The fanbase is still large, but the Lemmy community hasn’t quite caught up yet, and now there is a transitional period where the audience is smaller.
Only thing that bothers me is that most of the biggest communities are @ lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, so it still feels kind of centralized.
Obviously it’s not, but I wonder if too much “power” in one instance will have some negative consequences in future. For example one of them going black results in losing half of lemmy content and orphaned users probably won’t spread to smaller instances but will join next biggest.
But all the other federated instances will have an duplicate of certain posts/comments, right?
Maybe some content in cache. Not photos for sure. I’m not sure how exactly will this look like, but we can observe vlemmy.net as example, as it seems to be permanently down.
I was against it at first, but there’s probably a lot of value in communities spinning up their own domains and hosting their own focused communities. Instead of a central Lemmy.world which hosts many different communities, we should have lemmyPics.com and lemmyMusic.com and MaleFashionAdvice.com that all run Lemmy software, and then people can subscribe in from remote instances easily.
There’s still a place for general instances in this model too, but I think these communities might get off the ground easier with a $12 domain name and cloud hosting services than trying to all be the next Reddit.
Unless there’s an easy way to migrate a community to another instance, half of those will just go dark in a year or two when the admin gets bored. It’s also going to make updates suck when a breaking change happens and you have a month of admins getting around to updating.
I find absolutely nothing on Z-library and other important areas - I bet TOR, LMDE, Mint, Debian are absent.
I have no idea what any of those things are.
