User count has plateaued at about 420K
Active user count rose significantly between 2/24 37K to 3/24 51K
Hopefully users who signed up last year are coming back to use their accounts.
Maybe because they’re tired of ads on reddit?
Should we put together a collection and and buy an ad campaign on Reddit?
I can see it now:
“Ads suck. We’re ad-free forever. Join Lemmy.”
and
“He’ll never get us. Join Lemmy.” or “Don’t let him get you. Join Lemmy”
One of the effects of capitalism is that people are conditioned to think as growth in quantity is the end goal of all human activity.
This makes it harder to realize that, as far as the Fediverse is concerned, at very least, Lemmy and Mastodon have achieved viable self-sustaining networks and that driving inorganic growth by targeting users in other platforms would reduce the viability of the network because it makes onboarding new users harder. An example of this even inside reddit was when a subreddit got a sudden large influx of new subscribers they invariably lost what made them stand out in the first place.
I’m hesitant about that. It’s still run by volunteers, and that’ll end when the volunteer gets tired of paying the bills for whatever instance.
I think Lemmy needs to find a way to disassociate instance hosting from some individual kindly paying the bill. It doesn’t need to be profit driven, just a way to get people to donate enough to keep the servers going.