I don’t have any fancy graphs to show the community’s growth, but I thought it was worth noting this milestone. The largest individual community on lemmy.ca and the largest national community on lemmy as a whole that I can see. Discuss.
[Edit] A Graph
Credit to our gracious host, @smorks@lemmy.ca
I’ve been waiting for over a year now for people to find and populate Lemmy. To give it a big enough influx of users to make it viable as a space.
That’s honestly all I about out of this now. That enough people are interested in a new social experiment that is about community ownership and operation.
Reddit LARPed at that as they tricked people who cared about topics to work for them for free, but this is the real deal. And it doesn’t need 50 million people to succeed.
It probably only needs 5 thousand. Everything can grow from there. With 50,000 or 100,000, it can flourish. That number of people will secure strong long term growth for the whole endeavour.
I don’t need Reddit to disappear. As far as I’m concerned, it will be dead the moment it goes public. It’ll stop having the potential to be what it was for people, and it will be reborn as something new. But in ita death, it will have breathed more life into the Fediverse, and for that I am glad.
When I consider what my motive is for caring about this like I do, I see that it is the confluence of a few tendencies in my personality.
Open source and the open source spirit. Ever since I found a red hat disk as a child back in the 90s the communal nature of the open source software movement was appealing to me.
The community based nature of it. For many years I’ve been watching the profit motive turn rotten all the things I enjoy about browsing the internet. There is no corporate entity here. There’s just us.
Probably most of all, and is perhaps a bit nationalistic of me, but I was always bothered that the main hubs of talking about Canadian issues exist on American websites. Our data, subject to their data privacy laws, the profit going to American corporations. Here I see an opportunity to build a hub for Canadians to discuss Canadian issues on a platform that is run by and for the benefit of Canadians. Of course, people want to consume content from other parts of the world, and I think the federation model allows us to eat our cake and have it too, we have this little slice of Lemmy to serve Canadians primarily, while still having access to the world.
Personally this is me and Pixelfed right now. I’m slowly figuring out Lemmy/Kbin, I’ve been on mastodon for a few years now.