Looks all good to me.

I am happy here. Am not even tempted to open reddit anymore. No ads, better clients, friendlier community. Great.

It still lists feddit.de as growing. Which is not true. The dns entries expired, the instance is dead for most intents and purposes…

Other than reddit going for subscription or complete outage over some time I am not sure any event will cause another influx. A lot of people didn't care about the whole API drama, since they either never knew about 3rd party apps or just went back the official app. The official app might slowly get worse and worse but if it happens slow enough, these kind of users won't care.

I wish that the same post on different instances would just be collapsed to one in the UI

I agree with the sentiment, when things get too popular every sub becomes more generic and filled with recycled or low effort content. But there's a happy medium. It would be nice if there were enough people that some more niche communities had activity.

It is far from getting to that point. That will happen when it becomes mainstream enough to attract normies. Lemmy could still use a lot of growth. I only get to consume content that happens to be available here, rather than being able to pick niche communities being active on the topics I would like.

I don't think growth is neccesarily the problem by itself, it's the velocity that is the problem. Reddit had a massive amount of steady growth for years and I think it mostly stayed good. Then the Obama AMA happened, and that, in my opinion is when reddit died. The number of new users outnumbered the old users and the old users could not enforce the previously established cultural norms (some bad, some good, but that is what made reddit reddit), and made the ratio of users to donations crash. large corporations and political organizations realizing reddit was a powerful way to influence people didn't help, but I think if the old guard of reddit had bullied the new users into following the unwritten rules reddit would not be nearly as bad a dumpster fire and the userbase would not be nearly so tolerant to admin BS.

Exactly, key focus should be on sustainability. As long as there are enough people to develop the platform, run instances, and post content, then Lemmy will be around indefinitely. There's absolutely no rush to grow in my opinion. A slow and steady ingress of users results in people adjusting to Lemmy norms, where a flood of users risks changing the culture entirely.

It depends, without some growth in the beginning all the niche communities where one person keeps posting for month and others just consume this person will grow tired of being the only one posting. Then those smaller communities will die and we will have shrinking instead of stagnation. The big communities will grow and the users will get centralized. But overall the whole Threadyverse will shrink.

It's like when you have a conversation with someone and you are the only one carrying the conversation.

I walked away from reddit after Alien Blue had to get pulled, and haven't looked back.

There are a few niche areas Lemmy hasn't had a chance to build a community yet - AskHistorians comes to mind - that I miss, but time will hopefully solve that.

It has a pretty vanilla RESTful CRUD API. You can write a rudimentary app using only Bash, curl, and jq.

Moderation was always mostly in the user's hands, so it makes sense that it didn't change.

moderation policies that are very similar to reddit.

Or worse. Censorship and childish content warnings are rife. At least it's more transparent with built in mod logs but I wish there was at least some innovation beyond being just a federated reddit clone. Still nobody knows what an upvote means, same as reddit.

I like that it’s decentralized, but the largest instances seem to have moderation policies that are very similar to reddit.

At least you can switch instances easily, so that's already a major improvement.