Would you like it to grow so all of your other, non-technical interests could have active communities? Do you want more people for moral and philosophical reasons? Or are you enjoying being in a niche? Are you happy to have a platform full of techie individuals, even in communities not explicitly tied to anything techie (much like this one)?

My answer to all of these is “yes,” so I’m not quite sure what I want. What are your thoughts?

  • SomeGuy69@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Yes, because I still have to go to Reddit for gaming content. It’s getting more and more, but on Lemmy they are still small or some don’t exist. I try my best to interact with content on Lemmy, but sadly I’m not much of a post submitter.

    People against it have a valid reason but at the end we should admit, communities in the size of a Discord, don’t have too mich value, as one might just go on Discord than. Communities here need to grow to get independent from controlled social media platforms. It’s the future.

    Lemmy is already the same quality of conversations as Reddit, as long as you spend some time curating your instances and block some communities. Subscribing however would be much better, but right now there’s a bit too little content.

    • Sunshine @lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      Imagine how good the apps could be with the userbase the size of Reddit supporting them.

      • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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        3 days ago

        It could go either way. Probably not the way we’d like it to go. Name one time broad adoption hasn’t ruined something cool you loved.

  • Sunshine @lemmy.ca
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    3 days ago

    Absolutely as I have been advocating for the platform to grow by convincing folks from Reddit to make the jump as Lemmy is a solid upgrade. With its open source, third-party apps, community ran servers, more detailed statistics and public modlogs.

    Here’s to 100k active users 🍻

  • Ænima@lemm.ee
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    4 days ago

    I don’t run my own instance, but one concern I see grappled with by instances, at some time in their existence, is how to handle image storage and embedding. I won’t pretend to know the options or have opinions on which to use or how to resolve the larger issues, but I see that as a large hurdle to mainstream, in addition to the points referenced by OP.

  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
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    3 days ago

    Yes, but quality over quantity. I was a redditor back in the early days, pre Digg migration. Being a redditor meant something back then, almost universally meant you were tolerant, usually but not always somewhat liberal, and with a very strong sense of fairness. I remember a good friend of mine started dating someone and when they mention their new partner was a redditor I am immediately thought oh good, that means they are very likely a good person (they ended up married). Reddit has of course grown since then, but not all of the growth is good. I used to go there for engaging discourse, knowing that I was surrounded by other relatively smart people and we could have respectful discussion on almost any subject. Those discussions are few and far between now.

    So yes I would like Lenny and the fediverse to grow, but I am more interested in what kind of people we attract than simply growing numbers. When I would rather do is create a reputation that the fediverse is a place to come before respectful discourse and sharing of ideas, not just scrolling through page after page of mindless content like on a big tech social platform (FB / Insta / TikTok / etc).

  • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    4 days ago

    Growth is a secondary concern to me. I’m not against it but quality is much more important to me than quantity. And I mean quality in terms of content AND respectful interaction.

    Historically, if one can even use the word for such a recent thing as the internet, techies are usually first to a new thing. And these types of conversations inevitably follow at some point as though growth at all costs is the only way to stave off death. And then a decade or so further on we end up with Xitter, Meta and Reddit where the anger is palpable and the interface revolves around pushing monetised hate at you and exploiting your private data for another source of monetisation.

    I’m enjoying being able to go somewhere everyday where I don’t have awfulness pushed to a platform curated feed I can’t opt out of. If people want those things - fine they exist. I hope the fediverse does all it can to avoid interacting with or devolving to those places and that any discoverability tools that might get developed are for people not algorithms. I hope it remains an alternative to that mindset, not just another place to fling shit at each other.

  • vonbaronhans@midwest.social
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    4 days ago

    I think the big thing is that Lemmy isn’t nearly as monetizable as other social media. What that means to me is that if we do grow, it’ll be largely organic. It’ll be at a pace where the culture won’t change overnight. If we get big enough to have real issues, we can meaningfully splinter to more manageable sizes, or moderate shit stains into instances with no reach beyond themselves.

    In short, so long as we maintain interoperability standards, I think we will have all the tools needed to keep things from enshittification. We might just grow out of pure longevity as other social media enterprises slowly but surely kill themselves.

    But that could be wishful thinking. Who knows!

    • Sunshine @lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      I would imagine if the growth was too tremendous, the instance owners could always temporarily disable sign ups until more server infrastructure is ramped up.

      I can imagine this happening after Reddit loses more giants like BrookValley and once all the mobile third party mobile apps contain all the Lemmy features. I remember in June of last year when all the iOS apps were in beta and Wefwef was the only option and god forbid you wanted to do some modding on the fly and now look how far we have come.

  • secret300@lemmy.sdf.org
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    4 days ago

    I like it niche and I’m here when it is niche but I’d love to see it grow. I’d honestly love it to complete replace reddit and be even bigger. I doubt that’d ever happen but it’d be cool. I’d love to see Lemmy be the new thing to find answers from people in any topic just like reddit was for a while

    • Sunshine @lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      Lemmy will be bigger than Reddit as reasons why is it is taking a while to grow is because people are still learning about it and creating their first accounts however once that initial barrier is knocked down they’re here to stay. It also didn’t help much back then the third party apps weren’t so great during the api migration. And many moderators did not have expertise to start up their own instances so some decided to stay in the spez platform.

      I have had many people in classic wow tell me they never heard of Lemmy until I brought it up in guild chat. So hopefully I convinced a few to try out the platform.

  • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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    5 days ago

    Of course I want the communities I enjoy to grow but not at the expense of the platform. Too much growth and it’ll turn into another reddit situation with a bunch of unoriginal dipshits reposting meme responses to everything over and over. I’d rather things stay as they are then turn into that. At least now you can have interesting discussions with people when you do actually get a response.

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    I suspect if it does get a big pop bump there will be a few communities that get a lot of attention and start appealing to big numbers and broadest audiences, and new communities will begin for rules like no memes or image/video posts etc for smaller niche communities and sub communities.

  • kratoz29@lemm.ee
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    5 days ago

    Short answer: yes.

    Medium answer: yes because I want to not use Sync for Reddit to get into anime, Plex/Kodi/Stremio/Real Debrid/Arr stack, and handhelds communities.

    I could care less about trending shit and reels reposting… But that is the downside of exponential growth I guess.

  • atro_city@fedia.io
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    5 days ago

    I want to see the fediverse grow to enter the mainstream. For forum stuff specifically, that means as big or bigger than reddit. The more people discover and work on this federated form thing, the better. There will be better moderation tools, better filtering, better website experience and design, hopefully more developers enjoying opensource, etc.

    And most of all, I want to see how this network will cope with not just a few thousand people talking but millions, maybe billions. If it can survive becoming mainstream, stay opensource, and ad-free, that I think we’ll be a step closer to a better internet.