Lemmy.ca's Main Community

I don't mind the small community ... it usually generates some actual useful content

Social media sites tend to grow that way from what I've seen over the past 20 years

They start up with very small groups of people ... a core group of enthusiasts build the community and little by little others join in and contribute and it grows and grows steadily ... eventually it hits a critical mass of users where about 70% are lurking and just reading and watching and 30% are actively contributing and creating actual content ... then it goes into a heavy growth period ... the site gets more popular as more and more lurkers join in wanting to see what all the excitement is about ... now the site turns into 80% lurkers and 20% contributors ... it continues to grow with its own success and eventually its like watching a star reaching its end stages and now the site is 90% lurkers and 10% contributors ... the site now relies heavily on its huge library of content during its growth era and little new content is created ... things are heavily repeated and reposted over and over again ... critical mass now grows higher and now it is fast becoming 1% contributors 80% actual human lurkers and now 19% automated bots rehashing old content ... the star is now contracting ready for its final stage ... 1% contributors, 70% human users and 29% bots and the site is now actively being monetized and flooded with advertising that is quickly obscuring content and driving away users

the site reaches critical mass, collapses in on itself and goes supernova ... exploding in a digital storm and the content is blow away into the empty vacuum of disconnected data storage arrays.