You know what? I think I’m okay with the fediverse simply never getting as big and popular as Reddit is/was. Over the years, as it got more popular, I definitely noticed that the average quality of interactions I had on Reddit slowly but steadily declined. Lemmy feels like old-school Reddit, which I am honestly pretty happy about.
That's what I keep saying. I keep getting told I'm wrong though, that Lemmy needs to be easier to join, and hit critical mass and become the reddit killer because that's the only way we can exist.
Like, no thank you. I'm happy with Lemmy NOW, I don't need it to keep growing!
Depends. If instances keep going into defederarion wars over philosophical beliefs it will become really tricky to have small communities. If I like some kind of bizarre miniatures, turtle crocheting, collectible wooden marbles, etc. I shouldn't have to worry about whether the other person I want to talk to who collects toy unicorns is a "tankie" or not. As long as the communities are moderated enough, political philosophies shouldn't be an issue.
I think some more growth would definitely be good for the community. There's still a lot of room for growth before we even come close to being as big as early 10's reddit.
There is a pretty wide sweet spot between 100k users and 100 million. I think most of us agree that Lemmy shouldn't be trying to be a reddit killer, but that doesn't contradict the fact that we still need to grow the userbase by orders of magnitude.
I'm loving this phase, don't get me wrong, but I have a feeling that by the time we hit 1 million or 5 million it'll be even more enoyable here. We have a longggg way to go before we have to worry about becoming too big.
In all fairness, most people who want to see reddit killed off because they're still mourning how shitty it became, along with the virtual backstabbing by the admins through May/June. In reality, Reddit has a decent enough mainstream foothold that it'll likely linger on for a while, maybe even years. But the reddit we all once knew has been pretty dead for a while now.