that ! Interact with posts you like, upvote and comment, even basic nice words will mean the world to a content poster, because you took some time to tell them. Subscribe to niche communities you like, and perhaps go scroll directly in them because they may not appear in a feed saturated by larger ones. If you’re a poster yourself, we propose that you post first in a relevant niche community, and then cross post to a larger less specific one, so that it creates a small amount of visibility.

We can’t do it alone, but we all can try to make this place a better place, one small comment at a time :)