The fediverse is the future of the web. Reddit has been a massively important part of the modern web experience, but it looks like their pursuit of profits will begin to diminish It’s usefulness. Lemmy is slowly filling that void for me. Hopefully it continues to grow and fill that void for others too.
I want to see more FOSS/FLOSS projects succeed. One of Lemmy’s biggest obstacles is its lack of users so I joined to be a part of the solution instead of the problem.
Hopefully Reddit’s changes provides similar benefits for Lemmy that Elon’s Twitter changes did for Mastodon. I’m not sure if Lemmy will ever reach the size of Reddit (or even Mastodon), but it honestly doesn’t need to if the community is engaged enough.
As you say, size isn’t end-all-be-all. It’s the engagement. There’s plenty of old-school forums online that thrive with around 100-200 members. Lemmy probably has double that in active monthly users spread across the 4-5 big instances. It already feels bigger than VOAT ever got. And, at least this instance (beehaw.org), seem to be way better modded and ran.
I agree that beehaw is rad, but the last few months were very quiet on lemmy. Too quiet for my taste. Since the recent reddit thing there was a big influx of new users and also new ideas and whatnot.
