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.
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 dealing with all the different opinions and the massive burden of moderating it.
But sure, you can still choose to be on some instance that allows all discussions, that’s a plus of the technology. But I don’t think people want that. They dont want to see what they don’t agree with. This is why they downvote things.
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.
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.
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.
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 dealing with all the different opinions and the massive burden of moderating it.
But sure, you can still choose to be on some instance that allows all discussions, that’s a plus of the technology. But I don’t think people want that. They dont want to see what they don’t agree with. This is why they downvote things.
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
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.