I know in my heart that it probably won’t last, but I have such an awesome feeling of a clean slate with Lemmy. It feels so much more like the old internet before it just became a shopping cart. I don’t know how long we can enjoy this brave new world, but I am here for it.
This may seem out of the blue. But am kinda curious, having this bookmarked this for a while, if you ended up sticking around on Lemmy or if not, what about this experience may have changed your mind from this initial post.
I am 100% still here and more active than I ever was on Reddit. Getting to know the positives and negatives of Lemmy has been a good experience. The only disadvantage to Lemmy over Reddit is the same as it has always been. It’s smaller and therefore harder to keep niche communities active. I haven’t been back to Reddit at all with the exception a link or two that a non converted friend sent over to check out. I still feel that the general vibe is a much friendlier and more collaborative one. I suspect that this somewhat due to being a smaller place with a large amount of its users fleeing the walls of Reddit. I am sure the dynamic here will change over time (and to some small degree it has already) but this place is still my last, best hope, for a piece of online community that isn’t feeding a megacorporate machine who sees it’s users as nothing more than cattle to consume their advertisements and like it.
Honestly, if Lemmy changes into something toxic, I believe it will be my opportunity to exit social media altogether. I have already gone scorched earth on Facebook, Twitter, Nextdoor, and Reddit. It will serve as proof that what I have been jokingly saying all along is true, “The internet was a mistake”.
harder to keep niche communities active
Yeah, this is a core problem. I am trying to understand the main things that need to be built for niche communities/moderators/leaders to thrive.
isn’t feeding a megacorporate machine who sees it’s users as nothing more than cattle to consume their advertisements
Content consumption being re-prioritized is what I view as the main mantra of the federation movement.
Might I suggest we start paying for it this time, from the beginning? All of the sites we have been enjoying since the birth of Google have been a lie. They are all on borrowed time… myspace, google, facebook, youtube. each was loosing money for a decade before they had to start making money. We could CHANGE THAT NOW, if we all agreed to start chipping in on storage and transmission costs. I have no faith that it lemmy will last forever. eventually, it’ll get centralized somehow. But we could keep it decentralized for longer if we start normalizing having to pay for the content we enjoy
You may suggest that. User-supported is the way to go.
