On a user-driven platform, not all users are created equal. Lurkers bring little to no value to the platform beyond clicks. There might be a huge engagement difference on a per user basis.
Moreover… I just want my niche communities to be active. We will never have Reddit’s archive of content, but we can get to a point where the Lemmy’s corpus of knowledge grows to at the same rate as Reddit’s. I don’t know how many users it’ll take to achieve that; 500k? 1m? 2m? 10m? No one knows that number, but to me that is the number to beat.
The Fediverse is built on ideals of open source, privacy, decentralization, controlling your own experience and your own data, etc…
How is Fediverse built on privacy and “controlling your own data”? Essentially every action you take on here is public, and there’s no way to ensure all federated servers respect deletion requests. As it currently stands, the Fediverse has fundamental flaws with privacy.
I’ll take that a step further: the big default subs on Reddit were essentially worthless. Did anyone really use Reddit primarily for stuff like r/technology or r/news? You would have gotten almost the exact same, if not better, coverage of those two with a couple of tech Youtubers and AP News. Repeat for r/politics, r/worldnews, r/games… etc. Anything that was on there was mirrored elsewhere. If they had gotten Thanos snapped out of existence, it would have ultimately been a mild inconvenience at worst.
The real Library of Alexandria are the small subs. Those are the niches that need to be filled to make Lemmy a viable replacement, and we can’t get there without further growth.
I want it to be Reddit 2.0 in the sense that I can find active communities for specific or niche interests. Before July 1, the smallest subs that I participated in to have similar communities here were ones that had ~400k subscribers on Reddit.
The value of Reddit was never in the 1M+ communities, any content there was usually present elsewhere, and the discussions rapidly became dumpster fires. It was in the smaller dedicated subs for topics that might not have another human-centric discussion forum.
More devices, content, and people are online than ever before, and the user experience has never been worse. It is one of the most significant advancements in human history, and its not-so-slowly going to shit because of corporate greed.
It’s Google’s right to serve ads however they want, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t call for a competitor that doesn’t treat users like garbage.
Hey, it can be fire. Not exactly the same scenario, but 3015-era Battletech and lostech is dope as hell.