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Should Lemmy buy ads on Reddit?
(fedidb.org)
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this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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Lemmy
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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
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Why the growth fetish ?
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.
It's fear of calcification. Lemmy is tiny, in terms of our user base.
If we don't get fresh blood, and most importantly the rare active contributors, we'll just get used to talking to each other, we'll get bored or burned out and leave.
I understand. I suppose it is a risk, but I prefer the arguments against inorganic growth, put by others here.
A compromise could be, seeking to grow individual subs - so people come because of their interest superbowls for example - rather than an effort to attract every yahoo with nothing better to do on the internet.
!leagueoflegends@lemmy.world I want more then two others to discuss my hobby.