It feels like this is how social media and the Internet should have been all along. Truly run for the interest and good of humanity, and out of the hands of corporate control and profiteering. People, out of their own generosity and goodwill, host their own instances and let others use it for free. It's such an awesome example of humans helping each other and working to create abundance for everyone to enjoy.
I believe that everyone putting their time, money, and effort into building up the Fediverse - the developers, server owners, mods, and everyone else who keeps it alive and interesting - is helping to make the Internet (and by extension, the world) a better place. You all are awesome. Keep up the amazing work.
Also hi, I'm new here. I found out about Lemmy today, and I was so intrigued that I spent all day learning about it lol.
Isn't Mastodon already proving that, with 13M users?
It does (along with many better apps), but for the microblogging (like twitter), not for link aggregators (like lemmy or reddit)
Interesting, is there some significant difference in the scalability challenges between the two? As someone who knows virtually nothing about either (I never could get into mastodon), they seem similar enough to me.
I'd say they're comparable and have similar problems experienced in different ways.
On mastodon, a big name becomes the stress on the server. It's like people showing up to a small coffee shop to hear a politician speak about something. If the politician becomes more renowned / popular, eventually they have rallies. Eventually those rallies are broadcasted and licestreamed... All that means more infra and more $
Lemmy has the problem of communities. Communities sometimes gather in small places like a person's house or a bar. If that community grows large, maybe they need to have a conference / convention (like an anime or tech community). That means the instance that hosts that community has to has a conference sized instance, to host all the lads/lasses/etc of the fediverse.
More eyeballs / more discussion = more demand. Simple as that.
edit: I will add that there is one difference. You might have your own little small fragmented community, here on sh.itjust ... like for skateboards. More intimate discussion, etc. This would potentially prevent c/skateboards on an instance from growing too large....
But there is only one @gargron that most people will follow.
Depends on the platform, some are scalable enough (pleroma/akkoma for example). Also, they still work with other fediverse software, so you can comment on lemmy from a misskey account, or talk with an mastodon user with an pleroma account.
Imo scaling challenges are more in the user side than software side.
One big difference is that the Twitter model is driven by individual users, whereas the reddit model is driven by communities, and a community driven model benefits significantly more from a greater centralization. For example, on reddit, subreddit names are one and done. Once someone makes r/leagueoflegends, for instance, that name is taken, and has the benefit of name recognition for new users. But on lemmy, people could make c/leagueoflegends on as many instances as there are. And given the increased visibility on local and the widespread defederation among major instances, the community ends up a lot more fragmented.
Thanks for the response. After reading your comment and @Kazaii@sh.itjust.works's, I'm wondering if it would be good to have "bundles" of communities that new users could subscribe to, so that they don't have to go hunting for communities they are interested in across many different instances.
Or really, even just a big directory of communities spanning many different instances. I'm sure many exist, but ideally it would be something that would show up when you're first making an account, so you can quickly find communities you're interested in, without having to put in too much effort unless you want to.
I'm somewhat used to federation because I've been using matrix for a year or two now, but I haven't really explored many lemmy instances yet. Even on matrix, I haven't really explored much beyond matrix.org.
I don't much about mastodon. But if you say it preforms well then I believe this model works.