Lemmy isn't just software, it's community, formed by people. People who like it small, because once it grows too big, quality plummets. And that's what people here want to prevent. If you want reddit, go to reddit.

Lemmy is never going to be as big as Reddit. It financially cannot be.

Why not? That's exactly the kind of assumption I'm questioning.

Federation is supposed to make scaling easier to distribute. More users can mean more instances, more admins, more donations, more infrastructure, and costs spread across the network.

"It can't grow because we can't afford growth" isn't some fundamental property of federation. It's an infrastructure problem to solve.

And "it doesn't want to be" keeps coming up. Lemmy is software. It doesn't want anything. Different users, admins, and developers clearly have very different ideas about what it should become.

I'm interested in seeing how far it can go, not declaring its ceiling in advance.

What good is an alternative to Reddit if almost nobody adopts it?

Dude the number of daily users today is so astronomically higher than I ever would have imagined five years ago. I literally thought it would stay a small community and maybe max out around a hundred daily posts and I was happy with that because I liked the community. A project being worked on for "almost nobody" is still very worthwhile if the existing community is happy to keep participating, but what it is today is not "almost nobody".

What good is an alternative to Reddit if almost nobody adopts it?

That it has the model of reddit without it's userbase.

Lemmy is never going to be as big as reddit. It financially cannot be. It doesn't want to be.

Now, their are several options you can take from here. You can either spin up your own instance which abides by your own rules; join an existing instance and learn to live with the rules there; or don't change anything, keep on whining about reality not altering itself to your whims, become bitter and annoyed and eventually leave.

Which of these options do you think will give you most happiness in the long run?

Consider also that Lemmy isn’t the entire threadiverse/fediverse. PeerTube, for instance, is optimized for video, which dwarf the storage requirements of images.

Your own source says Lemmy was created because Reddit was banning their communities. The whole point was giving those people somewhere else to go.

Call it an alternative, competitor, or communist escape pod. The question is the same:

What good is an alternative to Reddit if almost nobody adopts it?

Jesus Christ, everyone here seems to have invented their own definition of what Lemmy is.

Including you.

Except the actual Lemmy developers describe it as:

“a decentralized alternative to Reddit and other link aggregators”

They’ve been calling it a Reddit alternative since at least 2020.

Yes, they’ve been calling it an alternative, not a competitor. They created Lemmy because their communist & anti-imperialist subreddits kept getting banned from Reddit. Such communities are antithetical to capitalism, so they’d likely be banned from any corporate platform, not only Reddit.

Lemmy

Lemmy is a self-hosted, federated, free and open source social link aggregation and discussion platform. It was named after the lead singer from Motörhead, the old...

ProleWiki (en.prolewiki.org)

Lemmy was created in August 2019 by two communist developers known as Dessalines and Nutomic. Their goal for Lemmy was to provide an open-source alternative to Reddit that anyone could self-host and federate with other Lemmy instances, effectively exchanging content between platforms.

You seem to have a pretty clear idea of what you want to operate like, and you said in another response, that you have experience building servers.

It's not hard to get a server built that has enough compute and storage to support the kind of capacity you're talking about. Any used, corporate desktop from the last 7-10 years has more than enough compute to handle hundreds of active users. Storage is the main issue, but that's not unattainable either. As of a week ago, Server Monkey was selling certified refurbished Dell enterprise 6TB HDDs for $175 each. $700 gets you around 18TB with one disk for redundancy using ZFS. 18TB will hold quite a bit of dank memes, especially if you limit the max resolution to something reasonable.

1,500 new pictures per day, all 50 megapixel JPEGs is roughly 670GB per month, so even at that pretty crazy rate (by Lemmy standards) your 18TB server would last two years before getting totally full.

Backblaze archival storage is $1,500 per year for 18TB if you want long term secure cloud backups for your entire server, that's just $125 a month that you'd need to fund yourself or get donations for. Not nothing, but hardly unattainable for a small instance. I used to play on a tiny Minecraft server that had maybe 20 active players, and they made more than $125 per month on donations.

I mean, again, all of this code is FOSS. If you really feel that your approach would be significantly more successful, dive in and build out your own instance. Get some friends involved, split up the costs, market yourselves, get some nice branding, build alliances and partnerships with other instances, etc. There is literally nothing stopping you.

Still, by the time these oldest posts were made, Reddit was already some 10 years old to my knowledge, and we can't even be sure if their active users' numbers are real due to lack of transparency and these numbers coming from a single source instead of being a sum of several independent ones.

And at least an impression of mine, but in these ~4 years I've been around, engagement seems to be growing slowly but steadily. And I'd need to put on a graph the data shared about the growth of the fediverse from another community, but the numbers overall seem to be growing there too.

On taking down Reddit, I'd advise against it. Competition is what lets products and services improve. What I'd expect in an organic competition, however, is for Reddit to deflate into a shadow of its former self, keeping only a nicher usefulness, like Tumblr did and thus becoming just another forum.

But unlike a product in the market, posts are easier to tackle. If the poster/reposter becomes an annoyance, the user just needs to block or, depending on the software and desire, mute the poster/reposter. If just certain domains are an annoyance, block the domain either natively if possible, or with extensions, scripts and/or filters. If just specific posts are a problem, voting and/or hiding posts can be done.

So imo, while the volume can be a tad annoying, if the annoyed users do use the features provided by the platform or more extremely by extensions, these posts shouldn't become the meme of Monty Python's joke on the canned food.

Your biggest competitor keeps shooting itself in the foot and you’re still not growing. its not working chief

So what do you suggest we do with our 0 USD marketing war chest?

Lemmy isn’t really our competitor. From a financial perspective, each person who switches from Reddit to Lemmy is a sum loss to both Reddit and Lemmy. Hosting costs money, and unlike Reddit, Lemmy has no advertising revenue to overcome that cost.

Kill the corporate marketer in your head.

Edit to add that quite a few Redditors would be a nightmare to moderate. We don’t even want them.

You've been told that's not how we do things here countless times yet you keep it up. And worse, you have the gall to complain that a small instance can't keep up with the amount of garbage you're botting over here.

Based on that complaint alone, I don't think you even understand how the fediverse works to begin with so maybe don't have such an ego about your opinion of what it needs.

Take the hint, man. Pay up or shut up.

at the momen 35k MAU is 4x less than my wife cookie blog monthly sorry

You're definitely not the average Lemmy user.

Their server their rules, you don't like it, build your own or find a community that accept you