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.

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.

Yes and no. Would be nice to have more active niche communities, but I don’t want this place to become full-on Reddit.

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.

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.

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.

Yes. No to the Reddit’s size though.

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).

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!

Yes, I do want Lemmy to grow … but to grow organically and naturally over a very long period of time instead of artificially in a short period of time just to make some idiot or a small group of idiots a bunch of money.

Growing over a long period of time will also allow developers, maintainers and managers to grow with increased size over time. Instead of panicking over sudden exponential growth, they can slowly build stronger more robust systems over time. Also, if something is grown over a long period of time … it will also take a long period of time for it be destroyed, dissolved or disregarded. If you grow something way too fast, chances are the risks increase for it to disappear just as quickly.

I want Lemmy to grow. I want federated ActivityPub-based communities to eventually be the general public’s default way of asking and answering questions, sharing information however obscure, i.e. replace not just reddit, but most web forums, Facebook groups, etc. too. I have liked things based on open standards for all my life, and will never stop wanting them to be widely adopted.

Yes, absolutely.

The nice thing about Reddit was that if I saw a new TV show, read a new novel, or picked up a new hobby, there would be an existing community of people already talking about it. Lemmy is great, but it doesn’t have the critical mass of people needed for that to be possible.

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.

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.