• 30k is small compared to Reddit, or Twitter, or Facebook, but it’s very large compared to what’s necessary to keep a space lively and engaging.

    And on that front, there is such a thing as too big. Subreddits with hundreds of thousands of active users all engaging with a single topic stop being, well, engaging, and start becoming white noise generators: See a post, comment on the post, never have anyone read your comment because 20,000 other people have also done the same. That kind of environment just turns us into consumers of media, rather than social beings, and is just fundamentally kind of bad for us.

    We have enough passive, unidirectional media we consume. Spaces like this are better when they’re not one of them.

    • I always had a decent mix of subs. Large ones for content consumption; smaller ones for discussion. Even then, the large ones I interacted with were further fragmented (big example being sports game threads, it was usually only fans of the two teams). Hoping to find that here; that is a beloved part of watching sports for me now.

    • 30k is small compared to Reddit, or Twitter, or Facebook

      Yeah for sure. The entire fediverse, with all sites and services included is somewhere around 9M users, which is still minuscule compared to Reddit’s 450M users - not to talk about billions at Facebook.

      We have enough passive, unidirectional media we consume.

      Exactly. Not everything is about big numbers, in fact, I tend to believe we (humans) perform best when we are in smaller groups. Dunbar’s number puts that at around 150 people - so if your favorite community group reaches that number of active members, you’re golden. You don’t need millions. That’s detrimental to good communication and community building.

      Of course we often have several interests (for example, I’m looking for good discussions around tech, linux, cybersecurity, science, sustainability, specialy coffee, NHL and music!). All of those are communities haven’t really established themselves here yet (some of them never protested on Reddit), so I’m still waiting to discover new discussions and corners in the fediverse.

      It’s lot of fun!