Title basically. I was here at the very start of it all and really enjoyed it. However I felt it lost its uniqueness within a few months of mass migration and started turning a bit like reddit again so I deleted my old account. However Reddit has only gotten much much worse since, and Lemmy has stayed about the same. So here again.
Note that for most old-school forums, 40K MAU is absolutely top of the pile in activity. The only reason people expect these MAU on lemmy is just because reddit has it. And don’t forget that moar users, moar problems.
I’m old. Chatrooms old. Went through digg and reddit from their infancy. Problems don’t show until you start climbing over 10,000,000 active users. That’s when eg9s and advertisers and bots and manipulation and overwhelmed mods and all the bullshit starts to chip away at things. 4 to 7 million users is the golden zone. Active and plentiful subs. Little enough bullshit.
Unfortunately the golden zone is golden for a reason, it’s very attractive and therefore doesn’t remain in that range for long. It’s a tipping point
Union lock down. Hit 7 million and no instances part of the fediverse are allowed to have more than 40k subscribers or members unless they already had more when the 7m hits. Then only one new instance a month can be added to the fediverse, and all that apply get voted on to be in. Lol