Also, I want to add something: Beware of people fetishizing the fediverse as a cure-all to all or most of Big Tech and social media's problems. Remember, the technology is rarely ever the problem, the humans are. So long as humans remain really clever apes, you are not going to solve hate speech, spam, or outrage.

In fact, it seems like outrage about Reddit is currently driving the majority of engagement on Lemmy so far, even though it's been three weeks since the API protests. Just look at all of the most upvoted posts here. Discussions about how bad Reddit is currently and how Lemmy/fediverse will save everything and make everything good. On social media, moderation is still extremely important, and from the snark and trolling I've seen here and there, I hope the mod team doesn't fall behind and I hope that the Lemmy developers create better mod tools, because if Lemmy does blow up, expect bots to show up. Expect propaganda. Expect automated trolling. All this shit hit Reddit as it got more popular.

Well, bugs and UI aside, it seems like Lemmy can work but there's not a lot of substantive discussion right now. The most upvoted stuff are memes and other low effort content. I'm not sure how long a bean meme can sustain serious activity.

Decentralization was a thing back in the 1990s and 2000s with all of the little message board communities out there. I think people desire centralization without the drawbacks of control going to a small group of people so that's why we have the fediverse.

Like all this is more of a move back to how the Internet once worked. It's nothing new (at least to those of us who grew up with the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s).

I'm going to be a bit meta here, but Lemmy is very circle-jerky right now. Lots of fediverse worship (despite potential flaws regarding governance and centralization of activity on Lemmy.world) and daily beatdowns on Twitter, Reddit, and big tech. The whole Reddit API fiasco happened two weeks ago but people are still bringing in that Internet janitor stuff over here.

I would add that the risk of joining a small server is that the owner can suddenly delete them at any time and you would have to start all over again elsewhere. Best thing to do is to make an account on the large instances only.

Isn't it called BitTorrent?

Elon stiffs people as a business practice.

Exactly. Which is why I believe that all this fearmongering is because of Meta's reputation (rightfully so) rather than because Meta actually has a plan to destroy the fediverse. And it's not the like the fediverse can be actually destroyed, people can always start new instances at any time.

1. As if Lemmy currently isn't overrun with low effort memes? Have you seen all those cans of beans running amok here?
2. I imagine there are many parties already scraping content from the fediverse as we speak - that's the nature of public web content.

How do you think that Lemmy won't be any different as it scales and grows? I've already seen plenty of trolling and snark around here.

The reality is that normies don't want to spend that extra little effort to figure out something like Mastodon. They want it fed to them. And Mastodon isn't even hard to figure out - it just lacks a lot of the features that Twitter has but if Twitter is borked, what's the point of those features?

Yeah hopefully we get past the shitpost/meme stage which seems to be taking over here right now.

Thanks. Somehow people are basking in the glow of potentially having found a solution to centralized social media. But here's the thing: someone has to pay for it, and someone has to moderate it.

Many Mastodon instances couldn't handle the increased load of sign-ups when Twitter crashed or malfunctioned. I see a lot of smaller Lemmy instances begging for money already even though those places aren't host to as much content as Lemmy.world does.

We need to be aware of the limitations of the fediverse too. No, it will not solve hate on the Internet because the people who self-select to be here are somehow virtuous and above the "average Redditor". You still need money and good moderation.

Yeah I agree. Lemmy is rapidly mirroring Reddit from its early days. And without good mod tools, it's going to be tough to police such behavior as time goes on. Platforms are rarely the problem, it's the people posting.

It's because normies want that "centralized" experience. They don't want to figure out which servers are federated with which server - but they always know that they will have the least issues with the server that has the most active users.

I disagree. The large Mastodon instances have managed to survive for a while on donations. I haven't seen a large Mastodon instance go kaput (though you can correct me if I'm wrong).

I don't use Twitter, so no. But normies will finally have a potentially credible Twitter replacement that's open to the public, so good for them.

That's because Mastodon is a federated Twitter clone. If you never used Twitter to begin with (which is really for professionals/celebrities/famous people to put out public messages to people), then you won't get it. Most people don't need to use Twitter or anything like it.

Ever heard of Mastodon blocklists? I mean defederation has been happening for a while.

But I think that's fine. Instances should have every right to block instances that they disagree with.

I currently have no plans to donate. Thank you to the rest who do!