Whenever barrier to entry is discussed for lemmy, and reducing confusion for different servers is brought up, all of the isolationist comments come out of the woodwork.
Apparently redditors who are too dumb to register should stay on reddit?
We have a platform that seems to be working and slowly growing. Shouldnt we want good defaults in place to give the best possible experience with minimal user effort?
Isolationism occurs in any functioning group because people fear losing it, or being drown out by the new users. There’s also the small sect of people who seem to have the vocal attitude of “well I figured it out so you shouldn’t need my help,” which I’ve run into in varying forms.
I remember it happening on Reddit too. First when the great Digg migration occurred. And at various times later in some subs that shot to frontpage level popularity.
I think we should encourage migration. Lemmy isn’t going to shoot to Reddit levels overnight, we’re probably seeing a growth that will plateau, then shrink as people miss their niche communities (which we have too few active users to have thrive). If we’re very lucky the folks that stick around will grow Lemmy 10ish%. But every time we do that those niche communities become that much more viable and Lemmy in generally becomes more appealing lurkers.
Check out https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=24
Monthly active users are actually pretty stable over the last 2 years, while posts and comments are steadily rising. While monthly active user growth would be better, I don’t think we’re in a bad spot right now.
Granted, all of Lemmy should strive to figure out how to get more people on the platform so more niche interests can hit critical mass. My point is that things are currently stable so the sky isn’t falling