I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
it's not just not caring. lemmy is currently not a viable alternative for e.g. reddit (there are no active conmunities for any of mine hobbies and posting to any of those that are here doesn't make sense - there is nobody out here who could respond to a specific question about analog photography or something similar). fediverse as a whole will never reach the momentum of old centralized social media - by design. it turns out that having many small servers with different moderation policies is great for resilience but sucks for bringing people together. i found out recently that my mastodon server is blacklisted on many of mainstream ones not because there is some bad content there but because it federates with some servers that mods somewhere else consider harmful... and so i am missing large swats of content from those.
i find out alot of people i blocked are the likely posters, yea thats probably why im seeing less and less posts now.
I'm not talking about people I block (I am not exposed enough and don't suffer enough harassment so I don't block almost anyone)... I'm talking about about mods of the instancr that hosts people I care about suddenly blocking instance that hosts my account - not because anything we did but because they didn't like that mods of my instance didn't block another instance that has some weird (e.g. transfobic) content. I follow a friend and suddenly we are out of contact because some entirely unrelated drama. And that's how fediverse works by design.
Ah yes, cancel culture. The Left always eats its own (and btw the Right does the same, eventually, but usually waits to win against the Left first).
Edit: moral purity beatings will continue until morale improves.
Genuinely, why would they do that? Like does Mastodon software work differently than Lemmy's - is there some way that someone from one of THOSE places could post content onto your instance (I dunno, CSAM? or just some trolling or piracy or something that someone considers offensive), and thereby it could come in indirectly to theirs? It makes no sense to me, at least if we were talking Lemmy, but I am interested how Mastodon differs there.
it's activitypub thing so lemmy as well. you sign up on one server, subscribe to community on different server, mods of the different server will decide they don't like your server for any reason (e.g. explicitly because mods of your server didn't blacklist some other server) and you are out of that community. it sucks. imho something based on the old news system would be better (i.e. community exists independently and servers just subscribe to them or not).
I've seen very niche questions answered on all kinds of topics. If there's no active community for your hobby, just ask on a general Ask community