For anyone who needs a reminder: user account ≠ human individual user. There are no bot/captcha protections nor IP restrictions on Lemmy. I'd say we have less than 1 million actual human individual users.
I remember checking out Lemmy in December 2022, it was barely even a proof of concept. Now it's a whole ecosystem.
it's incredible how far it has gotten in a short time. And while commercial platforms will only get worse with time, open source platforms will only get better. Growth might not always be a linear process, but I'm feeling optimistic. :)
Everyone wishing for more users might be wishing on a cursed monkey paw. I don’t know what the sweet spot number of active users is — I want more so we can have contributors to niche communities — but there’s a tipping point. You want your favorite bar/restaurant/message boards to be popular but not too popular.
Personally I think it's more important to break big-tech's hold on online communication. Every single user who leaves a centralized platform to join the Fediverse is a win in my books! Another thing is that we never had a mainstream decentralized, nonprofit and non-algorithmic social network before afaik, I'm actually not sure if the climate will evolve like it did with the other networks.
I guess I just don't have faith in the majority's conversation. Once you have a lot of dumb people, all the content starts devolving. Especially the comments.
As a dumb myself, it's a difficult problem that I don't have an answer to.
But maybe it's a net positive. Don't spend all day on one platform. And the dumb jokes are nice for being less serious all the time. As long as there is still good conversation
Bro, we've had like 3 dozen memes at the top about Taylor Swift's airplane just in the last week. We are not exactly avoiding what I just complained about. So I guess it'll be okay
We all know there’s barely enough people here. It’s not unusable, but there are so few people it’s always the same users posting and commenting, and it can be a bit dead occasionally.
I’m committed to the fediverse, but we could do with another big push from people dumping Reddit. Part of that would also rely on us (🫵) not being obnoxious towards the potential new users 👀
I heard it's something like 90% of people lurk, 10% of people comment, 1% of people post. So you need a pretty substantial population just to have enough posts and comments for the lurkers to still hang around.
It's also why it was particularly dumb of Reddit to piss off their 1% and 10%.
