If you're expecting everyone to leave Reddit, you're going to be disappointed. Most Reddit users do. Not. Care. They'll stay for as long as Reddit entertains them.
The Twitter migration was actually a really great thing for the Fediverse. It diversified Mastodon, and made it an actually lively space. It's still a nerdy space, but it's so much more than it was. It's a genuinely general and engaging microblogging space. And while, yes, it doesn't have everything that draws the Twitter clout chasers, celebrity watchers, and journalists or politicians, it's a viable alternative for people who are looking to actually engage with each other.
The same is true here, and will be true after tomorrow.
Sure, but anyone complaining about defederation in the context of "group think" probably isn't thinking about how much it sucks that small spaces can't moderate well enough.
Yes. The ability for users and admins to literally choose their feature sets while still getting access to the same content is a big, big plus for for the distributed and federated model
Yeah. Really, new admins should understand that they should be seeding their new instance, but the last couple of weeks have been... Kinda nuts? So, this won't really be an issue for most users long term. It'll be a thing for admins on small or niche sites that want to ensure they're discoverable and that their users can access the best communities.
Well, instances are all different, independent websites. As an admin, if I can't name a community whatever I want on my own website, I'm probably not participating in this ecosystem.
Plus, 1000 times more posts get posted to r/bigsub than you or anyone ever reads, and 10,000 times as many comments. It creates an environment where no one is actually discussing anything, and are just jockeying for attention.
You won't actually miss anything except for big vanity numbers by just choosing the community you like best for a topic and just... Ignoring the others.
Check out a Calckey instance (I think it's a significantly better UX compared to Mastodon, and they federate) and their PWA. It's pretty good. But there's a list of native apps for it here: https://calckey.org/apps/
The John Oliver stuff is happening on Reddit, though. That's where the attention is, that's where his face is being plastered everywhere. It really has nothing to do with anything here.
It's all people who don't want to bebherr, sending the message that they don't want over there to change.
Plus he's probably heard of Reddit, but not Lemmy, kbin, or the Fediverse. And he has no dog in
The community size thing is going to be interesting as the space grows. The fact that there are functionally infinite name spaces means that "politics" doesn't just get to become the default politics discussion space for everyone wandering into the place. Lemmy.ca/c/politics can be a very different place than Lemmy.ml/c/politics, which will be very different from lemmy.world/c/politics, which will be very different again from beehaw.org/c/politics.
And you can suppose that everyone will just use the biggest one by default, but I don't think that's necessarily true. The biggest subreddit got that way predominantly because of their name, and there's a good chance that people'll see their local one first, not the biggest. Or that they'll see multiple of them, and end up engaging with multiple communities before they realize what's going on and settle on the one that suits them best.
There will always be a biggest, but there can be a larger number of smaller, lively communities because they don't need to take on names like "r/truepolitics" or "r/onguardforthee" (which is a so very discoverable and intuitive r/Canada alternative).
We'll have to see how the dynamics play out over time.
Media hosting is the biggest expense, and there are services that make that significantly cheaper through sharing and deduplication.
A major instance can probably get by on a few hundred dollars a month. If it has, say, 100k active users, and 1% of them donate $5 a month, then not only is there enough to cover infrastructure expenses, but they can also put some aside in a rainy day fund, use it to expand hosting to other platforms (lemmy.world is made possible, at least initially, by donations to mastodon.world), or even pay instance-level mods.
Mstdn.social, a very busy Mastodon site, has 200k users and runs on a 32 core VPS with 128GB of RAM. Comparable unmanaged VPS packages go for around $300/month. After that, it's all media storage.