Gonna just say it. As a longtime Lemmy user I'm really not a fan of a lot of the people coming over from Reddit. It's probably just a small but vocal minority and confirmation bias on my part, but I get the impression that they are trying to turn Lemmy into Reddit, toxicity, entitlement, stupid challenges and all.
When we've had two major debacles before Reddit even opened back up, one about "how dare these unpaid admins try to lessen their workload with sign up questions", and the other about "how dare instances block other instances that are being used as proxies for forwarding spam and bot content into their own instances." The people from reddit seem to still think they're on Reddit and any perceived inferiority that Lemmy has compared to Reddit is seen as just as bad as Reddit's corporate decisions. A few people even trying to go to an instance with the intent of "converting" the existing users who may be socialist or communist, by commenting abuse on their posts of course, just like how they presumably do it on Reddit.
People also seem to be refusing to learn what federation is and how that works, despite it being literally the most important aspects of Lemmy. This is evident in people telling instances who block spam or troll ridden instances to "mind their own business" as if that content doesn't get forwarded over to and show up on the main pages of other instances, you know, what the fediverse was designed to do.
FYI, Reddit has opened back up. Spez has made it clear that he will never tolerate subreddits shutting down and inconveniencing you again. If you're so unwilling to even adopt a different mindset and perspective when coming to Lemmy, I think it's best if you went back. Plenty of us came here because we didn't want to be on Reddit.
Last thing and a pet peeve of mine: stop calling yourself a refugee. You left a meme website for another meme website because you didn't like one aspect of the management, the entire decision and migration probably took less than an hour of you sitting in your comfortable house in front of a computer. To compare that to being a refugee speaks volumes about your entitlement and privilege. And it's especially ironic considering what real refugees go through to save themselves and their families, that you won't even answer a few registration questions.
I recall these kinds of threads on Reddit when Digg was imploding, the OG Reddit hipsters were annoyed at the influx of users and the change it brought to discourse on the platform.
But the fact is, if we want Lemmy to grow, it's going to change.
There is no value in growth for the sake of growth. Lemmy isn't a commercial platform that needs to keep getting VC money to stay afloat. Only thing that actually matters is sustainability.
Sustainability comes from having enough people to do development, people willing to host servers, and users to create content. All these things are already present and Lemmy can go on indefinitely without any major growth.
In fact, rapid growth can be a net negative because it brings a lot of toxic behaviors from Reddit. When there's a slow trickle of users coming in then they adjust to existing norms. When there's a horde of new users they become the norm and overwhelm the existing community.
Lemmy has seen a rapid uptick in client development since the Reddit drama kicked off. I think it's an absolute net win, and the nature of federated instances and communities means you can always create/find the old school Lemmy environment you miss.
A move away from corporate overlords is an absolute net win.
I agree in general, federated nature of Lemmy does mean that people can always have their own smaller communities with their own rules. More people moving away from corporate platforms is generally a good thing as well in my opinion. This is ultimately the way the internet was envisioned to work where we have a bunch of servers run by regular people as opposed to being centralized around a handful of corporate platforms.
My main point was that slower steady growth can help people adjust to the better aspects of the fediverse, and there is no rush to grow.