this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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It's not that obvious.
Who would take over Lemmy development? Mbin and Piefed are getting there, but still far from catching up (Piefed has no API so no apps, Mbin only has one app)
Lemmy is still missing some impactful features which might really make it a 1:1 Reddit alternative
In a scenario where we are only left with Mbin and Piefed, we would probably have to wait another year to get to where we are now with Lemmy.
At the very least, we're at the point where the counterargument to mine is merely damning with faint praise.
I haven't tried Mbin, and as a Piefed user I agree that it's not there yet. I'm not suggesting that they should replace Lemmy as the backbone software of the threadiverse. However, Lemmy will continue to run in the absence of active development.
I expect Sublinks to eventually overtake Lemmy since it's being designed as a drop-in replacement, in a language better suited to web development than Rust. The dev team also aren't pathological authoritarians, as far as I know. If development on Lemmy were to stop, the threadiverse community's attention and resources would significantly shift towards Sublinks, which would benefit us all in the long run.
Interesting, because that's what I could see happening once they catch up. Unfortunately that's not for now.
Sublinks was announced in January 2024. We're in September, and the 0.1 version still isn't going to be released any time soon: https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1/views/6
I was hopeful for Sublinks as well at the beginning, but it seems like it's not going to be the one replacement a lot of people were waiting for.
At this point in time, I think Piefed has the highest chances at becoming a 1:1 Lemmy alternative. Development has been fast. Maybe in 6 months or a year it can really reach feature parity.
Fair enough, I hadn't been keeping track of their pace of development. Doesn't look super active.
I'm operating under the assumption that for a while the bulk of new user growth will happen on the existing larger instances, which are all running Lemmy, rather than Piefed or Mbin instances growing faster than them. I think that'll remain true even once Piefed and Mbin are more featureful than Lemmy, unless the gap is really significant.
If that turns out to be true, then for Lemmy to no longer be the dominant software, the existing big instances would need to switch, which wouldn't be a trivial task. Piefed or Mbin could add the ability to migrate an existing Lemmy database, but I assume that it would be overall easier and less risky for them to move to a Lemmy clone than to a different system.
Yes, that's also the big issue: migration.
While, to be fair, if LW moves to lemmy.world to piefed.world as the main site and keeps LW alive for archiving purposes, it should be okay. Discussions don't go over for that long anyway.