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.
If communities I’m interested in are on LW then it doesn’t matter which instance I use. If LW is down then Lemmy is down.
You can still see posts and comments from lemmy.world while it’s down. Making new posts/comments might be an issue though
I can see old stuff on archive.org from all over the web. But when something is down - it’s down. Because the whole purpose of communities is online communication between their members.
You’re right. On the other hand, beginning to use smaller instances might help to reduce the overload of lw in the long run. It might also make the Fediverse more resilient. Reducing the dependency on big instances in my opinion is a good thing.
