this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Fediverse
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So by my math and some googling, that's about 0.00005% of Reddit's MAU.
On the one hand, cool, growth is growth.
On the other hand maybe it's... healthy to stop looking at Lemmy as an "alternative" to anything and start thinking about it as this small forum you like to use sometimes. Worked for me in the 90s, works for me now.
The problem with (very) low user count is the more nieche things will not have activity.
Yep. Which ends up being why old forums were such tight-knit communities. You ended up hanging out with a handful of people. I'm mostly fine with that. If anything, it requires starting something yourself for your niche interests and being fine with it being dormant most of the time.
I think this is where lemmy/fediverse shines compared to reddit: you can have instances for niche things, yet be able to communicate with other instances. And each instance is free to have their own rules and (de)federate with others. Also the improved tools for searching/posting/modding of lemmy compared with old forums.
Sure. I mean, having a single log-in for all of that is definitely useful, as is being able to chat with others. Defederation as a moderation tool is... overrated, but it is there.
Why do you think defederation is overrated? Genuine curiosity.
Well, for one thing it only works asymmetrically. It's fine if you have a very specific source of issues that you can isolate and cut off, but it's not really useful if what you have is hostile users across the network. And it only protects the larger space. For smaller instances it's a choice between functioning as social media or not existing at all.
It's extremely far from a magic bullet, it is not resilient to large scale, systemic issues and the only reason its limitations haven't been apparent is that the AP ecosystem is too small to suffer most of the issues of larger social media.
Aaaaand it's designed to function via the petty squabbles of FOSS developer arguments, which I hate anyway, but that's a me thing.
ALSO with this model, maybe we can get away from the 24-hour news cycle mentality where a post that's more than a day old is dead. Comment on something from 2 weeks ago!