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 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

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.

This would be amazing. Huge opportunity here but of course some of the highest moderation requirements of any community. Near the levels required for something like r/ask_historians

Unfortunately front page is primarily made up of a transphobic/antiqueer sub right now.