How to avoid a Reddit-style downfall
- Use distributed, federated services like Lemmy, mastodon etc.
- Support the hosts with our own funds.
- Moderate our own communities.
The second point is the most important. Reddit happened because they are a corporate entity seeking profit. Let's own our social media platforms by actively contributing funds to them.
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Lemmy is not truly distributed at this point, there are few well-known instances which are bearing the load and the rest is just sipping stuff through activitypub subscriptions.
If this thing will become even remotely popular with current architecture they have to follow the same path donations -> commercial or die. Serving a lot of users costs money, serving media content costs even more money. It's not a problem at the moment, but it will be.
ActivityPub is not a magic bullet, it's just a spec on how servers talk to each other. To truly involve each and every server in sharing the workload there's a need in something on top of that, or even better - replacing that since w/o active participation of client apps in load balancing it'll be the same reverse proxy shit in the end.
When communities and users can be migrated, this issue can be somewhat solved
it's a band-aid, popular instances will be still under pressure to serve end users. Ok, they got the message through push from some other server instead of their user submitting it directly and the instance is not responsible for pushes to community subscribers (which is something, but not much, actually), however in the end it ends up stored locally and users still will be sending requests to popular instance to get their content if they are registered there.
not happening. It's a problem to change even username (and requires federation consensus first implementation-wise, it's not only lemmy around here), changing user's server will need fairly complex extension for id redirects or update propagation or something.
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/changeable-usernames/830
In general it's the same problem with migrating communities - you need to somehow update all the existing subscriptions across the federation.
I hope to be corrected on this, but this doesn't look too good.
I'm not shitting on lemmy and activitypub in general, it's a step in the right direction, however there are a lot of by-design issues which makes them prone to the very same problems as non-federated websites.