Lol I ask myself this all the time!

Just hit 3200 this week, and I get maybe 1-2 posts a month not from me. I get so excited when someone else does one!

I only started posting daily because I really love what I share, so I'd be sourcing all the stuff just for me. If you're doing this as a job, you're going to burn out. I try to post 3 or 4 things a day and have a week or 2 of posts built up in a drafts folder for slow news days or days where I feel like crap and I can keep it going. That's a labor of love though. If it's something I wasn't all in on, it would suck to do all that work for free.

Check out the !fedigrow@lemm.ee community if you want to discuss the growing pains here. It's mainly us crazy dedicated few talking about growing our communities.

5,000. That's really my sincere answer.

Well, there's the The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality in Social Media and Online Communities, which suggests:

Summary: In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

So whatever number you're looking for, it's 1% of that. Not that subscriber count means much, especially for older communities that have 10's of thousands of subscribers who aren't even using the platform any more.

My community (on other account) has 200 subs and it dies when I stop posting so I'd say the answer is more than 200

I guess it depends on the subscribers? Most of the time people just subscribe to communities because they want that kind of content. Look at stuff like the HistoryMemes community. It's got hundreds of subscribers based on the amount of upvotes posts get, but the only realy person contributing is PugJesus.

at least one

What's the Lemmy retirement plan?

i think this is one of the things that's going to end up driving away most of the reddit users in the future.

most people came to the lemmyverse because of reddit's enshitification and are trying to turn lemmy into diet reddit by recreating the things that they liked about reddit; but lemmy was always intended to be political at its core and that core is deeply unpalatable to most of reddit & its refugees so they've mostly self sorted into their own instances and doing so has caused further issues for themselves, including rendering most of their communities inactive.

lemmy works for me because i used to be active in reddit's political subs before the enshitification and that taught me how to tolerate shit takes from misguided tankies and clueless liberals alike and the people who are too rigid in their views to learn will leave.