this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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A community needs to reach a critical mass to live, but what is that critical mass made of is complicated to quantify in my opinion. It suffers a lot from Goodhart’s Law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure). What good is a huge user base if it’s just lurkers, inactive accounts and bots? What good is high activity if it’s just spamming? In the end what makes a community worthwhile is qualitative to me.
Yeah, I don't think there's some obvious number we can use to quantify the success of the Fediverse. It's more of a feeling. How often do threads feel like they have good discussion? How many niche communities are available to you?
Past a certain point, more comments in a single thread doesn't do much. You'd almost never read all the comments in a front page r/AskReddit post, for example. That's too many comments on the same topic and past a certain volume, quality comments can't rise to the top anymore, anyway. But there's so many niche communities that don't have enough people here yet to take off. Especially local ones.