Would you like it to grow so all of your other, non-technical interests could have active communities? Do you want more people for moral and philosophical reasons? Or are you enjoying being in a niche? Are you happy to have a platform full of techie individuals, even in communities not explicitly tied to anything techie (much like this one)?
My answer to all of these is “yes,” so I’m not quite sure what I want. What are your thoughts?
I don’t run my own instance, but one concern I see grappled with by instances, at some time in their existence, is how to handle image storage and embedding. I won’t pretend to know the options or have opinions on which to use or how to resolve the larger issues, but I see that as a large hurdle to mainstream, in addition to the points referenced by OP.
Yes, because I still have to go to Reddit for gaming content. It’s getting more and more, but on Lemmy they are still small or some don’t exist. I try my best to interact with content on Lemmy, but sadly I’m not much of a post submitter.
People against it have a valid reason but at the end we should admit, communities in the size of a Discord, don’t have too mich value, as one might just go on Discord than. Communities here need to grow to get independent from controlled social media platforms. It’s the future.
Lemmy is already the same quality of conversations as Reddit, as long as you spend some time curating your instances and block some communities. Subscribing however would be much better, but right now there’s a bit too little content.
Yes, I would like Lemmy to grow organically with people who share interests.
The way I feel about it is that I don’t want Lemmy to grow for growth’s sake. I want people to understand how important it is to use open protocols and free software to communicate with others and that is what will lead to Lemmy and other Fediverse applications to grow.
More people more better. Would also like to see a more balanced political bias here.
I don’t think more people will help with that. If like to see it at just the size that’s not really interesting for astroturfing
I think the big thing is that Lemmy isn’t nearly as monetizable as other social media. What that means to me is that if we do grow, it’ll be largely organic. It’ll be at a pace where the culture won’t change overnight. If we get big enough to have real issues, we can meaningfully splinter to more manageable sizes, or moderate shit stains into instances with no reach beyond themselves.
In short, so long as we maintain interoperability standards, I think we will have all the tools needed to keep things from enshittification. We might just grow out of pure longevity as other social media enterprises slowly but surely kill themselves.
But that could be wishful thinking. Who knows!
Yeah. This is such a better experience than past community tools I have used.
In particular, I hope we can attract the Do-It-Yourself repair community, before the current platforms lock all of that content away.
Of course I want the communities I enjoy to grow but not at the expense of the platform. Too much growth and it’ll turn into another reddit situation with a bunch of unoriginal dipshits reposting meme responses to everything over and over. I’d rather things stay as they are then turn into that. At least now you can have interesting discussions with people when you do actually get a response.
Yes and no. Would be nice to have more active niche communities, but I don’t want this place to become full-on Reddit.
I like it how it is. There are a lot of us who are non-tech. I see enough cat posts and cannabis-related posts seem to be increasing recently. I could use more knitting and crochet content and more 3d printing would be nice but I’m ok waiting for those to grow slowly.
I could provide some knitting pictures specially for you. But unfortunately I have no interest or skill when it comes to knitting so I bet it’s better if I don’t. Plus I don’t think my GF would like it if I started messing with her yarn.
What kind of yarn stuff does she do? You could share pictures of her things.
Honestly, it’s been quite a few years s8nce the last project, so she doesn’t remember what it was.
What a tease!
Absolutely. I think the setup of the Fediverse in general as well as the outlook on it by the majority of admins would allow Lemmy to keep its charm even when it grows to a much bigger size.
I’d also like to see specialist instances. There could absolutely be a separate instance that has major sports, for example. Or even just the NFL. Kind of like the benefits of old forums, but with the benefits of federation and Reddit.
More geographic based instances would also be great.
Otherwise I’m not into more instances just for defederation’s sake. Email works just fine having most users in a few major hosts. Lemmy can be similar. It’s the option to leave that is important.
separate instance that has major sports
There are instances like https://soccer.forum
https://nba.space
https://nfl.communityThe communities aren’t super-active because the idea is that they’re remote-only, but that means they don’t get the benefit that comes from local users browsing their local feed.
The geographical instances already exist for the most part. .world is an American instance in all but name, there’s lemmy.ca for Canada and some European ones.
A sports instance would be pretty funny if im being honest. Can you imagine the drama between the different communities for a specific team?
I like it niche and I’m here when it is niche but I’d love to see it grow. I’d honestly love it to complete replace reddit and be even bigger. I doubt that’d ever happen but it’d be cool. I’d love to see Lemmy be the new thing to find answers from people in any topic just like reddit was for a while
Yes. No to the Reddit’s size though.
What’s your size ;)
Growth is a secondary concern to me. I’m not against it but quality is much more important to me than quantity. And I mean quality in terms of content AND respectful interaction.
Historically, if one can even use the word for such a recent thing as the internet, techies are usually first to a new thing. And these types of conversations inevitably follow at some point as though growth at all costs is the only way to stave off death. And then a decade or so further on we end up with Xitter, Meta and Reddit where the anger is palpable and the interface revolves around pushing monetised hate at you and exploiting your private data for another source of monetisation.
I’m enjoying being able to go somewhere everyday where I don’t have awfulness pushed to a platform curated feed I can’t opt out of. If people want those things - fine they exist. I hope the fediverse does all it can to avoid interacting with or devolving to those places and that any discoverability tools that might get developed are for people not algorithms. I hope it remains an alternative to that mindset, not just another place to fling shit at each other.
I want to see the fediverse grow to enter the mainstream. For forum stuff specifically, that means as big or bigger than reddit. The more people discover and work on this federated form thing, the better. There will be better moderation tools, better filtering, better website experience and design, hopefully more developers enjoying opensource, etc.
And most of all, I want to see how this network will cope with not just a few thousand people talking but millions, maybe billions. If it can survive becoming mainstream, stay opensource, and ad-free, that I think we’ll be a step closer to a better internet.