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.
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.