I don't think a competition is necessary. I'm more than happy if this place is better than reddit was, even if it never becomes that big. It's the content and the community what makes it good for me, not the ammount of users.

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that Lemmy is getting bugger than Reddit. I just wanted to point out that Reddit is bleeding a lot of users. And judging by how Reddit's post quality has dropped, it's bleeding the best ones.

To emphasize this discrepancy, based on these numbers, if one tenth of one percent of reddit's monthly active users switched to lemmy, that would represent more than 600% growth in the lemmy userbase. So yeah. Sharp growth here isn't necessarily a sharp decline there.

But if the tiny minority that leaves is the same group that's willing to spend dozens of hours a week for free keeping the site free of spam and hate and keeping forums on topic, that has a pretty outsized impact on the quality of the site moving forward. So the small number isn't to say that reddit wasn't hurt by the exodus. It's just to say that lemmy growth numbers aren't a good indicator of that impact.

the thing is we need to hit the critical mass where there's enough posts and comments that it's not dead and there's a reason to come back at least daily. I'd say lemmy just hit that point for me very recently and I imagine that if I still had a reddit account I'd be 50/50. I expect exponential growth from here on out, with more users enabling more people to want to join and that further enhances the system

Stop pushing, the server gonna explode 💀

I'd rather we did not complete, thanks. I don't want 450 million people running riot posting right wing extremist crap.