Is Lemmy gaining or losing active users over time?
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.
See here. The graph for six month active users is a little glitchy (I think because lemmy.ml was listed twice under two different URL).
There does seem to be very small growth in 6 month active users, not as fast as a few other fediverse platforms (such as friendica and writefreely) . but i got my fingers crossed that third party lemmy tools will create some really compelling features and help push the adoption of lemmy (I think addons can enhance open source software, like how firefox addons helped firefox adoptions).
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?
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.
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.
I'm hoping mod tools are developed soon, automod is a must
These already exist at least to a certain degree, see awesome-lemmy.