“Again, Twitter’s interface was very intentionally designed to maximize the amount of time per day a person spends online. The Fediverse really doesn’t need that, but it has it anyway. That’s why I’m proposing that we reevaluate the way we design Fediverse interfaces and clients in light of how we can best strike a balance between creating a positive experience and one that puts the well-being of the person using your product first.”
This is a bit of a catch-22 situation, isn’t it? In the end there is a sort of evolution like competition between different social media offerings, and the less addictive ones tend to go the way of the dodo precisely because they are less addictive.
I think the problem can only be solved at a personal level. Addictions are in nearly all cases a counter-productive problem or stress management technique. So you need to break the vicious cycle first and then the addictive qualities of social media become mostly irrelevant.
For corporate social media it is definitely a competition, but I dont think it makes sense to see the fediverse in the same way. We dont make more money from having more users, in fact having more users results in higher hosting cost and more moderation effort. Maybe there will be more donations, but thats far from certain. So I am totally happy even if Lemmy doesnt grow, as long as it provides an alternative space that some people find useful.
More users also mean more potential contributors (after all existing contributors can’t work on the project forever ), it also means more content which means a higher probability that a certain person will find interesting content.
I dont mean to say that having more users is bad, I guess what I want to say is that Lemmy is already growing quite nicely on its own, so I dont see any need to make it more mainstream or anything like that.
True, but even if your are not in it for commercial gain you are still kind of competing for users as any social media will be judged by users according to its relative number of users (sadly).
I dont really care how others judge Lemmy. Its much more important how the Lemmy users think.
That is becaus in the end people get what tey look for with their actions and choices, no matter how many clients are developed with a nn adictive interface, if what people choos with their actions is adictive cliente there is nothing you can do in the long run.
Is true what you say in the 2nd paragraph, so the best we can aim for is to make good and non adoctive fediverse clients fore those willing to have apps like that