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.
Most of the communities I’m interested in are on LW. If LW is down, Lemmy is down for me. It is also important to understand that LW is experiencing these issues because it has the largest population. The more people come to Lemmy the more instances will cross this threshold and will go offline.
The more people build instances and the more people create communities outside of lemmy.world, the more resilient all this will be. Lemmy is the kind of place where you can fix your issues by building alternatives.
Hosting an instance has some cost and technical difficulties, so I don’t go around recommending that, but creating an account on a mid-sized instance and creating communities there for what you like to talk about is in everyone’s power.
One issue I see is reports as recent as a month ago of people bringing an instance to it’s knees with a python script on 1 desktop computer. It’s one thing to ask for more instances and investment into the hardware to run them from more people, but it’s another thing not realizing that the code itself is heavily under optimized. For now, and you can see this everytime there’s an outage via the atlassian uptime tracker notes, server owners are throwing more resources to bandaid issues.
I myself am currently running an under optimized application for my company, we are using 4x the amount of money to run it as what it’s meant to replace currently. At a certain point even throwing the kitchen sink at problems stops working.
Lemmy’s code needs to mature more, but im excited about the future for sure.
There is a nice button on each instance that turns off new registrations. Once an instance owner has enough users and don’t want to upgrade the instance anymore, he checks that one.
It will be impossible to ddos every Lemmy instance, not very efficiently at least. Now it’s super easy to just bomb Lemmy.world.