And a lot less people posting "what's something that used to be cool, but isn't now?" posts every single day. It's gotten to the point where I can usually guess what the top answer will be.
Mm yes, reddit started with out with tens of thousands of users over night.
I think the situation here on lemmy is pretty comparable to early reddit. People forget it started out as mostly a nerdy programmer centric site as well, and then grew from there. It's a bit jarring to see people here insisting on artificially creating communities and pushing/guiliting people into posting more just to bring the numbers up. "the narwhal bacon's at midnight" (although it was always cringe) started because reddit was a niche site less known than 4chan to begin with, so it was just a nonsensical dog whistle.
Do I miss the focused subreddits around specific topics? Sure, but I also think they will come naturally with time if lemmy survives just as they did with reddit. And the whole reason we're here today to begin with is because of an unsatiable hunger for growth.
Your argument is supporting the comment you're replying to. "Users" is equivalent to "cows" in your example, not "herd". If you lost 50% of the herd, you'd still have a herd of cows, but you'd have fewer cows, just like there are a lot fewer users in this instance.
Herd is closer to userbase. Lemmy has a userbase; Reddit has a userbase. Lemmy's userbase has a lot fewer users than Reddit's.
It's not, but even if it was, the original comment would be grammatically incorrect.You wouldn't say "You have a lot less herd". "Less of a herd" would work, "Your herd is a lot smaller" would work better, but it was written originally as though 'users' was a collection of individuals, not a userbase as a singular item.
"There are a lot fewer users" is the proper grammar. You wouldn't say "There is users online", you'd say "There are users online" because users is plural. "There is a user online" would be singular.
It's not singular, "users" is plural. "A group of users" is singular, but "users" is referring to multiple individuals. The correct verb to use with users is are.
For example, you would be incorrect to say "There is users online", but you could say "There is a group of users online".