Lemmy, we, are not a corporation. In fact, exponential growth is BAD since the instance admins have to spend more money and work to keep it running. There is no financial benefit to chase the numbers. Let it grow organically.

People will go where the content is.. all it will take is one massive event where Lemmy is the source

I see two big events in the coming weeks

• release of Sync and Boost for Lemmy
• Reddit actually killing 3rd party access and old.reddit

I think the triggers are likely to die down as the CEOs gradually stop sawing at their own genitalia.

What you have here is a start, but the barriers like having to find all the niches through searching mechanics that send you to a website and back to a client are always going to be a sticking point. There's not much support on any client to just get a list of communities on the instance, much less a different one.

If they come down or the instances centralize enough that it doesn't matter we'll see some growth by enticing other users because it'll be functionally the same thing to them. But there are some definite hurdles in getting here, and there's no incentive to advertise (read $) other than grassroots.

Seeing as how the servers keep on doing down or there are other similar problems, I'm not sure Lemmy could handle the traffic even if it did stay. And there are far too many subs with next to zero traffic which only makes the whole site look kind of sad. You are better off having 1/2 as many subs with 2x the engagement that they currently have.

Many communities are getting larger though, I wonder why despite this ?

Things take time, progress ebbs and flows. I think there's a critical mass of good content and interesting people here and over time people will use it more. Just keep participating and ignoring the corporate sites.

For example, the friends that started using Reddit because of me are still on Reddit, but I'm pretty sure they'll find their way here. Change isn't something that everyone jumps on.

One thing Lemmy is missing is a way to join that doesn't require you to understand the fediverse - currently the barrier of entry is quite high. Also, there aren't any great user interfaces yet, which makes the platform difficult to use.

I think that growth is not going to happen passively. These comercial platforms are deliberately pushed and advertised and there is always some new content whenever you open the app.

Fediverse, lemmy whatever may have the better model in theory but that is not enough to create buzz or to reach a critical mass of users.

"Hello here is the better model now come here, why aren't you here? " is not guaranteed to work.

It will always be like that. If 100 people come here for the first time on one day its great if 10 end up staying till the end of the week and lurking and out of those 10 maybe 1 would end up staying for longer. Thats just how these things work.

It will come in waves as Reddit would become worse and worse over monetization.

It seems like a comfortable size to me. I'm starting to think the ideal is something in the range of 20,000-1000,000 users per instance.

I'm not naturally a poster I got tired of posting. I keep thinking of stuff to post while I'm at work then forget when I get home.