Yes, but quality over quantity. I was a redditor back in the early days, pre Digg migration. Being a redditor meant something back then, almost universally meant you were tolerant, usually but not always somewhat liberal, and with a very strong sense of fairness. I remember a good friend of mine started dating someone and when they mention their new partner was a redditor I am immediately thought oh good, that means they are very likely a good person (they ended up married). Reddit has of course grown since then, but not all of the growth is good. I used to go there for engaging discourse, knowing that I was surrounded by other relatively smart people and we could have respectful discussion on almost any subject. Those discussions are few and far between now.

So yes I would like Lenny and the fediverse to grow, but I am more interested in what kind of people we attract than simply growing numbers. When I would rather do is create a reputation that the fediverse is a place to come before respectful discourse and sharing of ideas, not just scrolling through page after page of mindless content like on a big tech social platform (FB / Insta / TikTok / etc).

Absolutely as I have been advocating for the platform to grow by convincing folks from Reddit to make the jump as Lemmy is a solid upgrade. With its open source, third-party apps, community ran servers, more detailed statistics and public modlogs.

Here’s to 100k active users 🍻

Yes. I want all fediverse apps to grow to the point of being the default.

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, I would like Lemmy to grow organically with people who share interests.

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.

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.

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 Lemmy and other Fediverse applications to grow.

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.

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.

More people more better. Would also like to see a more balanced political bias here.

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!

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, but slowly. Every time I go to the Reddit front page and just see astroturfing and vapid pop culture stuff, then go to the comments and see 75% repetitive bot comments, I realize how much that place sucks now. I want more niche discussion spaces, but I don’t want reddit again anytime soon.