Lemmy

Email and websites are great federated success stories. Distributing the stakeholdership across companies in an interoperation keeps the peace, even in the face of crony capitalism. Just like each company has their own email server and website, they could and should operate their own federated instance of social media, be it Lemmy, or Mastodon, or Matrix... Or whatever becomes entrenched.

People forget that before SMTP email, there existed proprietary email! Yes, it's true. In fact it took more than 10 years for a federated email format to replace entrenched proprietary IBM and Xerox mail products.

In the end, even corporate clients prefer solutions they can have a controlling interest in, because they want some control of their kingdom, and they usually have the means to get it. You don't need extreme ancap or communistic views to get there, but you need a lot of patience. Decades of patience. It takes a long time for expensive lessons to settle in.

The replies already here have touched on the most important factors and why they matter (it's open source under AGPL and it's decentralised, the core devs are ideologically anti-capitalist so they won't go public or sell out to advertisers, the users are the primary stakeholders)

But they haven't mentioned an issue with this question: we are a community. What could WE do to about becoming the next Reddit after a decade?

Most important? Get involved. Acknowledge that volunteering and donations are powerful! The best thing you can do is to help the devs, whether it be coding, translation, documentation, web design, or the many other things that help this place thrive. I see all these posts saying "Lemmy should make onboarding easier!" as if approximately two people are there to do all the work.

I'd say it's a mindset of coming from sites where you don't have the power and the only path for things to happen is complaining to the higher-ups. Being open source and community-driven are things new users need to understand. We may well be their first experience on a non-for-profit social media platform, where we don't have a designated full-time tech-support team, or a professional dev team of dozens.

As users, reject changes that would make Lemmy too centralized, or profit-driven or lose a sense of community.

As app developers make the code resistant to hostile takeover, prioritize transparency, interoperability, as the AGPL has already helped facilitate, and customizability, to allow servers to tailor a community experience.

As server owners/managers foster and promote healthy engagement and discourse within communities, without power tripping unnecessarily. By fragmenting across different servers people can more easily spin up and migrate to servers where they feel more at home and heard.

We, the users should make sure to stay on lemmy servers that use the open-source lemmy code. If other servers open up, who have closed source code, we should consider blocking them, at a minimum not support them by using their communities.

That will make sure that lemmy servers will keep using the open source code and thus will allow other people to spin up new servers.

1. dont try to be a "outrage" generation machine
2. dont try to capitalize $$$$
3. open discussion != arguing

Lemmy uses a open source license called the AGPL, which is a type of reciprocal license (called copyleft), which basically means you can't close the source without everyone who contribute agreeing to do it or rewriting their contribution (and i don't think it ever happened, i think it can be extremely difficult ).

setting up a non profit that that has a decentralized power structure and is legally obligated to do public good might also provide another protection (but a copyleft license is probably enough).

It seems like the main driving factor in Reddit’s downfall is simple: money. They are making decisions that we the users hate because they think it’ll make them look more attractive to investors when they go public later this year.

Personally, I think Lemmy just has to avoid corporate greed, bending the knee to advertisers, and not allowing extremists on its platform (or at least forcing them to their own instance that can be de-federated). The first two shouldn’t be an issue for Lemmy as long as it is able to stay funded by users. The third seems like a constant struggle for every platform nowadays.

I don't think it's possible due to it being decentralized. If anything goes wrong start your own instance. That's what I think a lot of the new users don't realize. This isn't a reddit clone, it's something with much greater potential

All you have to do is retain ownership and never do an IPO.

Having shareholders in a public market makes a company go evil.

@IverCoder I think Lemmy is different because what could you use the Reddit source code for? There wasn't any federation so it makes perfectly sense that a website which only runs at one company will close source their code to avoid competition. With federation it's different because the instances talk together so there is a difference between the protocol and the large instance. It's like making email closed source. Doesn't really make sense for such a protocol.

A better official app? Lol.

Seriously, though, it's tough to say. I'm still unfamiliar with a lot of things here, and I'm not 100% sure it all works (but I do have an idea). I guess for me the biggest thing that turned me away from Reddit is the toxicity (in many, not all, subs) as well as the latest issue that felt like it was forcing me to do something I didn't really want without a significant benefit. I'm not sure the latter can happen here, though, because of the way it's set up. And it looks like the moderation team here is nowhere like the "top mods" of Reddit, although I have to admit I don't know a lot about stuff here to have a good opinion.

Edit:

Another thing is does lemmy, the community, want to go mainstream? I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. It's just that I've been on Reddit for years and this is the first time I've heard of lemmy (or else I'd have joined long before).

I think we cannot tell, yet. For now everything looks good, as you said, ooen protocol and decentralized.

But when the hype hits then suddenly money could talk and things could get worse unfortunate.

Lets hope the best and use it while it lasts