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
It depends what you want. If you want lots of people to join, you need to make it easy to join.
That doesn’t mean we need to get rid of decentralization. You could have a federated joining mechanism that assigned people randomly to any willing instance. Forcing the user to pick is the problem.
The trouble is a random joining procedure will absolutely launch users into unsuitable instances for their personality, political positions.