Comment on How to make the Threadiverse a nice place and effectively make it grow
muelltonne@feddit.org 4 months ago
I would question your focus on growth. Yes, we all want this place to succeed. But do we really want this unlimited growth like Facebook, Reddit and all those other companies? Small communities are great, they give you a connection between users, they spark friendships and great discourse. Those are great. Yes, they are smaller than those multimillion user subreddits, but we’ve all seen those big subreddits slowly burning down. Dying to bots, to marketing spam, to low effort, popular comments, to reposts, to karma farming, to US politics. We’ve seen subreddit after subreddit dying to moderator burnout - because big subs are really hard to moderate, people will burn out. They are sacrificing their free time to deal with trolls, shills, putins guys and receive no compensation for that.
So maybe … let’s don’t replicate Reddit? Let’s focus on creating small, helpful communities and people will come.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 months ago
I agree. I must admit my title was a bit clickbaity. Growth - meaning growing in user count - wasn't my intention. I think it'll be a result, sure. But I agree with you (and the Lemmy developers) in that growing (above all) isn't what Lemmy is about. And it's not healty anyways. And I think I didn't include any reasoning or suggestions in my text that'd prpose doing it.
What we'd need is the communities be at a healty (and useful) engagement level to allow having a comversation in the first place. Well, and I occasionally keep an eye at such metrics, because for example seeing something stagnate or decline could mean there is an issue, somewhere. I think i mentioned that in the post. But it doesn't necessarily mean we have to push that metric. It's tackling the underlyimg issue (if there's any) that's the important thing to do (in my opinion).