Please indulge a few shower thoughts I had:
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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.)
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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.
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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.
It does matter. You can still browse and even post and comment on LW communities, even when LW itself is down. But maybe more important is that LW is having problems because many people are using it, so switching to different instances actually helps LW be more stable.
Mmm, nope. If you are on instance X and view instance Y when it’s down, you only see a cache. If you post or comment your content will only propagate once Y comes up. If Y is down it’s down.
I would call that browsing, posting and commenting, even if it doesn’t sync to other instances until the source instance is back up.
You can use notepad to the same effect.