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I don't disagree with your comment, but I think many long-time reddit users will say that reddit was better long before it grew to 400+ million users. A lot has been written about how online communities, when they reach a certain size, become worse. Easily-digestible (and often subpar) content get upvoted by a broader mass of subreddit users while previously appreciated and easily-found discussions get drowned out.

I think the point I'm trying to make is that Lemmy or any other reddit alternative would be better off if they didn't aim for 400+ million users. So measuring success beyond measuring the DAU. And I don't think they are. But yes, to even reach 1 million users, the signup process should be straight forward and fast, and the overall user experience smooth. I guess a slow signup process helps with scaling to ensure the latter.

When the floodgates open during the subreddit blackout, the reddit alternative that you can easily sign up for and that can handle the load might "win." Hopefully there will be more than one, because the centralized nature of reddit is obviously why we're having this problem in the first place.

Having to write an application is a hoop that many people won’t want to bother jumping through. Requiring users to wait for their new account to be approved is going to put many off. I suspect a lot just won’t come back to check if their account has been approved. Being rejected (especially without realizing) is going to leave a sour taste in people’s mouths and they’ll just not bother. Requiring a human to manually read applications and approve every new sign-up is obviously self-limiting.

all of this is fine with us, to be frank with you. as i noted the other day: we're sympathetic to people who just want a new place to be, but it's really not on us to be that place. we didn't sign up to be the gatekeeper of Lemmy or to get all the attention we have--that's stuff that's been imposed on us by other people, often disregarding how clear we make it that We're Not Reddit, we don't intend to be, and that our community is crafted with a specific goal in mind that necessarily cannot be inclusive of everyone.

but again, we're trying to smooth out the edges for everyone in between keeping this site afloat: we have a whole list of stuff we're sending to the Lemmy devs, and we've already opened bug reports and feature requests to make this whole process more transparent and less painful for users. it's just a matter of getting the people needed to work on those, which we even have a sticky on here.