this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Meta (lemm.ee)
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Two reasons:
Both of these reasons only remain true if Lemmy stays small.
Imagine GIMP is enshitified somehow. Well that won't work because the source code is available and people will just create a fork and work with that instead.
There's many Lemmy and Mastodons servers AND clients out there, being open source is already one thing add federation on top and you see no one really is in control of Lemmy or Mastodon as a whole.
Is Gimp as fragmented as Lemmy? If I want to use the blue tool do I have to use Gimp A, and crop Gimp B? With Lemmy entire genres could just disappear if my iteration defederates with the interaction that hosted all the interesting topics. If that happens then the community all gets split up among other communities which likely will never come back whole again. It’s the Linux model, which is fine for longevity and availability, but it’s not good for keeping like minded people together. Fragmentation might be fine for a tool, but it’s not great for community.
Kind of like our worlds nations!
Imagine websites only had content from people in your own country. That would be awful.
How so? If the platform gains more adoption what could happen? Say lemmy.world grows too large and goes completely off the rails, many of us are already happy on other instances.
And if we don't like the route the lemmy devs take? Someone will fork it. Look at kbin, sole dev is going through some stuff and now [mbin is a thing] (https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin)g and fedia already switched over.
We:re in a much better position here.
Costs rise exponentially as sites get larger. Moderation becomes more important, more team members have to come on board, overhead, etc.
From a platform standpoint, sure, it won’t go away. But the platform is meaningless without communities, and a system built to easily dismantle communities is questionable at best for longevity. This is my third or fourth Lemmy-esk account due to a random assortment of annoying issues. Any number of instances could defederate from mine and I’d be forced to either move again or miss out on content I’m used to. There’s no guarantee user names will be available everywhere, so I find the prospects for community building extremely suspect long term.
Uhm... costs don't rise exponentially, if anything the opposite is true.
The other things you list don't have anything to do with enshitification. They are mostly growing pains of a new piece of software and general problems with federation that we need to solve.
More people, more resources. More people, more moderation. More people, more problems. More time consuming. More admins, more time to make decisions. And so on.
Yea but that's not what exponential growth means. Fix costs stay the same regardless of the number of users an instance has, and the cost per user usually goes down when you scale the capacity. That means the costs still increase of course, but the curve tends to flatten.
I mean in the initial growth phase. Yes it will eventually flatten out, but the way Lemmy is run atm won't likely do that unless it stays small.
Talking about exponential growth in the early phase makes even less sense, because exponential curves actually grow very slowly at the beginning while projects usually start out with substantial initial costs to get things going. And nothing about the way Lemmy is run indicates that it won't flatten out or doesn't flatten out already, I really have no idea why you would think that.
Maybe “snowballs” is a better metaphor. Point is, the way an instance is run today (1 person, maybe a small team dealing with everything) isn’t sustainable through growth without outside money coming in. The counter I keep hearing is to essentially keep that instance small, but number of users isn’t the only problem. More content needing to be processed is. And keeping things small and or having performance problems is not something that will help community building.
How would someone buy Lemmy? Even if they bought one instance it could just be forked
Because instances getting larger are going to incur exponentially larger costs. If the largest communities start suffering from performance issues or something like that, it fragments the community into who knows how many instances the community will be split into. The only problem Lemmy has is lack of users and engagement, and I think it’s actually flawed by design in this way. It’s like having a big party, but instead of everyone in one house you split it into a bunch of them with not that many people or food options. Idk if that’s ideal or not.
For us over at Hexbear that's a feature, not a bug. Our instance exists explicitly because we don't want to be subjected to the political moderation of others.
Lemmy can always stay small. If an instance is getting too bogged down, they can close sign ups and people will find other instances. Federation helps spread the load.