Everyone who compares growth here (here being very relative considering how it works) vs. the idealized Reddit is forgetting something. Age. You don’t get peak Reddit by looking at its first years, and yet you’re looking at the literal first years for Lemmy and company and saying it’s not comparable. No, it’s not.

Doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be constant discussion on improving and growing communities for better discussion, but the whole “oh no, the numbers are low” is ridiculous. Aside from being a aggregated discussion format, this is like comparing apples and cars. Reddit shouldn’t be a goal or benchmark, discussion flow here should be. I’ll be more worried about stagnation when feed numbers for myself drop back to the first few months, where there was concern about if federation would even work well. (and improving federation/defederation is also a great topic to talk about, it isn’t perfect, but it’s far better than it was)