I would say yes, because as is the real niche communities dont have the size for larger discussions.

Mainstream communities e.g. about global news already have a decent size. And in many ways it doesn’t make much of a qualitative difference if there are 500 or 10.000 predictable comments. But many smaller communities are still mostly propped up by a few power users providing the majority of content which is not ideal for many reasons.

Maybe a bit would be nice, but I don’t want it to grow as big as Reddit got.

Me too! Sometimes I forget that I can participate in the discussion and even post cool stuff I’m doing. After all, that’s the whole point of this kind of community.

I was about to agree with you and then add that people like me who more lurk and upvote may count as inactive because we don’t comment or post much. I just noticed that the chart only shows up to November of last year. I suspect several new people such as myself have finally found Lemmy given all that is going on and we’ll see that in the charts in a couple months.

Wow… there wasn’t more posters during the election, people just posted more?

Total post doesn’t really tell us much. Of course there’s going to be more posts over time. Hell there are Bots that post things. That number is going to go up as long as the servers exist. There could be no human users on here and those are going to go up.

Hexbear? Really?

sh.it.heads: “We’re number 5! We’re number 5!”

(me. I’m probably the only one chanting at this fact)

Source

I find it kinda concerning how the number of instances is shrinking and number of users per instance is going up. IMO it should be part of the fediverse design to incentivize decentralization to avoid a gmail situation.

Also worrying is that the number of Active Users is trending constant or slightly down, but the number of posts over time is climbing dramatically. To me, this could be a sign of inauthentic behaviour on the rise.

I agree, it’s improved quite a bit from over a year ago. I hope it doesn’t get too big. I personally like only logging in once every two days and being able to see everything important. Less content makes it much less addictive than reddit was.

What we really need is for people to put up topic focused sites and promote them as their own thing, not jusy “lemmy”. So many specific interests still have very active forums dedicated to them, populated by the kind of people who want to ask queations aboht and discuss the things they have interest or expertise in, but who aren’t into things like Reddit.

The fediverse is perfect for places like that. Places where you can focus on your primary interest, but also look over the fence. But all anyone wants to do is put up general interest sites and whine about there being more than one “gaming” forum.

Cancer grows continuously. Obviously we should model everything on that.

That’s some serious copium, and the other replies are worse. “If you’re not growing you’re dying” is bullshit when you control a large portion of the potential market, but not when you’re a bit player. Being less popular than a manifestly shitty platform like Reddit is not a flex and not a sign of long-term health.

for a service/site/mom-and-pop shop to be sustainable without unending growth.

I’ve been on somewhat niche sites which have lasted decades, with waves of people coming in whenever related sites screw up and trickles of people leaving when an alternative community becomes more popular. It’s a comfy, slow existence, which works for some communities, but not for ones like this which thrive on diversity and chattiness, rather than really well thought-out replies days apart from each other. On reddit-like sites, time penalizes how high a post goes (unlike a forum where years-long threads are very normal to see on a front page) so there is an inherent benefit in having consistent activity. That doesn’t imply boundless growth, but at least sustaining a decent level of activity. We’re not chasing ad revenue, growth for growth’s sake is not what we want or need.

But with that said, a community with no new visitors can only lose them. That can be a slow process, but it’s inevitable. Been there, done that. Again, doesn’t imply that pointless growth is a good thing.

To add, a lot of sites that “Fade into obscurity” still have active communities, they’re just not mainstream anymore.

I would prefer if it grew because so many communities are dead. It seems that only political and shitposting instances have constant activity.

For me it’s still not a real Reddit alternative. Which sucks because I’m permabanned from Reddit.

This is exactly on the nose. It reminds of articles I’ve read about the oldest continuously operating businesses in the world. Here’s an example: https://www.theceomagazine.com/business/management-leadership/japan-oldest-businesses/

Note that one thing in common between many of these businesses, some of which have been around for nearly 1,500 years(!), is that they are family owned and operated. In other words, they prioritized stability over rapid growth. I feel that there’s a huge lesson in this.

Correct. We don’t have need to be growing. 40k mau are nothing to scoff at and is bigger than most other online forums who can feel very busy even with 1000. So long as we’re getting as many users as we’re losing, we’re good. And the continuous enshittification of reddit will ensure there’s always people looking for a new home.

Same I’d like to see the south African community on here grow

Ideally growth would come in the form of new instances.