I think the big question here is still where we land. It could easily be somewhere in the 20-30k range.

Love this idea. I think we should also make sure that we are keeping broader fediverse compatibility in mind. Particularly kbin and mastodon.

Some interest specific instances that I haven’t seen here so far:
slrpnk.net
fanaticus.social
mander.xyz

There’s also a brand new currently unfederated instance for legal professionals at links.esq.social

The way I see it there are 2 paths forward for Lemmy. Without at least one of these scenarios occuring it seems unlikely that we’ll get back to a level of natural growth.

1. Reddit starts fucking up again. If this happens it’ll probably be because of or sometime around the IPO so be on the lookout for that.
2. We start getting significant user growth from other fediverse platforms, likely Mastodon. These users already understand how federation works and are actively looking for a lot of the features that Lemmy has to offer on their existing platforms. I think the way to get there is primarily through topic dedicated instances springing up as professional groups find Mastodon does not truly fit their needs. One recent example of this is links.esq.social which is a brand new currently unfederated instance for lawyers and legal professionals.

These things absolutely can be fixed in an update but I think we both know the devs have no intention of going in that direction.

We do need to continue growing at a natural but sustained rate. 50-60k is not a healthy place to stop and there’s still a lot of low hanging fruit development-wise.

The implication that the experiment cited was at all meant to backup the assertion that there exists a

phenomena wherein men tend to feel the need to dominate discussions regardless of their actual qualifications

is very clearly a mischaracterization. What I did was describe the content of the video in a comments section otherwise devoid of any evidence that anybody had watched the video. If you are interested in looking into the body of work that establishes the tendency of men to talk over others, I have found the full-text of the fairly foundational metastudy “Understanding Gender Differences in Amount of Talk: A Critical Review of Research”. It’s notable that most of the research on this topic leading up to the present day has been framed as answering the age-old question “Do women talk more?”.

attributes a lot of reasons for why the men did this

Those are not reasons in so far as they are meant to explain the men’s motivations but rather the methods by which they wrestle and maintain control of the discourse. It’s important to understand that this is written largely to bring them to the attention of the folks that are actively marginalized by these activities, so that they may counter and dismantle these systems.

The video spends a long time on the phenomena wherein men tend to feel the need to dominate discussions regardless of their actual qualifications. It cites one experiment wherein 16 women and 9 men had an introductory conversation on the issue. During this conversation there were 6 active speakers. 4 men speaking for a total of 9 minutes and 2 women who spoke for a total of 1 minute. These tendencies are mostly due to individuals desires to claim leadership of a group but absolutely leave us “paralysed and unable to push for the necessary policy changes”. If you are interested in watching any portion of the video, you can skip to the part that I mentioned by going here.

The paper that the video cites: https://www.environmentandsociety.org/perspectives/2017/4/article/taking-space-men-masculinity-and-student-climate-movement

Petromasculinity is a well documented phenomena and when paired with the male tendency to dominate discussions and consolidate power in hierarchies (both are covered in the video in the form of studies wherein climate oriented groups are completely derailed by their male participants apparent need to talk the most and shut down group based discussion) we see a problem that is salient and familiar but applied to a crisis where the stakes could not be higher. For the men in this thread who are unwilling to even WATCH the video let alone consider the merits of its arguments, it is very likely that you are actively the problem, because the same tendencies that inspire that action are also used to silence voices that can be instrumental in actual change.

What was your old username? Would be helpful to look you up in the modlogs

Last I heard Lemmy devs are explicitly against this. Mastodon users can still make top level posts over here but I don’t think that’s what you had in mind.

All good. If I had any artistic talent myself I would have put something else together but alas. If anybody’s got something cute and free hit me up!

As an example. This is the sort of post I’m talking about: https://tech.lgbt/@spaduf/110941439731236455

@bookstodon Not sure if this is anybody’s cup of tea but there’s a new Lemmy instance dedicated to books and writing over at: https://literature.cafe

The best part is you can participate from your existing fediverse account. Communities on Lemmy can be followed like users and have similar functionality to a.gup.pe groups!

Try following @fiction as an example but remember that federation doesn’t backfill.

More communities can be found here: https://literature.cafe/communities

Already sitting at about 8 boosts and several favorites from some folks with a fairly large follower count. That means potentially thousands of eyes. I went ahead and put together a dedicated user as I think that may be more appropriate than spam posting Lemmy communities/instances on my personal account. Not sure when I’ll have time to flesh it out and make it active but I’ve already got a list of communities/instances and what groups I think would be interested in them. Find it here:
https://mastodon.social/@lemmy_for_mastodon

What does that mean for those of us who never got into IRC?

The Lemmy devs honestly probably need a significant change in priorities or even a fork. They also seem to be ignoring relatively simple performance fixes that would have huge effects on the cost of instance hosting. If you think about it 60k users really shouldn’t cost that much to host. See @RoundSparrow’s thread about it here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/2971578

They just want a social network like reddit

Reddit users by and large are not content creators, particularly not in the way that Mastodon users are. I’m suggesting each Mastodon user recruited would be worth way more than each reddit user recruited. Reddit users are simply not worth the effort and have significantly less to add to the culture/conversation

empty communities, and no content

This is the most important part. But bootstrapping communities is a tough problem. I’m suggesting it’s significantly easier to advertise on Mastodon than it is on Reddit. At this point it’s hard to imagine advertising on Reddit being met with any sort of positive response at all.

Are you going to host them?

They’re already there. They are currently struggling with growth. This seems to primarily be an issue of getting the word out.

But more importantly, what are you going to draw them here with? Why would they bother? What’s the sales pitch? What do they gain?

They gain group-like functionality and deeper, more focused discussion. These are often requested features of Mastodon that Lemmy can provide without any additional features on the development side.

I think this may not have enough total posts to impact a feed like it needs to. Would definitely be a useful feature tho

What’s the alternative? It honestly seems like a worthwhile way to do it for me. I really think there’s only value in following niche communities from Mastodon. Discourse like that found on politics and news is pretty plentiful (and often higher quality) on Mastodon as is, but the gardening communities make up an important part of my Mastodon feed.

Important to note: linked crossposting does not currently work with discussion posts, just links.

Very true. Following hashtags is a pretty essential feature.