Fediverse does not need to have million of users. Fediverse only need enough users to mature the technology and ecosystem.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Agreed. The community will grow naturally over time as things continue to get better and better.
I completely agree, the total number of users isn't really that important. The three things that count are having enough users to generate interesting content, developers who can develop the ecosystem, and people hosting instances. As long as these three things can be done sustainably then the Fediverse will be around indefinitely, and will likely outlast all the existing commercial platforms.
Too much rapid growth can also be a negative because it can disrupt the existing culture and normalize negative behaviors on mainstream platforms. When the growth is gradual then new people are more likely to adjust to the existing community norms.
I think things will probably slow down a bit again after the initial euphoria is over, but yes, I think this has brought a lot of attention to Fediverse alternatives.
The same happened with the migration to Reddit from Digg. It wasn't all overnight, some people switched early as Reddit got more users, and for a while people used both, etc.
But I think things are in a pretty good state (especially if 0.18 fixes some of the UI issues), I see no reason to go back to Reddit.
Mainly that as more of the contributors and technical users switch to Lemmy, there's less of what you'd want to see on Reddit anyway. This is exactly what happened to Digg over 6 months or so.
New users is not a good metric. Many people will create accounts just to check it out even if they dont stay.
I've made multiple Lemmy accounts on different servers.
sure, but it's still an indicator of growth and some percentage of users does stay active
The individual instances doesn't really matter. What is actually shown in the picture is that fediverse grew by 200k users.
It actually does matter for the individual instances because the amount of content and interactions grows regardless which server users join because servers federate with each other. This is a fundamentally different dynamic from commercial walled gardens where each platform competes for users with every other.
This is going to work like the Mastodon migrations. It will come in waves as Reddit does more and more shitty stuff.
Most likely, and this works well because it allows time for server capacity to grow and for wrinkles to get ironed out gradually. Fediverse would have a hard time absorbing millions of people all at once, but a gradual trickle of users allows things to grow organically.
Thanks, /u/spez. Couldn't have done it without you.
He might be a shitty CEO but he's a GENIUS marketeer for friendly-fire campaigns.