I hate to sound negative, but right now growth in the fediverse (especially Reddit clones like Kbin and Lemmy) are being driven by people who no longer want to use Reddit. But over the past few weeks, most discussions are still circle-jerking about how bad Reddit is and how glad people are to be on Lemmy. You can only beat a horse for so long before you need other content posted on here to keep most people engaged.
rimlogger
Yeah but normies are what make platforms thrive. I fear Lemmy may just become an anti-Reddit circlejerk but then die out due to lack of content.
FYI, as great as Mastodon and the fediverse are, there are issues that prevent their mainstream adoption:
https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/
People should develop a federated video hosting service. It will be expensive but I know the community can do it.
That's fair. Everyone has a different way of doing things.
From your post, I don’t think you were really into internet forums. I was a part of several dozens forums, with tons of overlapping and also different discussions. I was sad when many of them slowly died as Reddit dominated niche communities. The current expression of the community-based fediverse such as Lemmy and Kbin are a return to form that I deeply missed. In the old days you could have an art subforum and the vibe of each art subforum was totally different, but shared the general themes of certain styles of art.
I was very much into Internet forums as a child and posted on quite a few. But I didn't go on any of the general discussion boards, I focused those on specific topics or niches. That is what's missing with the fediverse today. Everyone is trying to provide a Reddit alternative right now but forget what made Internet forums of old great - their singular focus on a particular topic, community, or subject.
No, this is worse than the old days. Back in the old days, forums were centered around specific groups and interests. All of the Reddit replacements are trying to replicate Reddit but without what makes Reddit actually the great: the mountain of archived content from over the years.
Instead of going back to the old days, what we got is a bunch of general discussion Internet forums.
Because the point of having such a huge website was always to make money. You need decentralization to remove some of that profit motive.
An indefinite shutdown would not work - the moderators of the subs who perform them will be kicked out and be replaced by people who want to keep the subs in operation. Plus, it's a disservice to people who do use Reddit as a resource for work or otherwise. I think a 48 hour protest is reasonable, but beyond that, there's not a whole lot you can do.
Yeah I imagine as Lemmy scales you are going to see moderation issues. But that's message board culture in general.
Let's say you sign up on Beehaw. You post a comment that gets you banned from Lemmy.ml. That means your posts will no longer show up to users of Lemmy.ml. If all federated instances were equal, then that wouldn't be a huge problem; your comments will still receive enough interactions. But right now, since most of the activity is on Lemmy.ml, getting banned could reduce the quality of your experience on Lemmy as a whole, i.e., you receiving fewer interactions from your posts.
My only issue with Lemmy is that it's not a true Reddit replacement, especially when places keep defederating from one another. Like I spend far less time here on Beehaw because it's defederated from some of the major instances - I understand the administrators' concerns about moderation but over time a lot of the activity will center itself around the most active instances (i.e., users may come from a diversity of instances) but only interact with content on Lemmy.world.