Please indulge a few shower thoughts I had:

  1. I wouldn’t worry about Lemmy having as many users as reddit in the short term. Success is not just a measure of userbase. A system just needs a critical mass, a minimum number of users, to be self-perpetuating. For a reddit post that has 10k comments, most normal people only read a few dozen comments anyways. You could have half the comments on that post, and frankly the quality might go up, not down. (That said, there are many communities below that minimum critical mass at the moment.)

  2. Lemmy is now a real alternative. When reddit imploded Lemmy wasn’t fully set up to take advantage of the exodus, so a lot of users came over to the fediverse and gave up right away. There were no phone apps, the user interface was rudimentary, and communities weren’t yet alive. Next time reddit screws up in a high profile way, and they will screw up, the fediverse will be ready.

  3. Lemmy has way more potential than reddit. Reddit’s leadership has always been incompetent and slow at fixing problems. The fediverse has been very responsive to user feedback in comparison.

  • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    One problem I see:

    You can google site:reddit.com whatever But if you google site:lemmy.world whatever then you’re losing a significant amount of results. To get good results, you need to know which Lemmy instances is likely to have your answer, and with communities duplicated over different servers, that can be tough.

    In the end I find I prefer this federation model, although I’m not sure although I’m a bit concerned about funding it if it scales up to the size of Reddit (same with Mastodon vs twitter).

    • redcalcium@lemmy.instituteEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Lemmy contents are replicated by federated servers, so you might find what you want by using site:lemmy.world or other big instances because they might also has replicated contents from other smaller instances.