Because let’s say you’re Tom Hanks. And you get [email protected]
Well, what’s stopping someone else from adopting [email protected]?
And some platforms minimize the text size of platform, or hide it entirely. So you just might see TomHanks, and think it’s him. But it’s actually a 7 year old Chinese boy with a broken leg in Arizona.
Because anyone can grab the same name, on a different platform.
You’re arguing quantity over quality. I do not care the least for bootstrapped growth at the detriment of the platform. I also do not care about people who idolize and platform hop in order to follow celebrities. I suspect very few will bring with them value beyond increased traffic.
If you want this, Reddit is still an option available to you.
Right now Lemmy has something like 16K users, and a few hundred instances. Most of which are small instances hosting less than 10 users.
What I’m suggesting is a few hundred thousand instances, with millions of users, if not billions.
And I assume the instances would face a point where they need organization. So certain instances start hosting certain types of content.
So if you personally don’t want to read on home and garden topics, you don’t read those instances. That’s what I’m suggesting. If you want to stick to your small corner of the fediverse, you do that.
What you’re suggesting is that the fediverse never expand beyond the people you deem worthy of contributing content.
I tried to give peer-tube a chance. None of my youtube creators are producing content on peer-tube. I gave up when every single instance I found was just linux content.
With more celebrities bring more content. With more content brings more users. With more users brings more communities, and more niches.
I’m trying to bring down reddit, and instagram, and youtube, and twitter, and everything else thats considered social media. In its place, social media will default to the fediverse.
You on the other hand are trying to keep the fediverse from growing.
You’re right. I see no more intrinsic value in having 1mil users, versus 15k. And nothing you can say is likely to convince me that quantity determines or makes for a valuable platform. We’ve seen the growth mentality and resulting corporate greed destroy numerous platforms already.
Quantity is quality, if you have good filters in place.
I never understood people that argue something is bad by looking at the median case. The problem of Reddit, Twitter and Facebook is not due to the amount of people they have, and they were absolutely fine until they tried to exploit their userbases.
(Aside for @[email protected]: see what I mean about Fedi’s anti-growth and reactionary culture? Our friend here is not an isolated case)
It’s more against having celebrities and their followers coming here en masse, which I get.
I’ve still seen a few comments mentioning “organic grow” which seems indeed healthier
“oh, I want it to grow, I just don’t it want to grow with people that I don’t like”
You can dress it however you want, it’s still elitist, reactionary and exclusive.
That’s the example used by OP to make their point. Just from a technical perspective, how are instances supposed to handle 300k new users overnight?
To come back to your usual argument, do you expect those hundreds of thousands of new users to get a Communick subscription? Or to even support the hosting costs of the instances they would use?
They won’t. Not at first. First we will get maybe 50k, LW will do their thing and try to gobble up the majority of users, alien.top can also help absorb part of this crowd and I could even finally convince some other admins to set up fediverser on their instances to help with the migration.
But the important thing is that this type of backing from the mainstream would mean free marketing.
All of those people, of course not. But I expect the increased user base and media attention to bring the following:
All of those things translate indirectly into more business opportunities, none of which need to sacrifice the ideals of the open social web.