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?
It wont
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).
Yes. I want all fediverse apps to grow to the point of being the default.
Imagine how good the apps could be with the userbase the size of Reddit supporting them.
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.
I dont think grow is inherently bad, its just that we might have clown instances prop up though.
Yeah. This is such a better experience than past community tools I have used.
In particular, I hope we can attract the Do-It-Yourself repair community, before the current platforms lock all of that content away.
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.
Absolutely. I think the setup of the Fediverse in general as well as the outlook on it by the majority of admins would allow Lemmy to keep its charm even when it grows to a much bigger size.
I’d also like to see specialist instances. There could absolutely be a separate instance that has major sports, for example. Or even just the NFL. Kind of like the benefits of old forums, but with the benefits of federation and Reddit.
More geographic based instances would also be great.
Otherwise I’m not into more instances just for defederation’s sake. Email works just fine having most users in a few major hosts. Lemmy can be similar. It’s the option to leave that is important.
separate instance that has major sports
There are instances like https://soccer.forum
https://nba.space
https://nfl.communityThe communities aren’t super-active because the idea is that they’re remote-only, but that means they don’t get the benefit that comes from local users browsing their local feed.
The geographical instances already exist for the most part. .world is an American instance in all but name, there’s lemmy.ca for Canada and some European ones.
A sports instance would be pretty funny if im being honest. Can you imagine the drama between the different communities for a specific team?
Every country should start its own instance. I wanna see a Brunei instance as Malaysia has one already!
The way I feel about it is that I don’t want Lemmy to grow for growth’s sake. I want people to understand how important it is to use open protocols and free software to communicate with others and that is what will lead Lemmy and other Fediverse applications to grow.
I like it how it is. There are a lot of us who are non-tech. I see enough cat posts and cannabis-related posts seem to be increasing recently. I could use more knitting and crochet content and more 3d printing would be nice but I’m ok waiting for those to grow slowly.
I could provide some knitting pictures specially for you. But unfortunately I have no interest or skill when it comes to knitting so I bet it’s better if I don’t. Plus I don’t think my GF would like it if I started messing with her yarn.
What kind of yarn stuff does she do? You could share pictures of her things.
Honestly, it’s been quite a few years s8nce the last project, so she doesn’t remember what it was.
Yes, I would like Lemmy to grow organically with people who share interests.
Yes, but slowly. Every time I go to the Reddit front page and just see astroturfing and vapid pop culture stuff, then go to the comments and see 75% repetitive bot comments, I realize how much that place sucks now. I want more niche discussion spaces, but I don’t want reddit again anytime soon.
I think theres a healthy middle, where its not fully mainstream but there are enough people to be able to have active communities for all your interests
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 🍻
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.
Lemmy should be the replacement for reddit IMHO.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m enjoying the recent influx since the recent reddit migrations, while still staying niche. And I’m appreciating being amongst like minded, generally leftist communities here.
But if it requires opening up the floodgates to idiots, fascists, and trolls in order to kill reddit, so be it. As long as there are no algorithms, advertisers, and spez’s, I’m all for more lemmings.
Yeah. I came here after the Reddit API debacle. I hoped Lemmy would be a good substitute, but we don’t have enough users or enough posters.
I’m trying to post as much as I can to drive more conversation. Once people see all the benefits and experience the well crafted Lemmy third-party apps they wouldn’t want to go back.
Thank you for doing that. I enjoy your posts.
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.
