I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
I've told people about Lemmy before. I got the same reaction everytime.
"It looks like it's just people talking about computers."
And their interest dies. Which tells me there needs to be more diversity of active communities. No one wants to come to a small platform, create a new dead community, and talk to themself.
We need comments, that is the problem. Small communities don't get any positive feedback via engagement, which causes them to die as the owner/sole poster feels like no one cares.
Simply link dumping (effectively what most posts are on content aggregators) is the easy part. Seeing even 1 comment inclines someone to open up the post to read the comment, which makes them in turn likely to reply and it builds from there to a hot/active conversation.
If you can just aim to write that first comment on or two posts a day in more niche communities, it will help achieve growth.
75% of small communities, if not higher, don't use lemmy-federate to expand the visibility of their community. The user makes the community, broadcasts a few posts locally and then gets sad that no-one replies (because it can only be seen locally). Nor do they make use of !newcommunities@lemmy.world or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca to advertise.
I use lemmy-federate a lot to help this, but it's sometimes too late after they set the comm up.
Then again if it's some guy in his corner doing stuff on his own, is it really a community ?