It is not the number of users. It is quality of interaction. And I argue that it is already here (kbin user). Yes, it still misses such things like subreddit for a particular obscure game, but the overall experience is great.
Right — on Reddit, if you didn’t get to a post within say the first hour or so*, you were going to be banished to a vast wasteland of unseen comments with only one upvote.
Even if you did, well, your comment best be damned clever, funny, or interesting to be interacted with much.
This basically feels like a less lonely Reddit.
Mastodon also has this vibe for me (vs twitter). Basically, the superstar economy effect is less strong.
*or piggyback on an existing top-rated comment (trying to make one’s own relevant to it, or “hijacking” it)
I 100% agree. I sometimes think of le funniest heehee hohos on reddit and i get 2 upvotes. Lemmy hits that dopamine a little harder with smaller number of users.
You can talk about quality all you want, but if the room you wanna be in is empty you're going to leave. You need a ton of users to populate the smaller communities that people will stick around for, not just the meme and porn threads.
It's not like Reddit started with the current user base. It starts with big topics like memes, news, politics, ask, etc. That's rolling. From there it starts to go niche and fill out.