While the idea sounds great in the short-term, sites like this need a huge community to actually become useful. It's cool as a little nod back to the old style of internet communities, but without a large following it's too easy for stuff like this to just fade away. Losing a single server like lemmy.world wouldn't shut down the entire system now, but imagine what would happen to the average user if their endpoint for news/media just disappeared and they were forced to make a new account and find all of their old communities again.

It's still neat, and I intend to give it as fair of a shot as I can, but we're ultimately going to "need" an influx of non-contributing-cat-picture-lurkers to push a few of the top servers up to the levels of involvement needed to support a persistent community.

It's like how the internet was great when it was mostly nerds. Sure, there are plenty of asshole nerds, but I'll take a smart asshole over a dumb one - especially since a lot more of them are dumb than not.