Is Lemmy gaining or losing active users over time? - eviltoast

I’m new here, so I’d like to know if this project is growing steadily or not really catching on. It has a lot of potentioal imho, but I understand how hard it is to make people use “alternative” websites.

  • Evan@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    Why must addons be created for free software instead of merging it in? for firefox seems good but for lm I don’t see the need, why was LES not just added to master?

    • wiki_me@lemmy.ml
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      3 years ago

      generally speaking adding code to the main code base requires a maintenance overhead maintainers might not be willing to accept, Also there could be disagreements about important design decisions and lemmy devs might not want certain features, it’s really hard to know in advance what works best so third party extensions can help a project switch from a mode of “intelligent design” to “evolution”, people just try stuff and the best stuff stays and become popular.

      Also advanced features might clutter the UX , but power users could be the ones driving the popularity of the platform so that’s one way to attract them.

    • Shepy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Your need is not the same as my need. Personally I do a lot of graphics work so a pixel ruler and a colour picker are absolutely necessary for my day to day use of a browser. Are you happy for your browser to be larger and slower to have these, even if you’ll never use them? Having extensions allows things to be modular and customised to fit the needs of the end user without unnecessary code hogging memory for others.