Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
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What I've seen many times is people stating the opinion that we don't need to grow. We're not some big commercial platform and we don't need to satisfy some investors. Growth will come naturally. Or it won't.
My opinion is, judging by the numbers... We aren't growing for quite some time now, so Lemmy will most likely stay what it is. I'd love if it were a super attractive place, though. And everybody would like to join.
Sane defaults are always a good idea. I'm a bit split on the "minimal effort" though. Minimal effort is letting some algorithms dictate what to consume, simple truths, and not bothering with complicated stuff like freedom or privacy.
And what I often see is people trying to solve such problems solely by technical means. And I think that's not even half of it. We mainly need a nice and welcoming atmosphere, nice and interesting people, good content...
I think we were growing and then the election cycle happened.
Kind of wish lemmy happened a decade earlier before all the constant rage.
A decade ago I don't think the circumstances would have allowed lemmy to exist because reddit was still in its growing phase and it was not as commonly known and appreciated as it is today.
It would have been cool to develop lemmy like that but I think now is the right time for people to realise why lemmy should exist.
I don't think this is the case. Judging by the statistics, we've peaked in 2023 and we've been on the decline since. And now we've pretty much homed in somewhere between 40k and 50k active users. But that's way too early to be connected to the election cycle. But good question what would have happened if it had been around earlier. I suppose the Fediverse isn't even that young. We had predecessors of the current platforms in the early 2010s already. And it's been roughly 10 years since Mastodon got launched and ActivityPub got standardized.
I dont understand whats different about starting from nothing and curating your feeds... versus starting from a good default and curating your feeds.
"Professional users" can disable or customize however they want. And it seems like a new user thing anyways... where established users wouldnt even notice a difference.
Its literally just a more compelling starting point.
I think proving that we dont need to be big commercial platform to be a big platform is an important milestone for foss. Big platforms should appeal to the masses. Any instance that wants to break off is obviously fine but when we are talking about the popular entry points to lemmy... thats where we should not be elitest.
Thanks for your comment.
Hmmh, I don't think it's even elitism in this case. Feels to me like something else. But I'm the wrong person to ask, since I do not share that opinion.
I think your proposal with default subscriptions (or whatever it is exactly) is a solid idea, though. In fact, I've heard some people scroll through the "All" feed here on Lemmy and subsequently block the things they're not interested in. I'd say that's about the same direction. And I mean why not? We also have sorting by popular, and things are popular for a reason. So we might as well subscribe new users to the 10 most popular communities.
It's a bit more complicated than just that, we'd have to take some care not to entirely destroy diversity and pour some cement over the whole thing, or we end up with a small echo chamber of just lemmy.world and AskLemmy and NoStupidQuestions... But I guess there might be some solution in beween the extremes. And things might change due to the size of the platform. An "All" feed might still be useful at our current size, but might prove to become infeasable once we grow.