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If everyone was spread out onto different instances, and communities were based all over the fediverse, the decisions of one instance would be less impactful.
(media.kbin.cafe)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Let's put things in perspective. Lemmy.world currently has a "whopping" 127k users. That's fewer users than the moderately successful niche subreddit I created on Reddit has, which is just one of several thousand subreddits over 127k in size. Not to mention the tens of thousands of Instagram, youtube, facebook, tiktok, etc., pages with more than 127k subscribers. Saying lemmy.world has "a lot of power" at this point seems like a real stretch to me.
The amount of power they have over the direction of Lemmy comes from the percentage of Lemmy users they have not the total user count.
think about it relatively
A lot of power within Lemmy.
Maybe by subscriber count (the bad count, never use sub count).
Truly niche reddits have 5k readers at most. And even then, readers includes lurkers, while lemmy users ONLY includes people making comments.
Their "power" would be relative to other lemmy instances, not absolute.
The comparison to reddit isn't really fair, as by the time they were getting thousands of subs with more than 127k subscribers, they had been bought by Conde Nast, and were also making money through ads.
These servers don't just magically run for free, someone is paying for it. And I don't know about you, but I don't want lemmy to change in order to appear more appealing to advertisers.
That’s all well and good, but a user can be subscribed to many subs
You can be on multiple instances?
It’s much more normal for a person to have many more subs attached to a single account than it is to have many accounts
E.g. you might have say 3 accounts, but one of those accounts might have 100 subs, relatively speaking the numbers aren’t comparable
It's obvious that like mastodon when twitter imploded, not 1% of 1% of 1% of fleeing users actually made it past the registration screen. Maybe Lemmy will get another chance , in 5/10 years
A platform switch takes time, and normally it's a particular community that takes hold. Right now, on Lemmy, it seems to be mostly memes and shit posting that's on the front page. Getting more interesting conversations visible to new users will make the biggest difference.