I'm honestly pleasantly surprised to see the growth of Lemmy. I joined like a week ago when the Reddit drama started, but didn't really expect it to take off. And to an extent it hasn't yet, there's certainly a lot of users and a lot of communities (especially on lemmy.world), but not a lot of content in most communities yet.
However, even if half the people that joined end up staying, that's enough to keep it "self sustaining" and keep conversations going on the bigger communities, which is what we want really. It's like Mastodon; even though the migration from Twitter was apparently a "failure", I recently got back into it, followed a hashtag and was surprised at the amount of quality content I got.
I still don't think that Lemmy'll keep growing at this rate for much longer though. The confusing nature of the platform and the lack of maturity of the tooling and apps will turn away a lot of non-techy users. I'd be pleasantly surprised if we managed to hit more than about 50k people. Instead, I think we'll see a "slow burn" over the coming months of Reddit slowly losing people due to their decisions or just fatigue, and they'll probably end up here.
At least, hopefully they'll end up here, rather than Tumblr, Telegram and Discord which aren't really the best platforms for Reddit like content, IMO.
Anyway, thanks to the mods, admins and developers! Having the platform you were working on suddenly grow this fast is really tough and not something I would wish on anyone. You are all doing great work, and we all appreciate it. <3
On another topic, there are rumors circulating that we are fascists or supported genocide. These claims are completely false, and like most viral twitter threads, are coming from a single Mastodon user on a personal vendetta who didn’t provide any sources.
Here's a source: the lemmy.ml modlog. Look through its pages for the word “orientalism” and see for yourself.
First find is a comment removed for simply pointing out that China's population is oppressed and Russia's population is being thrown into a meatgrinder.
The only evidence I've seen from this is feditips posting a claim that they are hosted from the same IP, which isn't actually accurate (maybe it was at one point, but not any more).