50k signups sounds reasonable-ish but if you mean 50k active users the software/hardware will give out before that. Hex isn’t being actively developed and doesn’t have a lot of the code optimizations vanilla has.

Yeah not the latter.

I don’t see how this would stifle growth. Federation allows for communication between servers with a sort of porosity that discord servers aren’t capable of. If hex remained unable to federate I could see this being an issue. But seeing how this plays out on mastodon, a similar situation is a server being “full” and closing new signups because they reach hardware limits, which rarely if ever causes that server to collapse.

Generally, users intending toward that server will try a different one in-network and sub to their friends/parasocialites and talk to them anyway. In a similar way, lemmy users from feddit.de can sub to lemmygrad comms if they so desire (which is also what I do). So if lemmygrad ever closed itself to signups you could simply join feddit and sub all their comms and get a similar enough experience (except your Local TL will be different).

Because your drivers of growth are users who are actively pursuing it, and the realisation that their efforts will not actually contribute to the growth of the site they care about but instead lead to the existence of some new site will demotivate them. Same reason that locking signups for a while resulted in a drop in new user signups that never recovered, it disrupted users that had a routine of advertising and then they never re-engaged that routine afterwards. You want to avoid any disruption to motivation or routine of key users engaged in that kind of activity and these tend to be an absolutely minuscule number of people, key events like a split that put a dampener on their growth pursuing activities will have a profound effect on morale, not just on those pursuing the growth but the entire site as a whole, each split event is a danger zone for a site never recovering depending on what kind of bad blood such splits generate (and they always do). This is an unproven problem though, just some pre-emptive speculation of future problems based on personal experiences that's all.

I don’t understand why we’d have this mindset? It’s not the goal of Fedi sites to make money so it’s not like we’re doing SEO and user demographic profiling like a bunch of ghouls.

Because what is the point of the site existing if not to take measures to help do something useful for socialism. More growth means larger impact which means larger capability to do more for socialism, not to mention the donations that will eventually lead to enough to pay for much development the site needs. Socialists that don't want to grow socialist projects are just admitting they only see the project as purely entertainment, in which case we should just shut it down as it's a purely an entertainment distraction in that regard.

Profit is not the only reason to pursue growth. No matter what happens educating more socialists is a good thing, and the ultimate goal of socialists is movement growth in the first place.

What makes masto work is simply the fact that you can organically join conversations no matter what server you’re from, and eventually turn those conversations into connections with other users. It’s what keeps people there, and people trying to sell you something don’t last long.

Mastodon is gamified at its core. Followers are a clout metric. Pursuing the growth of followers is what drives users of Mastodon to consistently advertise Mastodon on other sites and services. It has real value too I won't entirely discount that, but you can not underplay the fact it is operating on tried and true gameification methods that haven't just worked for Mastodon but other services as well. Reddit by comparison generates (or used to generate) a lot of its growth from its moderators being incentivised to compete with alternative communities on the web, slowly edging them out and consuming their userbases. Reddit turned its independent modteams into the growth monsters that killed each internet forum for the relevant topics by making mods obsessed with making subscribers go up in a similar fashion, whereas on twitter and mastodon every single user is incentivised into chasing followers over on reddit the clout chasers are the mods in each team trying to make the sub count go up. Hex has obviously done away with almost all of these gamey features and it's... Nice. I don't dislike it. There is little reason not to pursue optimisations outside of gameification methods though if they do the important thing of adding real value and usefulness.

FYI I'm not suggesting anything as radical as we privately discussed previously, all of that was a purely hypothetical alternate site. That stuff is not suitable for Hexbear at all.