I’ve been having a few back-and-forths in this thread about how it’d kinda suck from a user’s perspective if my instance defederated from Threads, but after reading those historical examples, I’m more amenable to instances defederating. I saw a bunch of people talking about how Meta was gonna “ruin” the fediverse, but not really elaborating past that. Your link explains that better than anyone else has.

I’ll have to ruminate on that some more to see how I truly feel about it, but those examples are compelling.

I REALLY don’t wanna be in Meta’s ecosystems if I can help it.

And the fediverse grants me the ability to be exposed to all the content over there, but not be subject to all the awful privacy violations they’re committing on THEIR users.

I can see where you’re coming from, especially with the part about how people came to Lemmy and Mastodon to get away from the type of people who want to reach the biggest audience. But I guess that leads us down the path of, “What SHOULD Lemmy be?”

I recently ditched both Reddit and Twitter for their fediverse equivalents. But they haven’t been true replacements because they don’t have the users to replicate the sheer amount of content. The mildlyinteresting subreddit has 22 million subscribers. The equivalent on lemmy.world has 100 subscribers. The last post was 3 days ago. I’m not even a fan of that subreddit, but the fact that such a weird type of content can keep so many users engaged speaks to how many people are out there searching for mildly interesting things to share.

Lemmy just doesn’t have that.

I guess it all comes down to this. I don’t care that much about expanding my content creator presence into Mastodon/Twitter, that’s just not the type of creator I am. But (I think) Lemmy could use more creators. Not even “content creators” in the traditional sense of youtubers or twitch streamers, but random people making posts on their favorite communities. If someone’s favorite subreddit is mildlyinteresting, and they come over here and see that the biggest mildlyinteresting community only has 100 subscribers, what do you think they’re gonna do?

Which leads back into the question, “What SHOULD Lemmy be?”

Do you think it should be a reddit equivalent with as many users as that has? With as many super-niche communities as you can think of?

Or should it be a somewhat niche thing with an admittedly passionate community?

Maybe I’m just kinda imposing my own beliefs here (as someone looking for a reddit replacement), but I’d prefer the former. And you don’t need super high quality users to post on communities like mildly interesting or whatever, you just need interested people. You need numbers.

I’m sure we’d squabble over the definition of “very easy”, but yeah, I could run my own. I just take issue with the whole defederating Threads thing on principle.

I logged back into Twitter for the first time in a couple days, and I just saw a TON of people I follow posting their Threads account. It kinda sucks that if the instance I’m on defederates from Threads, I just won’t be able to follow all those people I know and WANT to follow.

I could try and find an instance that doesn’t defederate from Threads, but that’s probably not gonna be easy. And I definitely don’t want to use the platform myself.

Of course you’re gonna have “low quality influencers”, but if you’re attracting THOSE people, you’ve already attracted a massive audience of other people. Those low quality influencers wouldn’t be coming over in the first place if there wasn’t a massive audience to appeal to in the first place. And if there is a big audience on these platforms, then you’re gonna have the higher quality creators come over.

I make YouTube videos, but I’m hesitant to fully dump Twitter because I’m losing out on a critical connection pathway with my (admittedly small) audience. If I could know that a majority of my audience was on mastodon AND that I could collaborate with other creators in my niche, I’d fully switch over and delete Twitter from my phone in a heartbeat.

But I can’t do that because everyone uses Twitter.

Threads is letting people get their foot in the door for the Fediverse. And I think it’s really sucky that, if I want to reach the biggest audience, I might just have to make an account on Threads, because practically all the instances out there are defederating from it.