More instances. Should make it super easy to roll your own. Lots of small instances just takes me back to 00s message boards, it was a good time.

I started on here almost 2 years ago and it has grown rapidly, I’m very impressed.

2 years ago, you could knock out all the content on here in a few minutes, now, there’s so much content and even stuff bleeding in from Mastadon at times.

Edit: make something good and people will come, Facebook, ig, snapchat, etc started off at 0 as well.

1. don’t lose steam, use steam.

videogames are a critical part of life for many people. find ways to integrate with, interact with or somehow involve steam. like literal steam it is pervasive, rising and hot espite being as old as time itself. look at gaben. some joke that he is a god. ignore that silly crap and look at the decisions he makes for the company. he rarely makes bad moves.

2. nay. aye.

ai is being forced violently down everyone’s throats. i didn’t sign up for this internet snuff film. it’s all over the news. websites have removed assistant popups offering help. gppt, guinea pig potty training.

3. make time for time.

not the magazine, put down that spice. nothing needs to be spiced up. milhouse is not a meme. the streisand effect is temporary and ultimately works. let it grow naturally, if you force it, the masses will reject it, shit all over it then leave it for dead.

4. an enema of my enemy is an anemone

people need a place to go. you have a place. people don’t like change. they move when their home dies. when it turns to shit. your enemy, whether by design or not, is reddit. reddit grew as digg died. let reddit die. a sea of people will steadily migrate over unless you supershittify faster and harder than them. look at a-a-ron’s [rip] early work with reddit and markup. keep. it. simple. keep it tight. don’t make it look like a sea cucumber with all the extra shit twiddling off.

5. porn.

remember deviantart? remember tummbler? remember imgur? what do they have in common? they all got rid of porn. their slow decline began at that moment every time. porn is hard (i don’t mean like that), once a site’s ability to share porn goes down (not like that) it’s really hard (not like that) to get it back up (not like that). there are plenty of obvious risks. csam. trafficking. too much or too little goatse (it’s not that little baby, please).

in short, time (3) for hot (5), steamy (1) humans (2) giving enemas to sea anemone (4). or something like that (6-9)

As the growth of Bluesky showed, most users do not care about decentralization as much as they care about usability. In his talk at ATmosphereConf last month, Paul Frazee explained that this is why his team built ATProto instead of using ActivityPub.

What I’d like to see is someone build an ATProto forum like Lemmy, and for it to be fully federated with Lemmy using Bridgy Fed.

Corporate buy in, just look at bluesky. I don’t want lemmy to grow.

Two big issues.

Usability: A lot of these alternative platforms are incredibly confusing for people who aren’t tech-savvy. You can’t expect most folks to really understand the idea of Lemmy instances for example. Bsky kind of hit the sweetspot of being super easy to use, offers not just familiar features but better features than its competitor (blocklists), while also being an open protocol. Though they’re FAR from perfect (their team is extremely questionable to say the least), and it doesn’t seem like the protocol itself is gaining traction.

Population: This is a self-defeating prophecy. We saw it with twitter to bluesky, and we’re JUST starting to see it with reddit to lemmy. The vast majority of people just won’t shift to platforms where the people they want to interact with aren’t present. They won’t move until they feel like they absolutely have to. People put off moving from the Nazi bar formerly known as twitter for literally a year - the site’s been nothing but a cesspool for ages now, but the vast majority of users couldn’t be bothered to moved to an alternative site until bsky got lucky. Hell, even now, so many people still stick to it because they’re afraid of losing engagement or some bullshit.

Userbase being more friendly towards different ideologies.

People don’t want to admit it. But this is a very toxic place for people who are not of a very specific ideology.

And when confronted about it the usual response is “I don’t want people thinking like that here” which is a rephrase of “I just want people like me here”. Which is ok, but inconsistent with a wish for growth as the idea of people turning your ideology because you think you are so convincing it’s a fantasy.

Money, donate money to the projects.

It all needs to get a lot less complex and confusing. I know the complexity is a byproduct of the defederated nature of the whole thing, but it’s also the primary thing limiting growth. The fediverse is never going to grow to anything other than a tiny niche if it isn’t immediately understandable to people who have 0 background in tech.

Accessibility, as the easier it s with people with disabilities, it would be a lot easier for people who don’t have them, accessibility is incredibly powerful and extremely good for everyone

Time and contribution from users like me and you, probably more you because you’ve posted something!

Support the communities you enjoy, and report the trolls in the comments. Block people who are trying to cause trouble and encourage others to do the same.

Word of mouth and time. Lots of it. All the ones that need you to be your own algorithm will take longer to gain acceptance with the general public. We’ll need a few more Muskerbergian s-storms to motivate people away from the silos as well.