Just a random thought I had. But, around 2010 I really enjoyed making how-to guides (you know the ones using hypercam to screen record, techno background songs, and using notepad to talk out steps). For some reason starting a lemmy instance and the whole process of customizing it, creating content, being on other lemmy instances, without any strategy or care of sorts reminds me of those days. And it’s just quite nice to relive that again.
Not just early YouTube, it feels like early 2000s Internet in general.
The biggest difference is that by around the late 90s when self hosting and learning HTML became accessible to normies, there was already a shitload of content online. Lemmy kind of has that backward, which is part of the slower growth pattern.