It was certainly fun back in the day. I was in middle school when I noticed everyone around me starting to use it and it was a bit of a mixed bag for me… at that point not everything was social media so it wasn’t such a hellscape and was a bunch of fun, but even then I think it had a negative impact on me, my friends, and our social lives. I don’t know what it was like before, but seeing that a popular kid had a huge number like 100 notifications on their Facebook could not have been healthy—I don’t think that kids need analytics on how socially successful they are
The nice thing is we aren’t really “competing” so to speak. I definitely want lemmy to grow, but the community can be a .0001% chunk of the internet and I would be totally happy as long as it were a kind, useful, and fun chunk