I saw the recent API charge news with Reddit and saw that people were discussing alternatives to Reddit in the event we all have to abandon it.
Joined Lemmy here and noticed one of my favorite subreddits had no Lemmy equivalent — so I created it.
I have no desire to be a mod, so if anyone wants to take on that role just let me know.
I’m just hoping people do post here if they’re checking Lemmy out and seeing what’s available community-wise.
Yeah, unfortunately that’s the hardest part, creating nice alternative is not the most difficult part (even if it still difficult), but to have enough users to make the platform interesting and “self sustaining” enough really is, and I think it is even harder now than the time when there was the same kind of “exodus” from Digg to Reddit (I wasn’t there for that though)
The difference with the Digg to Reddit exodus is that the two communities were rival competitors working in the same space. It wasn’t a case of one being a huge monolith that everyone used and the other being a small unknown, they were more evenly matched and reddit already had plenty of content and community, and neither were household names.
The situation today is very different. If Lemmy takes off, which I hope it does, it will likely still be small compared to reddit. A bit like how young people are fleeing facebook for other platforms, but there’s still no platform actually displacing facebook.
The masses will always use some corporate pushed product ~ Lemmy may be like early days Reddit - a small community of tech ppl , then may grow and get better in the future with volume , but Facebook will probably never die because all ages (old) and non tech/agile ppl are using it now ~~
Does the Lemmy license prevent corporations running nodes? In fact, it doesn’t even have to be Lemmy.
If you think about email, it’s widespread and used by everyone; but it is still mostly ruled by corporations (Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Outlook/Hotmail) for the average personal user. The protocol is open but the servers are run by different corporations each with their own UI. I’d guess there’s probably no reason we won’t end up like that some day, with some corporation creating a big social network with proprietary code, that happens to work well with ActivityPub so they have heaps of content and users on day 1, getting over that common initial social media hurdle (that none of your friends use it).
Honestly a big commercialised Lemmy instance would already be a huge improvement over the current state, because it would still be federated