The fanbase is still large, but the Lemmy community hasn’t quite caught up yet, and now there is a transitional period where the audience is smaller.

  • skomposzczet@lemm.eeEnglish
    351·
    1 year ago

    Only thing that bothers me is that most of the biggest communities are @ lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, so it still feels kind of centralized.

    Obviously it’s not, but I wonder if too much “power” in one instance will have some negative consequences in future. For example one of them going black results in losing half of lemmy content and orphaned users probably won’t spread to smaller instances but will join next biggest.

    • TheSpookiestUser@lemmy.worldEnglish
      56·
      1 year ago

      This is true, but there are good reasons it’s shaking out this way:

      • Lemmy.world has had some of the most open signups compared to other major instances

      • Discovery of communities across instances is a little harder, specifically natural discovery instead of directly searching

      • It is easier to just tell incoming users to sign on to the instance your community is hosted on because you know it’s safe and they won’t ever be locked out by defederation

      I think the rise of more topic-specfiic instances like ttrpg.network will help spread the load out.

    • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      Lemmy.ml is hosted by the maintainers and Lemmy.world is the biggest instance (because they were one of the few that didn’t restrict sign ups when Reddit API went dark) so those users are going to have the most communities.

      Despite this I still am subbed to many communities on beehaw, Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and sh.it.just.works

      And I have some subbed communities on smaller instances.

      But I will say that I’m thinking of starting a new community but I’ll probably do it on Lemmy.world as they have the funds and manpower to guarantee uptime