First and foremost, before the usual argument happens, I know that more is not necessarily better.
Having said that, it would be better if lemmy’s userbase were much bigger. There are many, many, interesting communities that are basically dead. We need a bigger userbase to drive some content to those communities.
If person A wants to discuss topic X, but there are barely any people with whom to discuss topic X, person A will go back to the usual for-profit corporations to do just that. This is obviously not good, for obvious reasons: just look around.
And an equally important point: for profit services, such as reddit, need to die. The userbase create the content and a select few get rich from it? Fuck them.
So the question is:
- In your opinion, what can we do to increase the userbase?
I’d been thinking along these lines - even as an anglophone it feels like the fediverse user base is largely USA, UK, Canada, and Australia, with some representation for German and French speakers. To really get away from the dominance of the Western tech giants I’d like to see much more global representation, and that would mean not just trying to mirror how the Western social media platforms worked.
However, for auto-translation the onus may be more on app developers than instances, as it wouldn’t really be practical to keep translations in every language. Maybe there could be instances for particular languages and they provide auto-translation to one or two other languages?