I’m a reddit transplant and I’m excited about what I’m seeing so far in Lemmy and the Fediverse, but my brain keeps bugging me with concerns:
Maintainability and Scalability - There are a ton of instances now. Lemmy had made it easy to spin up and host your own instance. In some cases, this means people with little/no infrastructure experience are spinning things up and are unprepared for scalability challenges and costs. This post by the maintainer of a kbin instance highlighted this challenge quite well ( https://lemmy.one/post/302078 ). How do we know if an instance is properly maintained, backed up, and is able to scale? Or should we just be prepared to start over on another instance if ours fails?
Monetization - The above cost challenges bring up monetization issues. What mechanisms will instance maintainers have to help with maintenance/hosting costs? As the Fediverse grows, how do we prevent against ads and coordinated upvoting from taking over and pushing ad content?
Legal/Privacy - Privacy regulations are becoming a mine field… GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy frameworks are making it tougher to handle privacy properly. Is there a coordinated Lemmy legal defense or are instance maintainers on their own? How would you even approach a GDPR user delete request across the fediverse?
The thing with Lemmy in particular is that unlike Mastodon, communities need one instance. dot ML’s and dot world’s potential future “untouchability” is, in part, because communities will also centralize there. Spreading users very “thin” among the network should also indirectly spread new communities off the big several instances.
And of course. the 5k number I mentioned is both
While the numbers themselves likely need adjustment, it definitely should be “lower than you expect”
Let’s take lemmynsfw as a rather difficult example. Nobody wants to moderate porn which makes it even harder to decentralize it, but even at 6k users should something happen to it, all the porn in the entire network bar effectively private communities on the few instances that allow it (or the l*licon filled and hopefully defederated burggit) goes away. Not because of its users but because of its communities.
With most instances being general purpose, this will be less of a problem, as for nearly all other communities, there is 0 incentive to centralize in this way beyond “the initial creator had their account here”