Exactly. Which is why I believe that all this fearmongering is because of Meta's reputation (rightfully so) rather than because Meta actually has a plan to destroy the fediverse. And it's not the like the fediverse can be actually destroyed, people can always start new instances at any time.
Yeah hopefully we get past the shitpost/meme stage which seems to be taking over here right now.
Isn't it called BitTorrent?
Also, I want to add something: Beware of people fetishizing the fediverse as a cure-all to all or most of Big Tech and social media's problems. Remember, the technology is rarely ever the problem, the humans are. So long as humans remain really clever apes, you are not going to solve hate speech, spam, or outrage.
In fact, it seems like outrage about Reddit is currently driving the majority of engagement on Lemmy so far, even though it's been three weeks since the API protests. Just look at all of the most upvoted posts here. Discussions about how bad Reddit is currently and how Lemmy/fediverse will save everything and make everything good. On social media, moderation is still extremely important, and from the snark and trolling I've seen here and there, I hope the mod team doesn't fall behind and I hope that the Lemmy developers create better mod tools, because if Lemmy does blow up, expect bots to show up. Expect propaganda. Expect automated trolling. All this shit hit Reddit as it got more popular.
How do you think that Lemmy won't be any different as it scales and grows? I've already seen plenty of trolling and snark around here.
Well, bugs and UI aside, it seems like Lemmy can work but there's not a lot of substantive discussion right now. The most upvoted stuff are memes and other low effort content. I'm not sure how long a bean meme can sustain serious activity.
I'm going to be a bit meta here, but Lemmy is very circle-jerky right now. Lots of fediverse worship (despite potential flaws regarding governance and centralization of activity on Lemmy.world) and daily beatdowns on Twitter, Reddit, and big tech. The whole Reddit API fiasco happened two weeks ago but people are still bringing in that Internet janitor stuff over here.
Elon stiffs people as a business practice.
I would add that the risk of joining a small server is that the owner can suddenly delete them at any time and you would have to start all over again elsewhere. Best thing to do is to make an account on the large instances only.
The reality is that normies don't want to spend that extra little effort to figure out something like Mastodon. They want it fed to them. And Mastodon isn't even hard to figure out - it just lacks a lot of the features that Twitter has but if Twitter is borked, what's the point of those features?
Decentralization was a thing back in the 1990s and 2000s with all of the little message board communities out there. I think people desire centralization without the drawbacks of control going to a small group of people so that's why we have the fediverse.
Like all this is more of a move back to how the Internet once worked. It's nothing new (at least to those of us who grew up with the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s).