Slowly's userbase seems to be atrophying. This could be from many things, though I believe the developers were considerably more motivated to engage with their hard-won community when it seemed Slowly was undergoing explosive growth during the pandemic.

I don't mean to undermine the app and there are certainly many things I love about it. I have met some fascinating people, even meeting one penpal in real life, and it was life-changing. Though for the last few months, I've seen an uptick in what seems to be spam profiles or else people who register on a whim and never engage with the app again. This was always a problem, but I think some people who might otherwise be solid contributors to the ecosystem here are prematurely abandoning the app when they can't see past all the ghosts.

I've suggested some pretty easy changes in the past to help connect people who are serious about penpaling, and I'm certainly not the only one to have suggested these things, but it seems the developers are indulging in dating app-style tactics to make Slowly seem more populated than it really is. I've seen posts in recent months raising the alarm that maybe the developers aren't as focused on this project as they once were, and I'm inclined to agree. Honestly it's like they don't even use their own app.

I'd rather meaningful engagement with the userbase and a less opaque decision-making process than more inane stamps. I don't think Slowly will die, but I think it will suffer a long bout of wasting unless the team gets someone on board with an inclination for public diplomacy. It honestly wouldn't take much for Slowly to have tens of thousands of *active* users. And it should!

P.S. As an aside, while I think /u/yann2 has done wonderful work for the app and I'd even hazard to say it would be on life support without his many pro bono hours, there's really too much categorization/atomization of topics around here and moving the slowly penpal requests to a separate sub was \not* the right move. That will ultimately diminish engagement here further.*