Lemmy will become a superpower by 2034

Half the success of Lemmy is not becoming the three ring circus of Reddit.

How long will it last? Idk. I've already seen people complaining about AI bots blowing up their instances with requests, mining for data. I've already heard complaints of bots manipulating votes on certain subs and accounts.

If that gets worse, Lemmy gets worse.

But for the time being, we're mostly just a large community of terminally online nerds doing our things and sharing amongst one another, which is what Reddit was supposed to be about.

What color socks you rockin

Yes. We don’t need millions of users to be successful. We come on here for a reason, we enjoy it. And to me that’s all that’s needed for success.

I'd even say that this illustrates the success even more...

• lemm.ee shuts down, iirc, because it took too much time and effort to run the instance. Not really a sign of inactivity.
• the platform keeps going! The whole idea of a federated network works, as a single instance going down doesn't impact other ones. As it happened before, see e.g. feddit.de.

So Lemmy as a whole is alive and healthy - and successful.

Yes, in many ways lemm.ee shutting down is a great example of the intention of a federated network at work, but it is also somewhat of a cautionary tale when it comes to centralisation. Ideally the load would be spread as such that any single instance shutting down would be reasonably painless to adjust for. There were already too many users and communities on .ee, really. Imagine what a disaster .world shutting down would be in the current state of things.

Decentralized control is probably the biggest asset we have to fight back against these issues. Each instance host has motivation to keep their community in the best shape possible, for users and visitors.

If one instance is having struggles, you can migrate to another - and instance hosts could share tactics and information about the process of management.

I still wouldn't mind 100k monthly active users, or even 75k.

That should mean one additional active poster on all the community where I'm alone, and that would be cool

It's alright https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45977837

Seems like a cop-out to call "usage rates" a "capitalist metric"

The whole point of federating is to make those metrics obsolete. What matters more is maintaining the community you have, not infinite growth.

terminally online nerds

I am offended and in agreement

Explorer guy hates when words are misspelled.

I’m pretty sure I got shadow banned twice for just linking Lemmy?

AFAIK it’s mostly not Redditors themselves, but the system they’re stuck in.

Could happen. Imagine the hosting costs of .world exploding if it becomes too big a target.

What's sad is there's people here that still make reddit their identity.

Some people make thier whole identity "capitalism bad".

Yup!

I really dislike the notion that every website needs to aim to gather everyone on the internet to it - one platform to rule them all.

Can't we just have lots of smaller sites that have their own communities, cultures, and histories?

We might eventually have to get more exclusive, or have separate "public" and "private" modes/communities, maybe like how masto handles post visibility...

I'm not sure if the open internet can ever be fully trusted, especially now with roving packs of predatory crawlers scraping for genuine human OC for their plagiarism machines.

Honestly I wonder, hypothetically, if .world shutting down right now would actually be better for the fediverse.

If it continues to be seen as the "default instance" it just becomes a bigger point of failure. And arguably more pernicious, becomes the cultural equivalent of a reddit.

Then I start to think crazy thoughts like what if private capital took an interest in a giant instance. Idk, I'm being way too paranoid I know I know