What do you care about most in an online community?

I'd say like-minded people is #1 and lots of engagement is #2 (with the catch-22 that if there's a lack of engagement, then it doesn't provide the opportunity to meet like-minded people).

I think that once the bare minimum of engagement is achieved though, #1 becomes vastly more important.

For example I'd rather have a thread w/ 20 comments and 80% of the comments are meaningful to me, versus a thread w/ 1,000 comments and 20% of the people have responses that I like. Although the 2nd thread has more meaningful comments overall, I have to sift through a lot of noise to get there.

That's part of the reason I'm optimistic about lemmy and how it has self-selected similiarly-minded people currently.