I agree. If lemmy continues to grow, inevitably some servers will be shit, but I imagine there will be other non-federated or less-federated instances. beehaw has already started down that path.

Trolls are generally looking for maximum carnage, so I imagine there's less incentive / reward posting somewhere like lemmy.

The bulk of reddit has already gone back to reddit.

Don't get me wrong, lemmy is great just the way it is. We don't need a continued influx from reddit (although lets see what happens on 1 July).

eventually it’ll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site

I somewhat disagree... you haven't considered the increased incentive for occasional posters to become more regular contributors as existing contributors leave.

As the volume of contributions reduces, each contribution is more likely to garner engagement - those sweet sweet endorphins released when someone upvotes or otherwise engages with your post.

This sounds fantastic to me.

It's pretty much what happened on mastodon with the twitter-storm in November.

Huge influx of new users, about a third hung around - but it was the third who were the most like-minded.

The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example.

I agree, to an extent. You're right in that if you were part of the vibrant community of /r/piracy then it's miserable to see it shatter here on lemmy. That said, this only applies if you're expecting lemmy to be a 1 for 1 reddit replacement. For this type of community to remain cohesive, /r/piracy would have had to spin up their own instance and in /r/piracy direct everyone to lemmy.piracyinstance.whatever.

You can't really "fix" this in a central way because even if you did, it would be trivial to create an instance that would allow duplicate community names. Also, I can see a lot of use cases for lemmy which do not intend to be federated.

That said, it's not necessarily as big a problem as it appears, if you just accept that this is how the fediverse works. There's no single source of control, so of course people can create 147 different /c/piracy communities if they wish to. Once you accept that, then it's not really that difficult to subscribe to all the /c/piracy communities you can find.

The problem itself could be diminished by a few new features which I feel certain will emerge in the future:

• linked communities, where one communities content is syndicated to another. So if you post in !selfhosted@lemmy.world then you also post in !selfhosted@lemmy.ml. This would work differently to cross-posting, all comments would be reflected on both instances.
• grouped communities, where you can subscribe to a group of /c/selfhosted communities with one click, so you see them all in your feed.

I came to beehaw because it seemed to very welcoming

I think they're trying to preserve that

users desire freedom to choose how they want their online experience

This hasn't curtailed that freedom in any way. You can sign up at one of many other instances (lemmy.ml for example) and interact with beehaw and lemmy.world and wherever else. In fact you might say this move affords additional freedoms for people to choose their own experience because beehaw will be free fro mthe noise coming from the instances they've defederated from.

I can only see this hurting beehaw in the future

This assumes that the objective is continued rapid growth. Like every instance wants to be a reddit alternative. The opening post pretty much says that's not the objective.

I would also add that you seem to have overlooked the difficulties OP mentioned in administrating the instance. That's easy to do coming from commercial sites where people are being paid. It sounds like there are four people who have a little experience, but very little time and resources to spend running the site. Additionally as they said in the post they're running into the limitations of lemmy's ability to moderate a large community. One of the fundamental characteristics of volunteer contributors is they're free to curtail or discontinue their services at any time. I saw one of the admins of beehaw in another post say that it's been more than a full time job over the last few weeks, on top of all their existing full time jobs. Imagine you'd poured 80 hours over the last fortnight into supporting a community, then telling that community that it's not sustainable, and that community saying "I can only see this hurting [...] hopefully this is a short misstep"

You're right in a way, but I think you're applying a narrow definition of "opinion" when I think most people ITT are thinking about "behaviours".

Sure, it's not great to exclude dissenting political opinions, the intolerance paradox being a notable exception. That said, I'm not here to discuss politics.

Say for example that some users will do anything for fake internet points - post anything, say anything, there behaviour is guided by the pursuit of karma and building some kind of following. Other users will do anything for engagement, whatever it takes to get others to engage with them including trolling. I'm happy enough for these types of users to find more rewarding platforms elsewhere. Note that's different to excluding them, it's just being a part of a place that isn't fertile ground for their fixations.

The reluctance of redditors to move to lemmy always amazes me.

Not surprisingly, there's a lot of posts in a lot of subs about the recently announced changes. In every post the same pattern is repeated ad-nauseum:

• "i hate reddit, it sucks here, I've always wanted to leave, I'm never coming back once this happens"
• "maybe we should move the sub to lemmy so we won't have this problem in future?"
• "but what about all our data, the wiki & post history and such"
• "but there's no users on lemmy"
• "but that would split the community!"

This is the case even in the subs I would have thought would be really keen to jump ship, like /r/selfhosted

I think this type of approach is the right idea though, a better ecosystem can only be good.

syntax error, malformed JSON.

This is happening all over reddit.

Mods are posting all over the place saying "I have to bend over for the admins because if I don't they'll find someone else who will".

You do you but honestly I find this a bit weird. As an unpaid volunteer you don't have to do anything. Just resign. Reddit's not about to die but it's best days are in the past. I wouldn't want to be a part of the future of reddit.

Australia also, South West corner. Water is fine to drink, I just don't like the taste. We collect rain water instead - heaps of that.

Redditors in general just aren't that into lemmy. Most redditors come here expecting to find a 1 for 1 replacement pre-warmed with millions of users and brimming with reddit culture.

Not having an algorithm to tell people what they want to see is a bigger impediment to attracting users than most people realise.

Additionally, I think mods are reluctant to direct users to any other community as they will give up lordship of their own fiefdom. Sorry, I acknowledge that I have probably an unfairly dim view of mods. I'm sure some are amazing, but certainly many are self-obsessed power trippers. They act in their own interests to preserve control rather than acting in the interest of the community.

What about bots to talk to the bots thought?

They're on lemmy.ml, not even on any of the effected servers.

Usernames are only universal in the same way an email address is. Any instance can have an @citizenpremier but only you can be @citizenpremier@lemmy.ml.

I don't mean to be a douche about it but you're still thinking about it in a very corporate-social kind of way. For something to be universal it requires a central point of control, which doesn't exist in the fediverse.

You don't even need to do that though. It would be the "fork" that contains the blocking, surely.

Is this really true?

Twilio is the biggest sms back end and it's like $10 per number month or something.

It's as though this proposal was dreamed up by someone who has never installed anything on their PC.

Like are they going to block entire repositories? When you apt get install x from within france to they expect repositories to magically give you the french version?

Not really. It's incredibly frustrating and I've def lost some faith in humanity.

I thought /r/selfhosted would be ready to jump but everyone is like "but there's no users on lemmy" and "you'll split the community" and "we're going to go dark for two days - that will teach them!"

Consequently there's been no support for any single refuge.

Additionally people have set up several communities here with similar names in the past but now mods aren't responding so it's all a bit of a mess.

I'm genuinely asking and don't mean this the way it sounds, but is this supposition or have you observed this yourself?

Everyone says their own instances aren't very resource intensive. Even the larger instances like lemmy.world don't seem to have huge specs.

Although there's a lot of subscriptions there doesn't seem to be an overwhelming amount of content being produced. The most active threads in /home have like 150 comments over 2 days? I don't have the data and this really is mere supposition but it just doesn't seem like that much load.

I did see they pushed a new version with some db optimisations so that's probably an indicator that you're right. Also things just feel unstable. Unusually long page load times or 500 errors just occasionally. Things definitely aren't great I'm just not certain that db linkages are the problem.