Comment on [deleted]
pacology@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Do we really need more people here? There are no investors to appease or advertisers to swindle.
Unlimited growth should be a metric we should chase over other stuff like engagement on posts, quality of submissions, etc.
If you think the only topics of conversation we need are Politics, World News, & Technology, then we don’t need more people here.
Personally, I don’t like having to keep going back to Reddit for everything else. For other communities to be successful on Lemmy, we need about 2 orders of magnitude more users.
Are you content to have meaningful activity in just a small handful of generic topics? I’m not.
So, yes, we really do need more people here. A LOT more.
There is an argument to be made that a diversity of perspectives increases overall quality, and a diversity of perspectives is only achievable when growth is beyond a certain point.
That said, Lemmy (the software) just isn’t ready for anything approaching Reddit-sized audiences yet, so I think you’re absolutely right that growth should only be a goal right now inasmuch as it enables existing communities to flourish.
You won’t have diversity of perspectives here… Entire instances are defederating rather than deal with all the different opinions.
Also downvoting means only popular opinions at the top.
Diversity of perspectives? This place is about left wing politics.
It’d be nice to have some good hobby communities, but lemmy doesn’t want a diversity of perspectives.
You might not need exponential growth, but you do want a certain critical mass of activity for each of a variety of topics
nurple@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yes. There are innumerable topics and interests that don’t have a robust presence on Lemmy yet because the platform is just too small and niche. Lemmy is great for tech and tech-adjacent stuff but I still wander back to Reddit from time to time for sports, for instance.
CoderKat@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I still use Reddit to read episode discussions of TV shows and such. Those largely don’t exist here, outside of a handful of shows. And probably would struggle to take off even if the threads existed, as they need a lot of people and good SEO.