this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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There is no way that the Lemmy network can handle millions of users. The big instances are struggling with tens of thousands. I believe many will leave and reddit will become worse because of it, but it's not going to die, it's going to turn into facebook.
It IS Facebook right now, but for zoomers. Nothing but emoji replies, copy-pasting the same tired meme for the millionth time, and so on. The reddit I joined back in 2012 died a long time ago.
I'd argue the 2012 version of reddit was much the same. The narwhal bacons at midnight. First rule of reddit. So many lolcats. I think I was just younger back then, everything was new.
Reddit was definitely immature and edgy at the time (generic 2010s memes plus dark and shock humor like fatpeoplehate and spacedicks), but it was real people dicking around instead of corporate and bots curating content for maximum engagement, you know?
Yeah I think you're right. A year or so back I just ditched all big subreddits and joined random small ones for a few months at a time, got some of that feeling back. But really reddit has become just another big social media platform and now people visit out of habit instead of out of a feeling of community.
Gotta convince some of the tech guys coming over from Reddit to spin up their own Lemmy instances so we can properly be distributed and share the load.
There are 150+ instances listed on the lemmy site. If we somehow managed to get all those instances running on hardware that could handle thousands of users, then we managed to find enough new techie people to get 10x as many instances, then we worked out some way of getting the load shared evenly so the new users didn't all congregate on one instance and you manage to do this without confusing non-techie people about how it works, if all that goes to plan and you get each instance to support 10,000 users - you've now managed to support 15 million reddit users.
Reddit has over 430 million active monthly users. It's just not feasible to do by 1 July, we need to let the community grow organically.
Yeah, in theory. In practice you need to explain to users why they are being sent to a seemingly random site, which all have different rules that don't necessarily align with what they are looking for. Plus some have open registrations and some you need to apply.
And then there's Beehaw, actively turning down registrations because they want to foster a certain community (which is their right).
This all leads to a lot of user confusion.
Yeah perhaps have a requirement that to be in the list you need to use the lemmy code of conduct rather than your own, you must have open registrations, and probably some level of no NSFW content or that sort of thing.
I actually had to pay 0.01 monero to join my server. There was a way to join for free too but it would have taken longer
Instance hosts will be understandably wary of investing $$$ in a huge influx that may or may not stick around, too. A more gradual influx is good since it lets people scale up slowly, work out donation streams, and such.
I'm fine even with just the current size of this place, though. Even just beehaw alone. It feels cozy. :)
A lot of those 430 million monthly users on reddit aren't posting or commenting anything I care to see. Most aren't posting or comment at all, just voting. And r/all has never not been a trashfire, so, it can keep being a trashfire somewhere over there where I'm not, at least.
Reddit has slowly replaced mods in large subs with employees. And you vastly overestimate the willingness of the average user to put up with quirks of new platforms like Lemmy.
For Lemmy to support the 430 million monthly active users that reddit has - this is currently, in my opinion, impossible. The largest lemmy server has tens of thousands of users, and is running on the most powerful server that VPS provider OVH offers. The lead developer knows that there are big performance improvements needed in the code and has been working on it for some time, but it will be years before the lemmy network can handle even a few million active users, in my opinion.
I guess we just have to hope that Redditors continue to be frustrated with Reddit in the future and keep migrating here over time (as opposed to just forgetting about the idea of moving to alternative platforms after they've gotten over the current controversy)
There are other alternative platforms, as well, even though they're corporate and not as cool.
Tumblr for instance is doing quite well and catching a lot of twitter refugees. I tried migrating there a few months ago, and to be honest I liked it heck of a lot more than I used to. I'm not sure if the site improved, or if I just understood how to curate my feed better this time around, or what, but nonetheless.
Yes, and I think as long as people stick around lemmy that will happen.