Trying to create a healthy NSFW[1] community on Lemmy:
[1] We’re talking about porn. not gore.
[2] This basically means the American and European democracies.
ABSOLUTELY NO!!!
Other websites with karma are full of bots who repost, a few year later, the content that was popular in the past, in order to mine reputation.
Karma also creates an echo chamber with self censorship where people won’t post anything unpopular out of fear of loosing karma.
I like diversity of opinion. I don’t want facebook, I don’t want to read my opinion with a different phrasing.
I think the solution is a central registration which selects a random server from https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
For example, join-lemmy.org should do this, IMHO, without any technicality. Just transparently register to random server, with a curated cross-servers pre-selected list of subscriptions. Once users are distributed across servers, people will just recommend friends/family to join their own server, then the centralization of join-lemmy.org won’t become an issue. But I might be utopian.
Reddit is profiting a lot from the network effect. By now this reddit is a known brand, has a lot of content is already there, has a lot of people (especially non-technical users) are already on reddit, and they’re there to stay.
All the other reddit alternatives, including lemmy and/or the fediverse suffers from:
Everybody is talking about the Digg exodus, but nobody is saying that it didn’t happen in a day, it took ~1 to 2 years.
Everybody is talking about the GPDR, but the GPDR when hosting in the EU, should be the least if your concerns. As I said elsewhere:
The real issue is Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market which is a nightmare if you want to host lemmy legally. Realistically, the government don’t care about a few copyright infrigement by some guy/gal hosting a lemmy instance in their garage.
But, if you want to follow the law to the letter, the EU doesn’t have any fair use. So theorically, you need to allow users to only post creative commons images, with attribution. Or do some copyright checks on the content posted on your instance. Here is an EU video on how to comply with the directive, it’s a nightmare.