I think it’s a boon that we’re a tiny fraction of Reddit’s size. Reddit is something like 30+ million MAUs and Lemmy dropped recently from 62k to ~50k. We’re a grain of sand compared to Reddit, and I think the community is better for it.
Lemmy isn’t really a Reddit alternative. We’re too small to have niche thriving communities, and depend 100% on sorting your feed by “all” or “local” to get new content. What’s nice is it feels like one close knit community vs closed off micro communities inside of subreddits.
I get exposed to more things this way oddly enough- viewing content I normally wouldn’t in favor of my smaller selection of subreddits. People are more polite, more informative, and far more original with their comments.
Keep on doing your thing, everyone! We’re building something different here.
The main thing I appreciate is the federation, which helps make us resistant to getting bought out by a corporate entity and subsequently enshittified. Theoretically, even if you buy a few instances you still don’t get the entire Fediverse.
In practice, people congregated on a few big servers. I exist on some smaller Lemmy and Kbin servers as well, because I want to help with the decentralization. Spread out the server demands and all that. I’m not the only one who’s on some smaller servers, but a huge chunk of us are on a couple of big servers that, if bought, take a lot of the Fediverse with them.
But even having to buy a few servers > buy one, all set.
For more my immediate concerns though? Less big-picture “what if” future thoughts? Editing titles. It’s really nice.
Or even worse, just totally collapse - doesn’t even have to be a case of being bought out. I know a lot of people are afraid of joining smaller servers because of this occurring, but it can absolutely occur to larger ones too.
That being said, I get that there is some nuance to the chance of this happening on larger server vs smaller servers, but I still wish the Fediverse, especially Lemmy, were a bit more spread out…