While the idea sounds great in the short-term, sites like this need a huge community to actually become useful. It’s cool as a little nod back to the old style of internet communities, but without a large following it’s too easy for stuff like this to just fade away. Losing a single server like lemmy.world wouldn’t shut down the entire system now, but imagine what would happen to the average user if their endpoint for news/media just disappeared and they were forced to make a new account and find all of their old communities again.

It’s still neat, and I intend to give it as fair of a shot as I can, but we’re ultimately going to “need” an influx of non-contributing-cat-picture-lurkers to push a few of the top servers up to the levels of involvement needed to support a persistent community.

It’s like how the internet was great when it was mostly nerds. Sure, there are plenty of asshole nerds, but I’ll take a smart asshole over a dumb one - especially since a lot more of them are dumb than not.

It may or may not take off to the point of replacing reddit, but I think the exodus if people now and especially after the end of the month will lead to it having at least the same amount of users as Mastodon. Maybe more, since the average reddit user is probably more tech-savvy and more willing to migrate to a different platform than the average Twitter user (since they follow subreddits rather than individual users). And a roughly Mastodon sized lemmy is more than usable to replace reddit imo