There is a huge emphasis I see on just growing community size and creating an alternative to reddit.
Back in the day we used to hang out in irc chats with 5-10 active users or forums with few thousand users max. I made friends there I visted across countries. Years after Id log in and people would ask how you've been.
I had a reddit account for over 10 years and I dont think a single person would recognize my username. Its always felt like people aren't talking to you but trying to appeal to the whole audience for points. Reddit exploits our psychology for attention but nothing humane is gained there. The super massive "community" ends up as a void where 99% of posts go completely unseen and any discussions suffer heavily from mod mentalities.
If this a place where even just ten people call home but feel good doing so, that is more good than a million being miserable. Maybe the best alternative is not to be reddit altogether.
Besides, good things have a natural tendency to spread, we don't need to focus on it.
You're right. I think there is a lower limit of required users, but if all the world moved to Lemmy by some miracle, most of the problems would be brought with them. I have the feeling Lemmy is a colelction of people missing the internet from before the big sites like facebook or reddit. It's been missing a long time and this is our chance to get it back :)
I think this is the beauty of decentralization is that individual servers can still maintain smaller communities and still be part of the broader network
I've seen a lot of posts about how having the same community across multiple servers is a bad thing, but I disagree for this reason (and others).