I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
I agree. New user introduction is very poor. Took me ages just to choose an instance - and that was in no small part because I’m here not only to escape the enshittified chokepoint capitalism of american big tech, but also because I’m utterly sick of the domination of US centric points of view and censorship. Even though i know communities are not instance locked, I wanted an instance that is not likely to be managed in the same way. Time will tell if I chose well or poorly
Fwiw that’s a very popular instance you are on, so I think you will likely enjoy it? But if not, then that is the beauty of the Fediverse: you can always hop over to some other one if you wanted.
Like email providers: if gmail doesn’t suit you, then switch to another one, or even self-host your own if that sounds appealing:-P.
Note here there is zero advertising: none. Therefore, no incentive to try to “(ab)use” you as the product. Conversely, features offered to you are significantly slower to be developed (honestly PieFed is so very far ahead of Lemmy in that respect, e.g. offering keyword filters such as “Musk” or “Trump”, and advanced AI slop detection, etc.). So instead of thinking how different platforms will fall over themselves trying to compete for your “business”, think along the lines instead of how you can match up with other like-minded folks. And at some point you’ll want to contribute - perhaps code development, or donations, though what the Threadiverse needs most is just participation, as in content posted to it, the more thoughtful the better.
So far you are off to a fantastic start, welcome! :-D