this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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There is no dictator. The developers don't have any control over people's instances. They have very little power. We are the ones that have all the power since Lemmy is decentralized and Free Software.
On Reddit the users have way less power, but more than they realize. They can't create their own instance of Reddit, but they can leave the platform entirely (and probably overwrite all their content with gibberish), which would probably kill the company.
Benevolent dictator is a software development term, that's why it's italicized. It's not literal
I'd say it's still behest to the benevolent dictator but it's easier to switch to another if one goes bad. Lemmy.world is up to 150k users. It's a main instance now and Ruud is providing server space for us all to use. If he goes bad then someone else has to step up and provide server space for other instances to take up capacity.
Lemmy as a whole is at 150k, lemmy.world is at 33k right now, and is 3k behind lemmy.ml (though it seems lemmy.world has more active users).
So who is the dictator then? Ruud or the developers? :) We could call him a dictator of his own instance and it is certainly the most popular one right now.
I guess Reddit users don't want to leave their platform, because they are afraid of losing the content and the community. Most of them probably haven't seen that there is a good alternative yet. When we are using one Lemmy instance, we know that there are many alternatives, because we know that that's the whole point of Lemmy. So even if there is a big instance that has most of the users, it should be fine. It would be better if the users were more spread out though.
I'm trying out lemmy and enjoying it so far it feels more engaging (I was using baconreader and had a lot of smaller communities). I loved reddit for what it was and am pissed at corporate assholes ruining it for profits. Lemmy has made the internet feel a little bigger again.
I'd say each instance host is their own dictator, but there are so many hosts that you can always move to another if you dont like what theyre doing. It's not like you're stuck spending money to jump from one to a next and apps like Jerboa let you copy your instance accounts to eachother.
Maybe it's inevitable that every proprietary and centralized platform will end this way. They just keep getting worse. It's been exciting watching Mastodon grow and now Lemmy. We now have a chance to change something and become more independent from greedy corporations. We can have software and platforms that don't exploit us and where we, the users are the ones in control. People only need to want to make the switch. Then we can have a better Reddit here.
I didn't know Jerboa had a feature like that. That's awesome!