There is finally a decent alternative to reddit, after one has been needed for years? And it’s open source federated software?? AND I can sign up on an instance that supports free sharing of media?!
I have been waiting a long time for reddit to fuck up badly enough that something else could fill the vacuum they created and do it right. Awesome.
It’s what I dislike the most about the fediverse concept. It’s nice in principle, but it’s all far too fragmented, which not only makes it a lot easier to target specific servers, it also introduces the concern that is defederation.
The open source part is great, but the federation part will take a long time yet to convince me, if it ever does.
Targeting specific servers sounds like a problem of centralization, not fragmentation. If hosts can just easily move to new proxy servers, and users can easily create new accounts on any random server, then I don’t think the Fediverse would be easy to target. The direction that a lot servers are going, with having to type a paragraph to join, seems like the opposite direction to me, and it makes me appreciate this server more.
That’s not really the ideal scenario though. Perhaps it’s fairly inconsequential for you personally, but I’d personally be rather irritated to need to create a new account, not only needing to re-subscribe to all the communities I followed, but also finding replacements should that instance that contained them go down.
However,
I have yet to encounter this, but this does sound positive.
Personally I like those “local” smaller communities. It’s like living in smaller cities, everyone knows each other, amount of posts and comments is not overwhelming so you can interact with people and be heard. And if you need some very active subs for news and such then there are popular “main” sublemmies for mainstream topics on lemmyverse.net.
My main usage case of Reddit was for the more niche communities by and large, so I can definitely appreciate that.
It’s the case at the moment where the “popular” communities feel niche, or at least similar to how they did when I first started Reddit back in 2012, and unfortunately the formerly niche Reddit communities are essentially non-existent here. I view this as an issue that will be fixed with time though, should Lemmy continue growing of course, so I don’t really have a complaint about that for the moment.
My main issue is that it doesn’t all come under one big “Lemmy” umbrella. Different instances have different rules and different accounts by definition of a federated space. I just think things are better managed if the site aligns with a single goal and singular ruleset, rather than having loads of little separate ones. I acknowledge this is entirely personal taste, I have no desire to force my viewpoint, it’s just how I feel about it.
Defederation is also a big issue. There’s lots of claims that federating the site prevents the next Spez for example. In my view, it really just opens up the possibility of a lot of micro-spezs. There’s theoretically nothing stopping the guy who runs lemmy.world from pulling the plug tomorrow, leaving myself and whoever is left to try and pick up the pieces. This is true of any instance and the accounts and communities contained by said instance. Even if it’s not quite as drastic as pulling the plug, they could certainly pull my access from here, which would be rather frustrating.
Again, I do believe it ultimately comes down to personal preference. I think I’m just more willing to put trust behind a larger entity than a bunch of smaller ones. It also means that issues with the site can be directed at a single source, and a larger entity with more “firepower” for lack of a better term is harder to take down via nefarious actors.
People from reddit started joining only 2 weeks ago, it will take some time for the platform to mature for sure. And regarding niche communities, your best bet is to make them yourself and start posting on them to attract people that are interested in the stuff.
I have actually done that with a community I’d personally be willing to moderate already. Naturally though, filling a community with a subreddit’s worth of content solo is a challenging endeavour.
Even some of the less niche communities, for example, Zelda, aren’t really existant here yet either. I’d create them all myself, but I wouldn’t be willing to moderate them all.
What we have here already is good, but it will take a long time to develop until it attracts the userbase necessary for niche communities to thrive. This is far from a complaint, in case it happens to come across that way, it’s simply a fact.
I think it makes the system more robust. And it significantly lowers the financial burden for someone to host an instance.