GhostedIC
The only reason I ever left classic forums was because they were dying. I resisted coming to Reddit but the community was just too good to pass up, if I needed a guide for some obscure thing it was there! Many of those old forums got rekt due to social conflicts better left dead and buried, but ultimately some of them are still out there, just very slow. Lemmy feels like it’s building enough of a community to be worth it, and there’s no way it’s going to get bought out (right?) The main limiting factor is going to be finances, I assume there’s going to be donation drives or something. That’s going to feel a little clumsy since every instance is going to need its own funding, and the communities you like might not even be on your “home” instance, but I think it will work itself out.
The time when Reddit banned subs like Jailbait and FatPeopleHate was preceeded with a deluge of articles from waning ad-driven media sites (buzzfeed/gawker, wapo, etc). I predict a similar attack on Lemmy if it gets big enough that it can’t be ignored, and IMO it’s well on track to keep growing. I’m curious to see how that goes.