Comment on we need more users
OpenStars@piefed.social 3 weeks agoHard agree there - growth at any costs should not be our motto, just improvement in terms of features for our own sakes, and if people enjoy that and want to join us, then that’s wonderful as well.
Though at one point we had 55k active users, and now we “only” have ~35k, so it seems like it has gone down over the years. Though to be fair, then it cycled back upwards, then downwards, then upwards again, then downwards - and yet always decreasing from that peak of 55k to where we are now, an overall negative trend. Even just six months ago we had 41k, a loss of ~15% now compared ot then (correspondingly, PieFed only has ~2k users total across all instances, so this loss of 6k for Lemmy was nowhere near balanced by a corresponding increase in PieFed as would be explained by a migration effect).
But even if you are fully right, and this all reflects relative stagnation, that’s still not a good thing imho, given the waves of Reddit migrants that we’ve seen coming here during the same time-period. It means that in roughly equal numbers to new people joining we are also losing a LOT of people, to parts unknown (perhaps they went back to Reddit, as many claim to have done in r/RedditAlternatives, or perhaps they moved instead to BlueSky?).
desentizised@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I think that every platform will reach sort of an equilibrium during its lifetime. That relative “plateau” may last for months, years or even longer than that, but I think it will always be reached after its peak.
imho the height of that peak and plateau speak to the overall popularity potential of the platform. Which is just that. A potential to attract masses. Whether maximizing this is a core goal is a different question.
OpenStars@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
The peak for Lemmy at 55k is really really super tiny, in comparison to Reddit’s literal millions. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up for debate, e.g. this very OP stating it as a bad thing, and people responding to it pushing back saying it is a good one, to have avoided being noticed more by bot brigades and large-scale disinformation and influence campaigns (which might be here as well, but there’s definitely less incentive for them to be).
The potential to attract large masses here I think does not exist. It could though, in theory, if we really did want it to and work towards it. The major thrust forward there that I know of is the PieFed software, which gets out from underneath many of the heavy aspersions that Lemmy is not even trying to distance itself from regarding authoritarianism. But PieFed is only used by a couple thousand people, and high ironically people are resistant to switch to it, just like others are resistant to switching from Reddit. It seems like it is human nature to remain in a place long after there become increasingly fewer reasons to do so.