First and foremost, before the usual argument happens, I know that more is not necessarily better.
Having said that, it would be better if lemmy’s userbase were much bigger. There are many, many, interesting communities that are basically dead. We need a bigger userbase to drive some content to those communities.
If person A wants to discuss topic X, but there are barely any people with whom to discuss topic X, person A will go back to the usual for-profit corporations to do just that. This is obviously not good, for obvious reasons: just look around.
And an equally important point: for profit services, such as reddit, need to die. The userbase create the content and a select few get rich from it? Fuck them.
So the question is:
- In your opinion, what can we do to increase the userbase?
Best thing you can do is make your own communities for topics that we haven’t already got one for.
Also going on reddit and just going “join lemmy join lemmy join lemmy” over and over again probably helps, right?
Plenty of people did just that, then came to realise that it’s usually quite the job to keep their sublemmys running and build them up over time. Bot posts don’t work very well, either. Hence all the dead communities across the FV.
A related issue is that the FV strongly needs people with more community-minded spirit than the typical Reddit user. IMO it’s important to ‘be the change,’ and to try to help each other out as individuals, and help communities we appreciate. Being more of a ‘lazy Reddit asshole who clutters threads with lame DudeBro jokes’ isn’t ideal at this point.