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
Now that you point it out, I think that's exactly it. I'm glad people like you are still around there.
according to the new users I'm an ignorant fascist hateful bigot nazi, etc. because I'm not going around being angry and making every issue into a binary choice of good vs evil.
woohoo! but yeah there are still plenty of good faith smart people who articulate subtle, empathic, and thoughtful commentary.
what sucks is watching those comments get removed by idiot mods because they don't fit the narrative of good vs evil. asklemmy was really dope until about two months ago. I got banned in a thread about trans issues, for having an opinion that individual athletic orgs should get to determine what they qualify as woman or man in competition... and my comment was removed and i was banned for 'hate speech'. saw several other really nuanced and subtle takes be removed as well.
most of these comments were heavily upvoted in the first few hours of the thread. About a day after the original thread/comments, a bunch of angry dipshits came into the really throughout discussions and just start plastering one liners to all of us about how hateful and fascist we were and probably dog-pile reported on them. My comment was a reply to a top comment, and got about a dozen angry insulting replies, and then it was removed and i was banned, 2-3 days after the comment was posted.
apparently the mod opinion was the federal government should abolish all gender in sports and anything that wasn't an overarching overreaching overbearing type of 'solution' was hateful and evil.
but in the eyes of bullies, everyone else is bullying them by existing and being different than them.