I'm an old reddit user, going back to '08. Like many of you I'm sure, I've seen the site rise and fall. Killing 3p apps was a major blow, along with the purge of so many subreddits, and now you have to log in to even view it...it's getting real bad.
I had heard of the fediverse back when Mastadon was first announced. Briefly checked it out, but didn't give it much mind. This morning I was browsing reddit and read a thread about the continual degradation of the site. Someone mentioned Lemmy (new to me), but I thought "hey! I'll check it out, why not''. A brief google search gave me some iOS apps, and I wound up using Voyager (10/10 btw, Voyager reminds me a lot of Apollo in it's hayday). I applied/logged in....and just...wow. Wow y'all. Lemmy reminds me so much of reddit circa late 00's. Sure, there is a smaller user base, but so was reddit at the time. I remember the subreddit you were supposed to go to when you made an acccount and introduce yourself :D
And here on Lemmy, nothing looks like obvious bot posts. Content seems real. In correlation with that, the post titles seem pretty reasonable and not based around rage bait / click bait.
After setting it up on my phone, I found the desktop site (I'm on a laptop some times) and I adore a.lemmy.zip. To me its the perfect layout. The other incredible thing about Lemmy is just how seamless it was to set up, on both mobile and desktop. It feels super accessible to non-technical users, which is something I don't think is true for a lot of fediverse things.
But seriously, I used to adore reddit so much. Watching it fall apart has made me sadder and sadder over time. There was seemingly nothing in its place. I really felt like that era of internet over entirely. Just my first few hours on Lemmy has made me realize I was wrong, in the best way possible. It gave me chills. I'm looking forward to this platform growing. So anyway, thanks for any/all of you who developed/are developing Lemmy. It really, truly feels like a return to the golden age of social.
Three primary points.
A) No one owns all of Lemmy. Or the fediverse in general, for that matter. No single power hungry or nutbag admin can pull a spez and make wide sweeping changes to the app, or who its run. Admins hace control over their own instances, and that's about where it ends There's dozens of significantly-sized instances and hundreds of small ones. They'd ALL have to agree in order to make changes that affect the entire userbase.
B) There is something kinda close to singular all-powerful admins, that can make changes affecting everyone, and it's the Lemmy devs. They do control the software, and ultimately can do whatever they want with it. However, that issue is already mitigated two-fold. For one, Lemmy is free-and-open-source, so if push came to shove, the software could be forked (I.E. copied) and maintained by others. For two (and much more significant) Lemmy isn't the only software that makes up the reddit-like corner of the Fediverse. We ALREADY have k-bin and PieFed, which many users already use and prefer over Lemmy. And they all talk to each other seamlessly.
C) There's no profit motive. Lemmy instances aren't funded by ads or venture capital, they're funded mostly by donation, and sometimes just by nerds who can afford it. Because instances are smaller scale, rather than the single giantic monolith that is reddit, they can be run for just a couple hundred, or maybe a couple thousand, bucks a year, depending on size.
That's not to say that there aren't entirely different issues that may threaten the health of the Fediverse as a whole. For example, following on point C above, there is risk that costs will increase as the Fediverse continues to grow, faster than some instances will be able to keep up with. There's also risk that, while most admins are well-meaning and try to be transparent, nothing prevents admins from being actively malicous and, say, running data harvesting, or injecting malware into their web frontends.
Overall, I think the Fediverse has a MUCH healthier foundation than reddit ever did.
Point B is the most important. The software is open source and can be forked... if there is enough interest and support. We've seen it happen with OpenOffice/LibreOffice, ownCloud/Nextcloud, mySQL/mariaDB, and other cases. In many cases both projects will continue in parallel, sometimes even remerging (node.js and io.js) or cross-developing (lots of Neovim features made it back into Vim).
Thanks for all those points. I diidnt know about any of that but I can see how. they mitigate the possible eventual enshittification of Lemmy