Humans who run instances are real people who have jobs and mortgages and kids. I also like having piracy communities around to balance the greedy ass corporations trying to control media and copyright…I’m glad to know they are there if I need them or feel like screwing around with it. I just wonder if the people ranting all indignantly acting like instances are competing for their usership would feel the same if the most active instance was on a server physically sitting in their basement, or paid for by money tied to them in the real world. Yes it seems pretty unlikely that you’re ever going to run into issues with law enforcement, copyright claims, lawsuits…but how much would you risk for a fucking hobby you do for free? Would you risk your house? Your job? I would not. Grow up. No one cares what instance you use.
But like, it’s a fundamental characteristic of the fediverse.
This place isn’t for everyone. If someone can’t eventually wrap their head around the concept of separate instances with distinct and sometimes drastically different administrative standards, and that alts are a reasonable and correct solution to (de)federation/network fragmentation… well, this probably isn’t the right place for that person.
And that’s the attitude that makes sure this platform never grows.
The reality is that most people don’t want to manage multiple accounts or even know what instance they’re on. That kind of stuff only matters to tech people. The average user wants one account that does everything, not a bunch of seemingly identical accounts.
I’m still not sold on the fediverse anyways. Federation often seems to hold things back more than it helps tbh.
You’re assuming that lemmy users and instance owners want monotonic growth, and I do not at all think that that can be safely assumed in the fediverse. In fact, I’d bet good money that a lot of users and instance owners would love to keep their own instance sizes relatively small, and furthermore don’t want to grow their userbases too fast.
And I find that defeats the whole point of the platform. If there’s no growth there’s no point in continuing to stay here. The communities I care about are so small over here that they’re barely worth having, let alone participating in.
If they didn’t want to be seen as a Reddit replacement then it shouldn’t have been advertised as one. If growth isn’t wanted then there’s no point to the platform and it’ll never gain any more users.
This is also why it’s good to have large instances such as LW. Most users can go to the one big instance and then the ones who want to stay small can without harming the growth of the platform.
