this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Fediverse

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On the future of Lemmy vs reddit (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Please indulge a few shower thoughts I had:

  1. I wouldn't worry about Lemmy having as many users as reddit in the short term. Success is not just a measure of userbase. A system just needs a critical mass, a minimum number of users, to be self-perpetuating. For a reddit post that has 10k comments, most normal people only read a few dozen comments anyways. You could have half the comments on that post, and frankly the quality might go up, not down. (That said, there are many communities below that minimum critical mass at the moment.)

  2. Lemmy is now a real alternative. When reddit imploded Lemmy wasn't fully set up to take advantage of the exodus, so a lot of users came over to the fediverse and gave up right away. There were no phone apps, the user interface was rudimentary, and communities weren't yet alive. Next time reddit screws up in a high profile way, and they will screw up, the fediverse will be ready.

  3. Lemmy has way more potential than reddit. Reddit's leadership has always been incompetent and slow at fixing problems. The fediverse has been very responsive to user feedback in comparison.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If communities I'm interested in are on LW then it doesn't matter which instance I use. If LW is down then Lemmy is down.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can still see posts and comments from lemmy.world while it's down. Making new posts/comments might be an issue though

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can see old stuff on archive.org from all over the web. But when something is down - it's down. Because the whole purpose of communities is online communication between their members.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You're right. On the other hand, beginning to use smaller instances might help to reduce the overload of lw in the long run. It might also make the Fediverse more resilient. Reducing the dependency on big instances in my opinion is a good thing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yeah, if I were LW, I would stop allowing new users. I feel like servers should be either user or community based, not both. One for users has nice things like alternate skins (e.g. a.lemmy.world or old.lemmy.world) and ones for communities are focused primarily on having good moderators and being super reliable so that federations to them work 100% of the time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I beginning to feel that lemmydotworld isn't totally acting in the interests of the lemmy community.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It won't help if the communities you're interested in are on LW. It doesn't matter if you register elsewhere - if LW is down then your community is down. The end.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I know that. That's why I wrote "in the long run". What I meant is this: If more users register on different servers in the long run more communities will spawn on those servers. If everyone just registers on lemmy.world, new communities will find their homes there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It does matter. You can still browse and even post and comment on LW communities, even when LW itself is down. But maybe more important is that LW is having problems because many people are using it, so switching to different instances actually helps LW be more stable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mmm, nope. If you are on instance X and view instance Y when it's down, you only see a cache. If you post or comment your content will only propagate once Y comes up. If Y is down it's down.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would call that browsing, posting and commenting, even if it doesn't sync to other instances until the source instance is back up.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

You can use notepad to the same effect.