Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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But like, it’s a fundamental characteristic of the fediverse.
This place isn’t for everyone. If someone can’t eventually wrap their head around the concept of separate instances with distinct and sometimes drastically different administrative standards, and that alts are a reasonable and correct solution to (de)federation/network fragmentation… well, this probably isn’t the right place for that person.
For sure, but still not user friendly in practice by nature. Admins can switch, you might be happy in an instance today and unhappy tomorrow and the only option is to blow up your account and make a new one somewhere else.
And that’s the attitude that makes sure this platform never grows.
The reality is that most people don’t want to manage multiple accounts or even know what instance they’re on. That kind of stuff only matters to tech people. The average user wants one account that does everything, not a bunch of seemingly identical accounts.
I’m still not sold on the fediverse anyways. Federation often seems to hold things back more than it helps tbh.
You’re assuming that lemmy users and instance owners want monotonic growth, and I do not at all think that that can be safely assumed in the fediverse. In fact, I’d bet good money that a lot of users and instance owners would love to keep their own instance sizes relatively small, and furthermore don’t want to grow their userbases too fast.
And I find that defeats the whole point of the platform. If there’s no growth there’s no point in continuing to stay here. The communities I care about are so small over here that they’re barely worth having, let alone participating in.
If they didn’t want to be seen as a Reddit replacement then it shouldn’t have been advertised as one. If growth isn’t wanted then there’s no point to the platform and it’ll never gain any more users.
This is also why it’s good to have large instances such as LW. Most users can go to the one big instance and then the ones who want to stay small can without harming the growth of the platform.
The fact that you say that makes me think you’re someone who wasn’t around for bulletin board forums in the 90s and early 2000s. They were perfectly sustainable, and generally extremely long-lived. There are more than a few of them out there from that era that are still kicking around and going strong, and they don’t have massive, unsustainable growth.
It’s 100% possible to have a relatively static, moderately sized userbase, and to still have a vibrant, nuanced, productive community. You just either haven’t interacted with any, or your expectations have been so deeply skewed by the Facebook/Twitter/Reddit meta of “constant OC all the time no matter what” that you don’t understand that in many contexts a firehose spraying greywater isn’t really “better” than a gently burbling mountain spring.