Start telling people now, over on reddit. BEFORE they start cracking down. That way, everyone will know, and the growth will happen even more rapidly.
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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More users = more lifetime, for the platform. At the current level, I estimate that this platform will last about two years. Maybe three. Less, if some kind of significant problem occurs.
You're right that the instant part could be dangerous. That could be the significant problem I just mentioned. But otherwise, Lemmy needs more users, desperately. All internet things have to grow or die. You can wish that wasn't a fact, but it will remain a fact.
Based on what? I too can pull a number out of my arse and estimate the platform will last exactly 18,345 years from today, that doesn't actually mean anything.
To me it looks like they think of the Internet like corporations do and needing growth to justify investment. I think that's fair reasoning for sites that are profit driven but Lemmy isn't.
Lemmy was already 3 years old when the API fiasco started. It didn't need the users merely to survive.
But in the context of the meme, more users means more content which Is a good thing.
That's all I meant.
No it depends entirely on your audience if your doing a yt kids channel sure because they grow up but if your targeting loyal users u don't really need to
There IS still a minimum number of them that you need, in order to truly make the community secure against rotting away, naturally.
As I explained to someone else, if you come in here one day, and you realize that it's been three weeks since you've seen a new post, you WILL eventually stop coming back to check. And then the few people who remain will also stop interacting with the platform. And it will die.
I don't know the exact number of people that the particular community (or the Fediverse, in general) needs to be permanently viable, but it's somewhere between 20 and 100 times more people than we currently have. Maybe more.
That's not up for debate. It's simply a cold, hard fact. You don't have to like it, but it's not optional.
I mean look back 8 months at the number of comments and post upvotes, Lemmy has been worthwhile at a larger userbase than now and as long as the influx isn't too much (Eternal September style) the community can continue to grow. People who dont fit in will go back to reddit or find their own place somewhere in the fediverse where the old heads won't have to put up with them. I dont understand the insularism, although I only got here about 2 months ago so maybe I need to lurk more and read the room.
"Grow or die". What a bunch of corporate bs. And throwing out made up "lifetimes" doesn't lend you the legitimacy you think it does.
Lemmy doesn't "desperately need" more users. What it needs is less of this nonsense.
I'm sorry, but I'm simply correct about this. If you come in here in about a year's time, and there haven't been any new posts in three weeks, you WILL leave the platform, too.
You won't intend to. You won't do it out of spite. You'll just keep checking for new posts, less and less frequently, until you eventually give up.
Growth is THE ONLY WAY to prevent that situation. Does that mean Lemmy has to "go corporate" and start monetizing everything? No. Does that mean Lemmy has to become as huge as Reddit? No. I don't want that. I don't want this place to become so big that it inevitably repeats all the mistakes that Reddit made, over the years.
But the Lemmy/Fediverse platform absolutely does have to grow larger than this, in order to become a permanent, secure thing.
Feel free to explain why that "will" happen without infinite growth.
I just did. Allow me to repeat it:
If you come in here in about a year’s time, and there haven’t been any new posts in three weeks, you WILL leave the platform, too.
You won’t intend to. You won’t do it out of spite. You’ll just keep checking for new posts, less and less frequently, until you eventually give up.
Growth is THE ONLY WAY to prevent that situation.
THESE ARE FACTS. THEY ARE NOT OPTIONAL.
EDIT: Also, I specifically said that the growth didn't need to be infinite. But yeah, you go ahead and claim that I said that. Go ahead and just blatantly lie about what I said. Great intellectual honesty, right there.
So your explanation on why it will happen is that it will happen? You understand how nonsensical that is, right? YELLING that it's a "fact" doesn't make it so.
HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO SAY THIS???
IF. YOU. COME. TO. THIS. PLATFORM. AND. THERE. HAVEN'T. BEEN. ANY. POSTS. FOR. WEEKS.
YOU. WILL. LEAVE.
That is a fact. if you deny it, you are simply insane. We do not currently have enough people to avoid a situation where there can suddenly be days/weeks of time with no new posts, and certainly no good ones.
If that happens, the community will die. It's like I'm saying "if you let go of a bowling ball in Earth's gravity, it will hit the floor," and you're like "BUT PROVE IT! HOW DO YOU KNOOOOOW THAT'LL HAPPEN????"
It's bloody goddamned obvious. This community is BEYOND TEENY TINY SMALL, right now. This SubLemmy has 1.8 thousand people active per day. That's 75 per hour. You can fit that many people into a mid-sized bus. IT'S NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE TO GUARANTEE CONTINUED EXISTENCE.
Scream all you want, you'll never make me incorrect about this.
Yeah, I'm the one screaming. Ok, bud.
Fyi, repeating the same made up scenario isn't an explanation, nor does it remotely approach "fact". You keep pulling bs figures like "2-3 years" and "20-100 times more users" with zero elaboration, then freak out when the hollowness of your statements is pointed out. News flash: "facts" have corroborating evidence and backing that can be shown to others. What you have done so far has none of that except your repeated insistence that you are right because you said you are.
You think you're winning the argument, because you are denying such basic facts that it's essentially impossible for me to prove them.
If this community had, say, 10,000 people active per day, I would not feel the frustration that I'm feeling. But I just can't believe you're truly being intellectually honest.
Please try to be honest with me, and try to give me an explanation for your own belief: without any growth to replace users who leave, do you REALLY believe that 1.8 thousand people per day will not ebb away to 1,500 in six months, 1,100 in a year, 800 a while after that, etc?
You think people here are made of some kind of different stuff than regular people? We've lucked into a group of hyper-loyal, saintly humans, who will 100 percent commit to a community forever, regardless of whether it provides them with the experience they expected?
Why should we expect that? Why am I being such an asshole, for simply assuming that we've got normal humans, here?
Replacing users who leave isn't growth though, it's sustenance. With the current user count there are posts much more frequently than one every 3 weeks, and I don't see how that would change from lack of growth (not shrinking)
You're just being obstinate, like several other people in this thread. I'm saying that there aren't currently enough users to weather any kind of big problem, like an extended server outage, or anything like that.
It's like if you're supporting a family of four, and you consistently run all the way out of money, every month, with somewhere between twenty bucks and negative three dollars left in your bank account. And your spouse says to you "hey, we're in major trouble, here. We need to start growing some savings, or else we're eventually going to run into medical expenses or repair bills that will completely destroy us." Annnnd you would apparently respond with something like "SHUT UP, DUMBASS. WE HAVE EXACTLY AS MUCH MONEY AS WE NEED, EVERY MONTH."
I don't pretend to know any kind of exact number, in terms of how many average daily users this platform needs, in order to be safe from future erosion. But it's more than a couple thousand. I think that's safe to say. Mid-sized Reddit communities have about 40,000 concurrent users, at any given time.
I just don't think I'm being as unreasonable as you think I'm being, when I say the Fediverse/Lemmy needs to get at least somewhat bigger.
What "basic facts"? I clearly don't know them, but all you've said is that you're right, not why. Who's leaving? Why? How fast? Etc. You have numbers you keep pulling out, but not how you "estimated" them.
And you're the one making claims here. You're the one that gets to do the explaining.
I'm not pulling these numbers out of my ass. LOOK AT THE SIDEBAR ON THIS FUCKING COMMUNITY.
1.8 thousand people per day. That's real. That's the actual number.
Let's round that up to 2,000. The mortality rate in the USA is 9.5 per 1k, per year. We can round that up to ten, then multiply it by two. That means 20 of our 2,000 people will leave because they're dead. Remember: your claim is that we don't need to grow, at all. Well, we better grow by at least 20 people a year, or DEATH ITSELF will be carving the place to pieces, actually pretty quickly.
Technically, yes, that still means decades and decades of time, assuming that everyone who doesn't meet their maker still logs in every day. But if DROPPING DEAD is eroding 20 people per year, can you TRULY believe that I'm insane for assuming some other things might cause people to leave?
Again: please understand that I'm NOT advocating some kind of infinite-growth-or-death mentality. I just literally think that the Fediverse/Lemmy needs to have more than a couple thousand people per community, in order to survive.
Imagine, for a moment, what these communities look like, if you aren't an English speaker. You're gonna be looking at, what...ten people, in a community like this one, but for French speakers? Maybe? Yes, I'm "pulling that number out of my ass," but there are objectively less French speakers than English speakers.
At the end of the day, you're advocating in favor of your personal little club. Right now, you are getting what you want, from this community. So, like, fuck everyone else and fuck the future. All that shit can just take care of itself, according to you.
I'm thinking about the future. I'm hoping that we can strike a balance between growing too fast and too big (and making all the corpo-tastic mistakes that Reddit made), versus an all-too-limited future, where the platform never reaches a great many people who could benefit from it, and then decays into nothing.
You literally said "grow or die". Not really sure how else that can be taken.
Also, I never said "don't grow at all". I was responding about the "instant 50,000%" growth from the post you made, and more generally the overall obsession on the platform if the userbase isn't constantly increasing. Might as well be shareholders with how obsessed people are with a line graph.
Concerning your mortality rate example, that sort of scenario needs regular replenishment, not growth (ie increase). If 20 new users joined for every lost 20, the platform wouldn't grow but would be perfectly stable. In other words, not growing and not dying. Obviously neither of those numbers will be that precise, so there will be fluctuations, but assuming that the userbase will inevitably die off in just a few years without "20-100 times" more users is just nonsense.
And overall, obsessing about the numbers won't help anything. What Lemmy actually needs is meaningful participation. Good posts, good discussion, cooperation and support between mods/admins and users, less bots, etc. That will attract plenty enough people on it's own, not weird campaigns to overwhelm the community we have.
First of all, I'm not campaigning for anything. I'm using the "winter is coming" meme pretty accurately. Reddit IS almost certainly about to finally ban (or highly restrict) NSFW content, after it's done with its IPO.
We don't have control over that. And that WILL cause an influx of people, flocking to the NSFW part of this community. This will result in both good and bad things. Again: I'm not asking for this to happen. I can't make it happen, nor can I keep it from happening. It's simply GOING to happen, some time this year. Mark my words.
I will admit that I assumed you meant "Lemmy/Fediverse doesn't need to grow at all," but you also did kind of assume that I meant "grow forever or die."
I meant what I said. The Fediverse/Lemmy needs to grow or die, and I stand by that. It needs to grow bigger than the current size. I did NOT say it should grow forever. And I absolutely did not MEAN that it should grow forever.
You asked how else that statement could be taken. Well, couldn't you have tried to take it AS I LITERALLY SAID IT? What would have been so hard about that?
But, again, I made the same mistake with your assertion. So we can let that go, if you're fine with that.
All I'm really saying is that the platform IS too tiny to be considered safe, at the moment. And, in all honesty, most people who frequent the communities on this platform would like to see more content per hour than we currently have. Maybe you're getting exactly what you want. But the thing is, you're not everyone. You don't run this shit.
Maybe you don't care about the gonewild communities, at all. Lots of people do. Right now, there are about a dozen frequent posters, on the lemmynsfw Gonewild community. There are many thousands of regular posters, on the equivalent community, back on Reddit. The people who made the Gonewild community on Lemmy absolutely have hopes that it will grow larger than it is, right now.
Yes, that comes with dangers. Yes, that comes with challenges. But just saying "I like my little club EXACTLY the size it is now" is shortsighted and rude, to put it mildly.
So fyi, "Grow or Die" does mean "grow forever or die". That's what's the phrase was coined to mean and what it implies in every other context but yours. Worth keeping in mind.
Regarding everything else, you are very possessive about a platform that's not your's either, aren't you? I talk about how better participation from everyone would improve and grow the platform (quite the opposite of the "I like my little club EXACTLY the size it is now" you're trying to frame it as) and your response is "you don't run this shit"? It's surprising you want more people here when you can't seem to stand just one person disagreeing with you.
And comparing this all to Reddit, a site that's been around over 4x longer than Lemmy has existed, is just asinine. No, Lemmy isn't going to be at the same level as that. It probably won't be next year either. That doesn't mean it's dying.
I recommend patience and, again, focusing on bettering what we have now rather than obsessing over increase for the sake of increase, though considering your responses so far, it seems unlikely you'll take to that suggestion much. Good luck with that I guess.
Are you somehow unaware that this platform is SPECIFICALLY A REPLACEMENT FOR REDDIT?
You're acting as if the comparison is somehow unwarranted. The Fediverse/Lemmy is an alternative to and/or a direct replacement for Reddit. Nothing more, nothing less. It has the same feature set, the same basic format, the same intended use cases. It's an open/free/non-corporate version of Reddit, to belabor the point. Comparing it to Reddit is only sensible.
Or are you like one of those GIMP users who really bristles at the notion that the GIMP is intended to replace Photoshop?
Also, please address my point that we don't have any control over what Reddit does. This isn't about my patience. Reddit IS about to make a lot of corporate-ass decisions that will cause them to shed users BY THE TENS OF MILLIONS, and a whole shitload of them will land here.
Again: neither of us can control that. Neither our patience nor our eagerness will have any effect on it. It's just going to happen. And I made a meme about how perverts can and/or should be harnessed to grow the community.