Humans who run instances are real people who have jobs and mortgages and kids. I also like having piracy communities around to balance the greedy ass corporations trying to control media and copyright…I’m glad to know they are there if I need them or feel like screwing around with it. I just wonder if the people ranting all indignantly acting like instances are competing for their usership would feel the same if the most active instance was on a server physically sitting in their basement, or paid for by money tied to them in the real world. Yes it seems pretty unlikely that you’re ever going to run into issues with law enforcement, copyright claims, lawsuits…but how much would you risk for a fucking hobby you do for free? Would you risk your house? Your job? I would not. Grow up. No one cares what instance you use.
The fact that you say that makes me think you’re someone who wasn’t around for bulletin board forums in the 90s and early 2000s. They were perfectly sustainable, and generally extremely long-lived. There are more than a few of them out there from that era that are still kicking around and going strong, and they don’t have massive, unsustainable growth.
It’s 100% possible to have a relatively static, moderately sized userbase, and to still have a vibrant, nuanced, productive community. You just either haven’t interacted with any, or your expectations have been so deeply skewed by the Facebook/Twitter/Reddit meta of “constant OC all the time no matter what” that you don’t understand that in many contexts a firehose spraying greywater isn’t really “better” than a gently burbling mountain spring.
I dabbled in them, but never saw a point in a community that small.
When niche communities have less than 10 active users there’s no point in continuing it. When a community can only get a few hundred people active at any given time on Reddit it has 0 chance of survival here without growth.
I’d rather a stream of crappy content to a trickle of ok content any day without a single bit of hesitation.
You do you, I guess. We clearly do not see eye to eye on what “good” social media is or what it can be.
Clearly
I see a large number of users as a requirement for a successful platform
There many, many flavors of “success”. One is “having a large and growing number of users”. Another is “monetizing the absolute fuck out of anything you can, regardless of sustainability or ethics”. Yet another is “having a small, tight-knit, long-lived community that’s sustained itself for something like 2 decades”.
Just because you have a firm (yet simplistic) view of what “success” is doesn’t mean that anyone has to agree with you, be they users, mods, admins, or instance owners.
I noticed the community I was posting in only had like 5 active users but I get 20+ upvotes so theres more exposure than what it says.
Upvotes don’t matter if there’s no other engagement. They’re great in theory, but really don’t do anything. Without an algorithm they’re particularly meaningless since they’re not a metric for what’s being presented to users.
I do niche things like Simracing. The community is a tiny subset of a small subset of gaming. So there’s simply just a small pool of users to pull from. Niche specific communities are really struggling to take off here because there’s not a large enough user base to have enough people interested (and with the disposable income) to participate.
Lemmy is a great platform, but it’s not a solved problem. Growth is absolutely necessary for the platform to survive, or you’re going to quickly start losing users who are looking for specific niches. Also as far as I can tell there’s nothing else out there that has a decent amount of users.
Just gotta wait and see, redit was pretty barren in the early days too.
Absolutely, but growth is needed to make it less barren. Adding additional barriers to entry (what this OP was tangentially about) isn’t ideal because the average user doesn’t want to deal with instances or federation or managing multiple accounts across multiple instances (due to defederation) or anything technical before they even make their account.
We can’t be hostile to less technical users. Not everyone needs to understand the ins and outs of federation and instances to be able to use the platform
Then why are you here? Go back to Reddit where you can get your stream of crappy content.
Because I can’t browse Reddit on my phone anymore
Well, you technically can, but I can understand why using the Reddit app isn’t seen as a viable option.