The fanbase is still large, but the Lemmy community hasn’t quite caught up yet, and now there is a transitional period where the audience is smaller.
I was against it at first, but there’s probably a lot of value in communities spinning up their own domains and hosting their own focused communities. Instead of a central Lemmy.world which hosts many different communities, we should have lemmyPics.com and lemmyMusic.com and MaleFashionAdvice.com that all run Lemmy software, and then people can subscribe in from remote instances easily.
There’s still a place for general instances in this model too, but I think these communities might get off the ground easier with a $12 domain name and cloud hosting services than trying to all be the next Reddit.
Unless there’s an easy way to migrate a community to another instance, half of those will just go dark in a year or two when the admin gets bored. It’s also going to make updates suck when a breaking change happens and you have a month of admins getting around to updating.
Unfortunately, Reddit and Twitter going shitty this year just reminded me that the Internet on the whole is only 30-some years old and things are still fleeting. I think it’s unreasonable to expect any one center of discussion or any particular service to be around forever.
