Reddit had a wealth of niche communities. If you needed to know anything about anything, or had an obscure hobby, you’d find your people there. I would love to see Lemmy take that place.

Building this huge collection of niche communities requires a big and diverse userbase. For the ‘diverse’ part, we’d need to make sure there are no barriers scaring off less techy people. I’m glad to see that several mobile apps with good UI/UX are being developed, and on the web UI front there are also several ongoing initiatives.

But I want to talk about the ‘big’ part here. People may check out Lemmy, make an account, comment on a thread, then promptly forget about the site. Getting an inbox reminder when someone has new replies is a trigger for them to come back, and to build a new habit. But those notifications are not turned on by default. I didn’t even know it was possible until someone told me.

Now obviously, I know most of us are frustrated with how pushy commercial social media can be. Personally, I think that if the inbox mails contain a clear unsubscribe link that turns off all notifications immediately, it’s fine.

What do you think? Should we help the growth of Lemmy.world by having e-mail notifications on by default, or should we take the least pushy approach possible? A compromise between the two could be to ask people in the welcome e-mail if they want to turn on reply notifications.