this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Fediverse
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A lot of community types just simply don't work without a minimum critical mass of members.
Imagine asking a programming question on a software development community of just 5 people. You end up with 3 people who aren't active enough to see the question, 1 person sees but doesn't have an answer and doesn't respond (classic lurker), and one person sees it and responds that they don't know the answer. Now imagine a community of 5 thousand people...it's suddenly much more feasible to even bother asking the question.
Sure, fediverse could exist with just 5 people, but it would be worthless and pointless.
yea the reason to want more users is for niche communities, I don't need a billion people just for memes or news, but when you subdivide your users down to niche communities suddenly you'll want more
I wish there were more people on Lemmy talking about Deus Ex, The 7th Guest, DOS games, Randomizers, or specific TV shows that I'm currently watching (Reddit always had a pretty active sub for each and every show)
One could make the argument that 5000 users is still not mass adoption. If that is enough activity, then mass adoption is not a requirement for the fediverse to be a nice social place to be.
5,000 users in a niche community would need hundreds of millions in the wider network.
This is how bulletin boards used to work. The most successful were focused on a niche and one with 5,000 users would be big enough to be of use to people interested in that niche. But when your niche is part of a much larger community covering all niches, that community needs to be vast to get 5,000 subscribing to any given niche.