Avatar credit: Kyla Duhamel (CC BY 2.0)

  • 10 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’ve honestly been pleasantly surprised so far.

    Like, the communities over here are clearly tiny compared to the ones we’ve been used to over on Reddit, but they’re also large enough that they have enough interesting content to keep you browsing. In some ways, the environment here feels a bit more welcoming right now than a lot of Reddit due to there being a lot of pretty high-quality content from folks that clearly want this place to succeed.

    That said, there’s still some growing pains. Some of the instances are pretty sluggish, there are bugs that need to be worked out (this isn’t to knock on the devs - I’m thankful this works at all!), and the number of niche communities is still vanishingly small.





  • I think you are definitely right that there will wind up being some degree of centralization, even in the Fediverse, but I think the issue will be far less severe than the one we find ourselves in right now.

    The fact of the matter is that it takes some degree of skill and willingness to devote time and resources to complete strangers in order to host a Lemmy instance, which will probably result in there only being a handful of “big” instances where the vast majority of communities are located. These instances could theoretically be bought, sold, and neglected, and potentially face the same conclusion as Reddit, bringing down whatever communities they happen to host.

    However, the difference here is that some communities would be unaffected in that scenario. Suppose that Instance A were to go off the rails, taking with it for example the Lemmy equivalents of /r/gifs, /r/politics, and /r/gaming. This would suck, but at the same time other instances would be unaffected, meaning the Lemmy equivalents of like /r/news, /r/dankmemes, and /r/space could continue on. Furthermore, if the mods of those Instance A communities were aware of the possibility of the impending death of Instance A, they could form a migration plan ahead of time to another instance, and communicate this to the users ahead of time.

    Compare that to where we are now, where literally every subreddit is shut down and needing to find an alternative place to land with practically no warning. I’d much prefer the federated scenario.