It’s wild. I’m not a habitual social media user/checker, so my thoughts should be interpreted within that context.
Anyway, I don’t think anyone can fairly say they’re artificially growing the platform. I’ve watched them fight bots that attempt to autofollow everyone on the entire platform and engineer solutions for blatantly NSFW content filtering (but not blocking as that’s not a direct concern of theirs). They’re thinking really critically about giving users tools to give them the ability to see only the content they want to see. The coolest feature I’ve seen so far is custom feeds, which lets any user create a custom feed using whatever criteria they want to filter posts that any other user can then subsequently discover and add to their own list of feeds as an optional way to view content. For example, there’s a feed that (I presume) uses CV to include every post that includes a cat photo (no hashtags needed). It’s pretty cool.
They’re really on top of it, and when I say that I mean crazy passionate, bordering on burnout levels of on top of it. Throughout all of it they’ve been really authentically engaged, and even playful, with users.
As for users themselves, I’d say at the moment there are still really tight demographic bubbles of users on there, and everyone is an early-adopter, so the 80/20 rule doesn’t apply yet. Although it’s slowly changing, at least back in late May/April there were no lurkers. Everyone seemed to be posting and replying to everything. I find it interesting that they’ve managed to pierce beyond our techno-bubble. Not everyone on there has a technical background. I’d say they trend that direction, but they have writers and artists too, for example.
Lastly, I’ve seen some pretty neat experimenal web apps and chrome extensions being built around it. It’s all very exciting. That being said, this is early days, so it’s to be expected. I have a hunch they’re going to win this space because they seem to be making a concerted effort not to alienate users who are used to the idea of a centralized platform by not overwhelming said users with concerns that extend beyond engagement.
My concern also hinges on that, however, because it can very justly be argued that this is federation-lite or d(i)e(t)-centralization. The underlying foundation of the AT-protocol will be expensive to run. It’s the push/pull dilemma. They’re not shy about this, but they’re not exactly shouting it from the rooftops either, if you catch my drift.