this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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To be fair, a lot of users don't seem to want the user base here to grow at all. I don't feel that way but I've had enough discussions here to know that this is literally not the case for everyone and it kind of sucks because stagnation is how social networks die.
There is a point where more users may bring more downsides than upsides - but we haven't reached that point yet. There are still many many niche communities that have no equivalent here and starting them would never take off with the current number of people.
I get not wanting to grow the userbase of lemmy.world which is already kinda bloated but there is basically infinite space for new instances to be added.
Thanks for bringing this up. I think I’ve heard this too and I have to say I’m of two minds about it.
In one end… I am frustrated with Reddit’s greed and I think they’ve lost most of my respect at this point. I think I’m kinda bitter toward them, so seeing them lose market share might bring me a bit of schadenfreude.
On the other hand, Reddit’s content quality really feels like it’s gone to crap in the last 5-6 years or so. When I came to Lemmy (and Mastodon), it was refreshing because the community seemed to have a bit of that scrappy, fringe attitude that I missed from early Reddit. I’d be sad if that went away due to over-population.
Basically, I like Lemmy and I want it to be even more successful so that algorithms have less control on our lives. At the same time, I dislike Reddit because they’re going whole-hog into enshittification. I guess I just convinced myself that I want Lemmy to continue to grow ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The difference is that Lemmy is not centralized. So it can't really be over-populated. If an instance is poorly modded and doesn't have that vibe you like you can find one that does. The more people using Lemmy the more options there will be, it's the opposite of Reddit.
60k active users isn't enough, really. 500k would be a great spot to be in, though.
Agreed. I can understand fearing being as bloated and bot filled as reddit. But we don't need to grow that big to be a thriving active community of users.