Some people might find the answer to be obvious (yes) but I’ve rarely found it so. In fact, this is a question I often find in the linux community (regarding linux going mainstream, not lemmy) and people are pretty split upon it.
On one hand, you may get benefits like more activity, more content, more people to interact with, a greater chance you’ll find someone to talk to on some specific subject.
On the other, you could run into an eternal September like reddit, where Lemmy would lose its culture, and have far more spam and moderation issues.
I don’t know, what do you think?
What matters isn’t whether or not our Lemmy instance grows, but rather the nature of this user growth and whether or not this can be steered by the community with its current personnel and resources; while we should avoid sudden, explosive growth that slips beyond the ability of our existing means to manage and control it we should never turn away a steady growth of the usership in more easily digested bites.
As socialists and communists our agenda is to raise the consciousness and organisation of the masses to the highest level possible. This extends to not only their consciousness of class, but also to raising their technical, academic and professional skills. Lemmygrad could serve as a great forum space for stimulating all of that, provided it continues to grow at a steady rate while safeguarding its standards, politics and culture. I think achieving this is feasible provided the tools and mod base are available to:-
Enforce and even refine the existing standards and culture of communities on this platform
Integrate both user and mod feedback mechanisms at the community level to prevent the emergence of mod cliques with no accountability to users and means to filter out those mods whose values and actions are unsuitable for the community they’ve been given authority to oversee.
As things currently stand, Reddit already functions as the home for casual demographics that go there simply out of a sheer hunger for content. These people have no incentive to come here, as we’re in absolutely no shape at all to compete with Reddit on the basis of content. Moreover, the Lemmy interface is too similar to it to truly distinguish itself and compete with it on that basis either. Therefore, we shouldn’t be concerned about an influx of reddit people to this platform.
We should intentionally be more discerning in terms of who should be welcomed and tolerated here, so as to foster a genuine alternative that caters specifically to people who share our own political sensibilities and view it as a space where that expression is valued rather than derided. As more dedicated users trickle in over time they’ll supplement the platform with increased capabilities that enable it to position itself more and more as the space for socialists and communists to come to instead of the Reddit cesspit.
This seems a little specific to only lemmygrad though no?