this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Lemmy has a lot of obstacles that will prevent it from truly going mainstream:
The community browser is complete dog shit for discovering content on different instances, and trying to view another instance's content from your own community is just needlessly complex. Discoverability is still a lot better than Mastodon though, where you'd look at all post and see nothing but hentai reposting bots regurgitating stuff that isn't even allowed on NSFWLemmy...
Due to the nature of federation, you also run the risk of committing to an instance only for them to defederate entirely, or disassociate from content you want to see but they don't agree with. Beehaw is a very good example of this.
As there's no option (yet) to migrate to a different instance, and Lemmy is a FOSS project that cannot be monetized in the same way as a traditional social media site, what happens when instances start shutting down due to being unable to keep up with server hosting costs?
I cannot speak for the iOS option available, but Jerboa is barebones. For example, you can't even tap on a post/comment reply in your inbox to go to that comment's permalink and view the context. This is incredibly basic functionality for any social news aggregator. Even with the fediverse in general surpassing 150,000 users, I don't see Lemmy getting the same level of third-party app support as Reddit had.
Server costs are not as high as Reddit made us believe. You can probably run a 10 user instance for less than 10โฌ/month.
If the instance is good donations could keep it up forever, not even expensive donations. Certainly a fraction of what reddit is asking for reddit premium.
If the fediverse gets very big, won't your instance need a lot of bandwidth and storage to sync all the content?
It's requirements will grow, but it's still mostly text and some images. Mastodon is kind of big (not twitter big but bigger and more active than lemmy) and there are people still self hosting their instance and there's lots of donation supported instances.
I think fediverse being instance-oriented should scalate well. As no instance really needs to hold the whole thing by its own.