A little history on Reddit. From the politics subreddit with just 85,678 users in 2008 to 500 million active users today. Lemmy/Kbin will follow the same path.
This is going to be a short and sweet little history of Reddit. Reddit was founded in 2005.
Take a look at what Reddit looked like in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20061206235353/http://reddit.com/
Note that it didn't have subreddits back then because the user base was too small.
Look at Reddit in 2008 (December 31): https://web.archive.org/web/20081231080128/http://www.reddit.com/reddits/
Politics had just 72,314 subscribers. Technology had 85,678 subscribers, and the "Nicher" Food subreddit had only 4,438 subscribers.
Lemmy/Kbin follows the same path. Initially, generalist communities like Politics and Technology will have the most momentum and gain subscribers, just like Reddit did back then. As the user base grows, "niche" communities will be able to sustain themselves.
Let's not think about the Reddit of today, let's think about Reddit of old. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Biggest problems I see with Lemmy right now is servers going down, defederation for petty reasons, and duplicated communities fracturing a user base. I’ve also noticed users with the same name on different instances but it’s not always clear if that’s the same user or a clone. i basically quit Reddit cold Turkey when I lost use of Apollo and I’d been there since well before the Digg migration. I’m looking forward to seeing how the Lemmy community resolves the issues I noted, no doubt they will.
you can't be mad at both subreddits being too large and controlled by a few power mods, and lemmy having too many duplicate communities all run by different mods.
it is the core virtue of the federation model in the first place, in that if a community on an instance goes down, you have the others as backup.
past a certain size, the content that comes through subs/comms passes by too fast to be digested in time, and other content gets buried, so smaller communities should be more digestable.
as for cross-platform user verification check, lemmy can implement mastodon's method of instance A giving you a secret to be put to instance B, and if it sees that secret from B, then it knows the user at B is you.
I’m not mad, I’m just noting issues that are confusing for new users. Duplicate communities don’t serve as backups. They are distinct from each other. A community going down just means it is gone, for practical purposes. Ive noticed that usually just one community of a given name has any active participation, the rest are placeholders with a post or two. Worse than creating communities as placeholders are Reddit mirror communities that are just populated by bot posts.