Would you like it to grow so all of your other, non-technical interests could have active communities? Do you want more people for moral and philosophical reasons? Or are you enjoying being in a niche? Are you happy to have a platform full of techie individuals, even in communities not explicitly tied to anything techie (much like this one)?
My answer to all of these is “yes,” so I’m not quite sure what I want. What are your thoughts?
I think the big thing is that Lemmy isn’t nearly as monetizable as other social media. What that means to me is that if we do grow, it’ll be largely organic. It’ll be at a pace where the culture won’t change overnight. If we get big enough to have real issues, we can meaningfully splinter to more manageable sizes, or moderate shit stains into instances with no reach beyond themselves.
In short, so long as we maintain interoperability standards, I think we will have all the tools needed to keep things from enshittification. We might just grow out of pure longevity as other social media enterprises slowly but surely kill themselves.
But that could be wishful thinking. Who knows!
I would imagine if the growth was too tremendous, the instance owners could always temporarily disable sign ups until more server infrastructure is ramped up.
I can imagine this happening after Reddit loses more giants like BrookValley and once all the mobile third party mobile apps contain all the Lemmy features. I remember in June of last year when all the iOS apps were in beta and Wefwef was the only option and god forbid you wanted to do some modding on the fly and now look how far we have come.