What made reddit special was the comments and interactions.

And in the past few months, I found several instances of karma farmers copying a good comment that was low in the thread and pasting it as a reply to one of the top comments to get visibility and upvotes. Idk if it was bots or people with no life, but I bet shit like that was happening much more than we realized, vastly padding engagement. Personally, I'd rather have a smaller and more authentic community here than disingenuous reposts, shitposts, botposts, trollposts, and general farming like what many subreddits became. I like that this platform seems to have much more thoughtful engagement between users who feel more like people than some cardboard cutout. I think we all can learn and grow as people by sincerely engaging in real discourse in the serious communities, and have interesting OC in less serious ones that are just about memes or storytelling or whatever.

I agree that interactions are special, and I agree that Lemmy needs more users, but I'm wary of bloating the userbase and packing garbage into here. I'd like to see a little growth, and give lurkers a reason to engage in an inviting community that isn't hostile.