I think my favorite thing about Lemmy is that it feels like Reddit used to. Less negativity, more engaged users (I think). I know it will be fun to watch Reddit die, but if I put spite aside what I’m really mad at Reddit about is more about what Reddit became and maybe part of that is when the general internet user started going to Reddit and it became less like the small community it was years ago. Feel free to disagree or share an argument 😉
It is WEIRD how much I feel like I’ve been here before.
My first days on the internet were around the time that both email lists, and IRC chat, were popular. IRC chat was a bit more centralized than this perhaps in management, but in many ways the concepts were similar: multiple servers, interlinked, and if the admin of one server had a problem with the admin of another, they could delink from each other. IRC, a protocol that was popular 30 years ago and has been largely dead for at least 10, was basically the OG fediverse of instant messaging.
Anyways, there’s a massive amount of promise with this. It’s more or less what Reddit was originally meant to be: Each team fully in charge of their own subreddit, and Reddit admins only there to make sure that each subreddit played nice with each other subreddit. In a fediverse context, it’s almost exactly the same, except the responsibility for cutting off subreddits that don’t play nice lies with the managers of each “subreddit” (instance).
I realize that instances are not magazines and so on, and this analogy has technologically weak comparisons, but I think the principle works.
I do think that we will start to see communities getting their own hosted instances. A light novel/manga I read has an entire instance devoted to communities about the series, and I’ve seen some chatter in the selfhosted community about making an instance for selfhosted/datahoarders/FOSS in general, though we’ll see if that actually pans out.
I really like the model of a community of communities being in containerized into one shared, dedicated instance.