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
I believe they publicly stated they removed .world from it to prevent centralization because everyone was going to a single instance, thus defeating the fediverse purpose. But this is all from memory and I might be wrong
Yes, that's correct. But I'm not aware of lemmy.ml mods running it is all I mean. That it randomises the instances for newbies on first view isn't great either.
Good point, I made a PR to use biased random sort again that we had in the past, so larger instances are always shown near the top.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/508
The logic it uses is to hide any instances with more than 30% of all active users to prevent centralization, just like you say. There are also some other filters like requiring at least 5 active users.
Understandable but something needs to be done to lower the barrier of entry of new users joining.