I don’t want to be that guy but does this guy have a good track record? Kind of feel he managed to get a good Lemmy domain (generic sounding one) and now he has the biggest instance.
• He’s been running a fairly large Mastodon instance too, and it seems like it’s been going well.
• If I end up disappointed, the beauty of the fediverse is that I can up and leave. In fact, I already did: I started with an account on Beehaw, and I moved to Lemmy.world when they defederated a few instances whose contents I was interested in. It was a fairly painless move.
So for now I’m donating $5/month, and we’ll see what happens from here.
At this moment, I expect that ‘the average Joe’ is still on Reddit.
The current growth of the user base will be mostly technical users, that aren’t to afraid to try things and fail miserably.
By the time the Reddit population is fed up with all the ads, lack of content,… they’ll move over and (hopefully) find a few very stable and established instances. I even guess we’ll have a few instances that have almost no local communities, but are mainly used to jump off to other communities. But for now, I guess that the average technical know how in the community is a tad higher then ‘average Joe’, or at least they won’t be afraid to make a big mess and learn from that.
Here are the key factors I see behind Lemmy.world’s success:
Lemmy.ml was buckling under load, and at least one of the admins (and Lemmy developer) is an unapologetic communist & China sympathizer.
Beehaw.orgis a classic powermod situation where the admins want to micromanage every community. It also was struggling under load.
Lemmy.world was scaled quickly to handle the load, hasn’t been controversial in their policies, and for the most part just works.
As has been pointed out in other comments, the power of the fediverse is that if one instance becomes “evil”, users and communities can and will abandon it for another instance.
Tbh when I joined I didn’t completely understand the fediverse. I tried to join Lemmy One first because it sounded generic enough. It didn’t accept new joiners so I moved to the next generic one.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that a lot of users are going to do the same. And even though I might swear in church now, I guess that’s the fragility you get with fediverse. Ruud can kill this instance at any point. He can grow bored, decide he wants to put his money elsewhere, instance can grow too big for him to afford, etc. People are angry Reddit have 30 days but Ruud could easily kill this instance overnight.
Reddit is a shithole of a company, but at least you can trust a company to like money and certain futures are simply not realistic because that would hurt the income.
I have no doubt Reddit will still be here in five years. I wouldn’t bet the same amount on any fediverse instance
Tbh when I joined I didn’t completely understand the fediverse. I tried to join Lemmy One first because it sounded generic enough. It didn’t accept new joiners so I moved to the next generic one
I understand that lemmy or federated services are confusing for those unfamiliar with it, so I don’t expect a user to be familiar with every single detail about it. But if you make an account on any site whatsoever, you either understand the basics of what the website is about or you don’t have any expectations about creating an account…
that’s the fragility you get with fediverse.
The fact that instances could disappear overnight is an inherent characteristic of federated and decentralized services. You can call it “fragility”, one might also look at it as strenght. Because even if an instance decides to just shut down overnight, the fediverse is not going anywhere and it also means that new instances can also appear overnight.
He can grow bored, decide he wants to put his money elsewhere, instance can grow too big for him to afford, etc. Ruud could easily kill this instance overnight.
Yeah sure, all of this is possible. But why would he do that? If he doesn’t want to do it anymore, he could just give the project to someone else. And even if the worst case scenario happens and he decided to shut the instance down for some reason, the entire point of lemmy is that even 10 instances shutting down would not kill lemmy.
I have no doubt Reddit will still be here in five years. I wouldn’t bet the same amount on any fediverse instance
Again, why does that matter? A lemmy instance and reddit as a media site is not comparable. It would be more accurate to compare a lemmy instance with an individual subreddit, except that the lemmy devs have no power to shut down an instance while the reddit devs can shut down a subreddit…
Why the passive-aggression? It’s rather difficult to ask the question without joining SOME instance. And a feature of the fediverse is that it really doesn’t matter which instance you join first, because you’re supposed to be able to switch very easily.
I don’t want to be that guy but does this guy have a good track record? Kind of feel he managed to get a good Lemmy domain (generic sounding one) and now he has the biggest instance.
Do we know he’s a jolly good fellow?
I’m not too worried about it, because:
• He’s been running a fairly large Mastodon instance too, and it seems like it’s been going well.
• If I end up disappointed, the beauty of the fediverse is that I can up and leave. In fact, I already did: I started with an account on Beehaw, and I moved to Lemmy.world when they defederated a few instances whose contents I was interested in. It was a fairly painless move.
So for now I’m donating $5/month, and we’ll see what happens from here.
And when very disappointed, nobody stops users from starting their own instance and federate from there.
Knowledge does 🤷
People underestimate how important it is with a nice, stable, default experience for the average Joe.
At this moment, I expect that ‘the average Joe’ is still on Reddit. The current growth of the user base will be mostly technical users, that aren’t to afraid to try things and fail miserably.
By the time the Reddit population is fed up with all the ads, lack of content,… they’ll move over and (hopefully) find a few very stable and established instances. I even guess we’ll have a few instances that have almost no local communities, but are mainly used to jump off to other communities. But for now, I guess that the average technical know how in the community is a tad higher then ‘average Joe’, or at least they won’t be afraid to make a big mess and learn from that.
Here are the key factors I see behind Lemmy.world’s success:
As has been pointed out in other comments, the power of the fediverse is that if one instance becomes “evil”, users and communities can and will abandon it for another instance.
Isn’t it a bit funny that you are asking that after you have already joined the server and accepted all the rules, etc?
I mean that’s up to you to decide, idk. what answer you are expecting… You have the same information on him as we do, the info on his mastadon:
https://mastodon.world/@ruud
Tbh when I joined I didn’t completely understand the fediverse. I tried to join Lemmy One first because it sounded generic enough. It didn’t accept new joiners so I moved to the next generic one.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that a lot of users are going to do the same. And even though I might swear in church now, I guess that’s the fragility you get with fediverse. Ruud can kill this instance at any point. He can grow bored, decide he wants to put his money elsewhere, instance can grow too big for him to afford, etc. People are angry Reddit have 30 days but Ruud could easily kill this instance overnight.
Reddit is a shithole of a company, but at least you can trust a company to like money and certain futures are simply not realistic because that would hurt the income.
I have no doubt Reddit will still be here in five years. I wouldn’t bet the same amount on any fediverse instance
I understand that lemmy or federated services are confusing for those unfamiliar with it, so I don’t expect a user to be familiar with every single detail about it. But if you make an account on any site whatsoever, you either understand the basics of what the website is about or you don’t have any expectations about creating an account…
The fact that instances could disappear overnight is an inherent characteristic of federated and decentralized services. You can call it “fragility”, one might also look at it as strenght. Because even if an instance decides to just shut down overnight, the fediverse is not going anywhere and it also means that new instances can also appear overnight.
Yeah sure, all of this is possible. But why would he do that? If he doesn’t want to do it anymore, he could just give the project to someone else. And even if the worst case scenario happens and he decided to shut the instance down for some reason, the entire point of lemmy is that even 10 instances shutting down would not kill lemmy.
Again, why does that matter? A lemmy instance and reddit as a media site is not comparable. It would be more accurate to compare a lemmy instance with an individual subreddit, except that the lemmy devs have no power to shut down an instance while the reddit devs can shut down a subreddit…
If an instance disappears people can move to another instance. A slight inconvenience but worth it to escape corporate control.
If you are community creator and lose all the data that’s a big problem
Why the passive-aggression? It’s rather difficult to ask the question without joining SOME instance. And a feature of the fediverse is that it really doesn’t matter which instance you join first, because you’re supposed to be able to switch very easily.