Did Reddit get massive because of Digg users making a beeline towards them or were they already big before that?
Why is everyone in such a hurry to make lemmy into a Reddit clone?
For more interesting and easily discoverable content. Really that’s what people want at the end of the day.
Exactly. I hate Reddit more than most people here (I’m a mod on a sub that has more than a million subscribers and felt disrespected by spez), but the fact of the matter is they’re the gold standard of quality answers and discussions.
I would want Lemmy to get to that level, not immediately, but that’s the dream.
I want lemmy to become popular just so you can be quoted in news articles. User “fist eye mouth eye fist” wrote that…
Or just have 🤛👁️👄👁️🤜 appear in reputable news outlets.
By the way why are people able to do that? I see that person’s username is mojo by hovering over it but at a glance it’s just emojis.
Mojo is my account name but you can change your profile name at any time in the settings so I used dumb emojis lol
Classic Mojo!
lol, nice.
I would just love to see more users in the communities I care about! I loved Reddit for that reason alone. Here I can find the memes, news, and opinions that I care about, but none of my hobbies. I really miss it to be real with you.
Yeah, I get annoyed at the people acting like this place is perfectly fine as it is. It isn’t. It lacks content. It has repetitive posts. And as far as I’m concerned, growth will iron out those problems over time. It doesn’t need to be all at once, but I am looking forward to it. 60k active monthly users is nothing. Reddit has 450 million active users. It’s hard to overstate how much larger Reddit is. Even if you’re a hipster opposed to Lemmy growing to a Reddit size, it isn’t even remotely close to being that large yet. And as far as I’m concerned it still hasn’t reached the mass it needs to turn it into a super engaging community just yet. I’m rooting for it to become more engaging and I’m doing everything I can to increase that engagement, but we really don’t need the smug in denial “it’s perfect right now” attitude.
Reddit has 450 million active users.
Yes, but how many are bots? Trolls? Bigots? Spammers? Antivaxxers? There is some content that lemmy is better without.
I’m wondering if it’s possible to get the same level of broad esoteric discussion without also welcoming the same toxicity that made reddit the superfund site it is today. Is toxicity a function of size, or is it a function of an environment in which toxicity is encouraged?
I used to moderate a fairly large subreddit and I think I can answer the bots question. There are millions. We’d get hit with multiple spam campaigns with thousands of bot accounts that were seemingly prepared for months in advance to get around our account age restrictions. Most users would never see any of it because we managed to catch most of them. It also happened under almost every post that hit /r/all.
I wish more subs were run like how you described yours. In my experience, too many mods were willing to overlook obvious bot accounts (new to the sub, just older than the account age cutoff, no history, all showing up to the sub for the first time on a given thread and saying the same thing) as long as the bots were sayin’ stuff they liked.
It’s why I was so happy when lemmy became popular enough to sustain conversation. I hope the mods here and on other instances don’t engage in the behavior I described, as I consider it principally responsible for the toxicity that ate reddit.
The bots we had were mostly karma-farming to appear legitimate in other subs or were spamming links to phishing sites and such. Lately we’ve had some that were trying to write actual comments but due to our subreddit language being German, it just came out as garbled english-german nonsense. It was a humor/meme-based sub, so we were an easy community to target.
Is toxicity a function of size, or is it a function of an environment in which toxicity is encouraged?
Both.
Exactly. One doesn’t happen without the other. If growth equals increase if trolls/bots- then grown equals strict moderation. Struck moderation equals power hungry mods.
Voila! You now have Reddit.
Well said.
For me what made Reddit great was not the big wildly popular communities. It was the small niche communities that were (IMHO) only able to form in their shadow and you need a critical mass of people before you can have that.
I don’t want the r/funny people to invade this place, but quality middle sized to niche subreddits don’t yet have their active equivalent on Lemmy.
You’re not getting one without the other.
Let’s bet we can do it.
I wouldn’t take that bet.
Hope helps, try it!
Hope has no place in reality. I accept thing for what they are, not what I’d like them to be.
Lies, you have hope otherwise you would not be alive to live, you pretend otherwise to look tough.
I’d rather have dumb r/funny people in here than bitter mindless negativity
if mastodon is a federated twitter clone, what else is lemmy than a federated reddit clone?
because reddit has all of the content and ease of use while lemmy has neither and we want to see lemmy succeed.
Lemmy is succeeding just fine right now.
Reddit’s “content” is way more rage-baiting, fake AITA stories, culture wars both-sideisms, publicfreakout schadenfreude, and basic-tier iFunny memes, re-posted by waves of bots. All reddit is “succeeding” at is being a firehose of diarrhea.
I prefer Lemmy’s slant towards technology-related news, and polite discussion in earnest without painfully unfunny “and my axe” responses.
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For me it is not a clone, it is a replacement/improvement.
Evolution or revolution?
Why not both!
Because I’m tired of reading the same stories all day long. I like the latest news and lemmy is slow.
Was Lemmy not designed as a reddit clone? Community/post/comment system with upvotes and downvotes, volunteer moderators, generally the same sorting filters, crossposting - hell, they even display your date of join as a “cake day”. The influence is obvious.
That’s not a bad thing, take the good and leave the bad, but if anything I think Lemmy needs more unique features that Reddit never had.
Its a really great Fark.com
If you want lemmy to be like Reddit, you’re not getting the bad without the good. When it grows in number, it grows in trolls, bots, fascists and pedophiles.
Take your pick.
Yes, it will have those things, and in fact already does. There are trolls, bots, fascists, and even pedophiles already. This is an extremely sad and disturbing reality of online spaces. The only thing we can do about it is ensure moderators and instance admins have the tools to deal with it.
Right. However the more popular it gets, the more moderation will be needed. See what heavy moderation did to Reddit?
You couldn’t even post on many subs without proper formatting and or your posts were removed if you didn’t put it in the megathread.
I’d rather lemmy remain small.
See what heavy moderation did to Reddit?
I was a moderator on Reddit off and on for like six years, so yes I did. Heavy moderation is the only thing that kept larger communities on topic - r/Askhistorians being the shining example. The amount of effort required to keep spaces from devolving into low effort hodpodges of memes and such was notable.
But it was worth it. Lemmy will grow, and moderation will probably have to grow as well, but I hope that the mod-user relationship here will be healthier and we can rely more on good faith interpretations of rules so we don’t need to resort to pages of detailing no one will read.
r/Askhistorians being the shining example.
You are so right about this! I will goto whatever service has that again
And how do you filter out the heavy handedness of mods like what was on WhitePeopleTwitter where if you didn’t fall in line with whatever agenda they followed, you were banned and reported to Reddit admin?
With growth, you can expect this to happen here.
Well I expect that the federation model that allows multiple communities to grab the same namespace combined with instance admins that will be more active in removing openly hostile users and mods will help.
To add to what everyone else is saying, Lemmy is by definition a federated Reddit clone. It’s in the documentation and the initial commentary about this service, this place is meant to emulate Reddit to some extent so it makes sense that the two would be compared frequently.
Bigger than right now would be nicer to fill out the niche communities.
So we don’t have to move again.
So that I can use site:lemmy.world instead of site:reddit.com when I’m googleing things
Is that a real question? Because more than half of this websites user base is people escaping from Reddit and looking for an alternative. That seems extremely self-evident
Idk, for people that left their ex, y’all are sure obsessed with your ex.
I think we should prioritize SEO.
If you get a link to a Lemmy post you can’t see the contents nor the comments of the post until you click a further link. Or at least I can’t.
And that means google can’t either.
We need to get to the point where people are adding “Lemmy” to their search posts like they do for Reddit today.
Doing a google search for “best budget backpack Lemmy” should bring up results like “best budget backpack Reddit” does today.
This isn’t the only answer but it’s a big one. Having both the communities where people can authoritatively answer niche questions and the ability for new people to find those communities/questions is absolutely critical.
It doesn’t help that the thread URLs are some old school “post/4268567”.
I also noticed that the markdown format is included (e.g. the hashmarks for headings, asterisks for bold/italics) in search results while every other site doesn’t look like that.
Yea it’s a shame the URL isn’t
post/5784366/title_formatted_for_url
What do you mean you cant see the comments until you click a further link? What do you see when you click on this https://lemmy.world/post/2383782 i see the post and all the comments?
I wonder how that’d work though. Like imagine you made a backpack focused Lemmy instance, say backpack.social. How would you get the SEO show up posts under that instance if they add “Lemmy” at the end of the search? It’s probably possible, but I dunno how it works or if that would cause problems. Also would we go with Lemmy? Because should kbin posts also show up, or should they just use Lemmy as an SEO tag?
Maybe “fediverse” might be better. All fediverse instances would have the context of fediverse in the scraped data. When someone searches “best budget backpack fediverse” the search engine would show the fediverse instances with the best seo score. Higher quality posts get a letter seo score just as they do today on Reddit. It does not matter which instance the post would be on.
The bigger problem is that search engines can’t even really scrape some parts of the fediverse (like Lemmy) because the default UI does not show any post or comment data.
It’s not so much the instances but the communities that are important on Lemmy, unlike most of the fediverse. If your community’s instance is federated with the big instances, it helps get people to your community either way if the post shows as a link on the bigger instance or the host instance. Hopefully crawlers will eventually add some smarts so we link the host instances eventually too.
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Counter point: lemmy doesn’t need to do anything to become a top website. Just stay decentralized and independently run. If that’s meant to be a “top website” so be it, but that’s not why I’m here.
I share similar thoughts. I care more about the quality of the content and most importantly the quality of the community than the popularity of the website. I do hope that we continue to grow and that the growth will be to the benefit of the community.
I think people are forgetting that Reddit didn’t start off with communities (subs), they came later. Reddit got big the same way all sites that don’t have a built in audience (e.g. Threads users basically being Insta users) - time and commitment.
Lemmy is not going to be as big as Reddit for a long, long time. Everyone has fallen into this habit of thinking all Reddit mods are power crazy egomaniacs and some are, no doubt, but the good subs on Reddit required dedicated time and effort to build up. Curating, introducing and constantly readjusting rules and expectations and at some point a good sub reaches a tipping point and it’s popular.
All this will take time with Lemmy. Community mods will need to be as dedicated as Reddit mods were. And, as a side issue, this commitment to making and keeping a community great is what spez and his idiot gremlins have just thrown away. It’s not about user numbers for Reddit, it’s now a priority for them to get mods who are willing and able to put in the amount of work the mods they just alienated had. Subreddit engagement stats are mostly going down take a look at the number of posts and the number of comments for r/askreddit, it’s a steady decline.
Lemmy might not ever get as big as Reddit but it will grow if mods stay committed and users keep posting and commenting. If that happens, that same tipping point will come.
What is most interesting about that site you linked is further down the page - it shows the number of subs still growing - but that graph cuts off at 2022. The post and comments per day plunged in early July and have not recovered. And the top poster and commenter is the same user - u/deleted
And as you say, reddit has alienated a heap of good mods - and they are the true foundation of a site like this, not users
I checked a politics, publicfreakout and trashy, they all had subscribers going through the roof. I think they’re fucking with the sub numbers.
When do the sub number counts finish… if its 2022, like it is with askreddit, thats why. A graph going up to this month would likely show a dropoff
July of this year, hover over the last and it says July 2023. https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
That’s interesting to see this steady decline way before the most controversial changes.
I think that may be stemming from the earlier changes when they shut down a large number of fairly popular but controversial subs, that drove some active commenters away. Plus they started getting very ban happy in the last couple of years, that absolutely has a damping effect
Also, there needs to be an established code of conduct in how to interact with users. For example, if i make a post on reddit that violates a subs rules, it get‘s either removed or put in quarantine and I get a message so I know what happened. In Lemmy, your posts may just vanish without you ever knowing how or why.
The goals of federated social media and corporate social media. Unlike siloed corporate social media, the fediverse platforms are not meant to compete with one another for being the ‘top dog’ so to speak. The idea is just diversity amongst the platforms and different options for people with different preferences. Since the fediverse is not concerned with revenue or appealing to a venture capitalist, competition is unimportant and I hope it stays that way.
The more users the more content there is though which is ultimately what I want as a user.
This is even more important for more niche communities a lot of which are still very quiet/dead/non-existent on Lemmy relative to reddit.
Having been part of a couple of subs take off, the key is to engage yourself. If a sub starts or you start it, add content that’s authentic and appropriate and then discuss things. Don’t force it but don’t let someone else do it either. It’s the only way. There were are a ton of dead subs at reddit too, usually because people stopped engaging for whatever reason.
In a way they do. At least the instances don’t compete, but the users do. Example, there could be a meme community on two instances. Users will probably gravitate towards one. The downside is that smaller communities get buried. Most of the smaller communities I’m subbed to on Lemmy don’t ever pop up in my hot/active. Reddit was a bit better I think and smaller/less active communities popped up in my front page more often and felt more balanced. I think the hot algo in Lemmy could be tweaked to be more balanced like that, would also help the competition.
I mean I don’t mind the current state of Lemmy right now, in fact I’m actually quite liking how it is right now. It’ll probably take a lot of time to even get on the same level as Reddit if it ever does, however I’m seeing so much users, moderators, and devs who are committed to making this platform work and that in and of itself is amazing to see. Things like this actually show there is a human side to technology and that we can make it work. Anyways that’s my food for thought.
I like your positive spin.
I’m just thrilled it’s decentralized. I’m so sick of being advertised at. I’m so sick of being asked for monthly subscriptions. I’m really feeling this open source vibe or however you want to label it.
Monthly subscriptions aren’t bad - they’re the solution to removing the avalanche of ads we are inundated by. The user gets to pick and choose which services they want to use.
One of the problems is opening up services to free users so you can keep them captured and squash competition, and at the same time push subscriptions to them via ads constantly.
People definitely need to accept that you can’t have it both ways - servers have costs, and either the users pay those costs directly through subscriptions or indirectly through advertising.
Agreed. However, these data collectors and aggregators need to be submit to data privacy regulations and checks and balances on how they use this data. Currently they muddy the waters on how this data is handled and distributed, and in the smokescreen use/sell our data however they want for profit, and our data end up being less secure.
EDIT: Also, who do we trust to perform these checks and balances? Not the government I hope. How can we expect them to be fair when they have access to this data?
I agree. Everyone is nicer here, and y’all seem older and more intelligent too. You can actually have a proper conversation on Lemmy without some idiot teenager making a dumb joke.
I also like the “Hot” sorting algorithm for comments way better than “Best” on reddit. On Lemmy, you can actually show up to a conversation late and have a chance at your top-level comment being seen, without having to resort to hijacking other people’s comments. On reddit, you could forget about it once a post became popular enough to hit the front page. You’ll just be shouting into the void.
That’s because it’s still new and not super user friendly/a little confusing. I am still figuring things out here, but I love it because the tone and vibe remind me of the older net before it became super accessible and the unwashed masses started to outnumber the real nerds.
I’ve seen it happen with many sites, boards, communities, etc. A haven is created, it becomes popular, it has a golden age, it becomes flooded with idiots/spam/bots/trash, dies, and a new place arises and the cycle starts again. I watched it happen with icq, AOL chat rooms (and AOL itself), MySpace, Facebook, reddit, YouTube…
Some take longer than others to go through parts of the cycle, but they always do.
One positive to this is that with each new beginning the technology has improved, and there is a richer ecosystem of features as things have been iterated on over the years. The customizability of the UI on Lemmy for example is awesome. It is a brave new world right now, and I am excited to see where the platform goes, and what cool new things we all discover together as we walk this road of building a new and hopefully vibrant community.
I know. I went through this before when Digg killed itself off and everyone migrated to the underdog, reddit.
With everything on the web being so centralized and corporate (especially compared to 90s internet), Lemmy is a breath of fresh air… for now…Let’s just try to enjoy what we have, while we have it.
I like the content I’m getting now more than I have in the last few years at reddit. Can we just pretend we “failed” and carry on?
I’m pretty much of the same mind, but I do think a user base increase would be good. Some of the subs are kind of dead right now, and that’s a bit sad. But I think the quality of the average user is WAY higher than reddit it anywhere else I’ve hung out. And that quality is related to the quantity being low. What’s the right size? I have no idea. We’ll see how it goes.
Dopamine reward loops, good content and a reasonable UX.
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If you gave a good, detailed answer with sources, you got rewarded for your effort with upvotes more than a low effort answer. This kind of appreciation motivated quality content generators to generate more content.
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as usercount grew to a certain threshold, you basically got users from all sorts of domains generating quality content covering pretty much all topics
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while official UX was horrible and 3rd party apps were needed, the basic system of sorting and indendation of answers allowed for long, detailed discussions which could be navigated and followed effortlessly.
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Totally agree. For example, Madtodon was designed to be less addictive compared to Twitter. These platforms don’t share the same financial model, so they don’t share the same growth incentives either. Lemmy can grow as big as the users want it to be, but it shouldn’t aim to grow as big as possible. These are two very different worlds.
Absolutely. I mean, it would be nice to have more users in more communities, but with that I mean that maybe 10 or 20k is more than enough for a vibrant community. No need to aspire to multi-million users communities like any modestly large subreddit. Lemmy isn’t and shouldn’t aspire to be a reddit clone.
“If you make it, they will come”.
It maight not be fast but there is huge potential from what I have experienced so far.
That’s true if your store is on some street where people are passing by and taking a look, but if your store is deep in some forest somewhere then it might stay unnoticed forever.
This is the case right now, Lemmy needs better SEO so that normal people can stumble upon it
To continue the analogy, if nobody understands how to purchase from your store or even what the store is, you’re not going to stay in business. That’s why I think Lemmy needs to bring the UI/UX up to industry design standards and simplify a LOT.
The abundance of controls and information is nice for power users, but it scares away the newbies who already think Lemmy is too complicated. Go to any other major social media site and check out how they bury/simplify/remove choices from users to not overload them. Don’t get me wrong, I think the UIs that provide all that info should definitely exist (think RES) but should not be the default.
The other thing is the sign up process: join-lemmy.org is what people have be telling folks to look at if they want to join, and it immediately gets into the nitty gritty of tech specs and servers and other things that the average Joe doesn’t know about and may get intimidated by.
This has been my nearly universal feedback when telling non-techie people about Lemmy. I know I may get pilloried for saying it since there is a lot of hate for big social media companies on here, but a lot of what they do works and I think we can copy some of that without losing the magic of federated social media & opposition to big corporations.
The brand promise of Reddit was pretty simple—it was the “Front page of the Internet”.
It did not get popular because of the sub-communities or that there was a sub for everything ( at least not at first ).
Reddit became a thing because it was a single destination that aggregated and curated interesting content from the web that “interesting” people could comment on. If you were only going to make one stop on the Internet, it could be Reddit. Uses could share the main URL by word of mouth and new users would get the same experience. As content grew, Reddit became high ranking in search results.
Lemmy does not really offer the Reddit experience to a new user. New users do not want an offer to find an instance or create one, they want to experience the content, get addicted, and come back.
The closest Lemmy has right now to early Reddit is Lemmy World but how do new users know that? Actually, I guess old.lemmy.world is the closest. :)
Lemmy does not really offer the Reddit experience to a new user.
I agree with one caveat: yet.
If Lemmy can build up its userbase and content it could offer a similar experience to Reddit
The problem is the lack of a main page. People want to type “lemmy.com” and find what they are looking for.
I take it back!
I just type lemmy.com and got redirected to https://lemm.ee/?src=lemmy.com
I think that won’t be as big of an issue in time. As Lemmy grows, eventually people will be exposed to it and other services on the Fediverse and will be more likely to have an idea on how to get started, or at least find good guides.
Remember that pretty much everything on computers requires some instruction at the beginning. The advantage that Reddit and other software have is that people have (and continually are) already taught how to use them.
It’s a similar situation to Linux vs. Windows. A lot of distros on Linux are actually more user friendly and easier to learn than Windows - the issue with getting people to try Linux is that they already know how to use Windows and most people hate learning new things
Something like lemmy.world or lemm.ee will just become the “default” instance for new users.
Reddit got massive because it had very vibrant communities and lots of them that inspired a loyalty in its uses.
I was brought to Reddit by a previous user, and I brought several of my friends to Reddit.
For lemmy to get there, you need thousands of communities.
Want to know stuff about Rav4? There’s a sub for it.
Want to know about accounting? There’s a sub for it?
Want to know about what’s happening in Oklahoma city? There’s a sub.
Lemmy isn’t anywhere close to this point. In fact most subs are very dead.
Reddit didn’t start out like that either. If Lemmy is to grow, it will take years of dedicated active use from us.
Preach. So what, we multiply the amount of people those Sublemmies get by 100. It’s still going to be dead. That’s how dead it is.
We need to create Sublemmies for certain groups out of thin air. There’s no chance we can convince people to move when the amount of engagement is orders of magnitude less.
Look at League of Legends. You know, the most played videogame in the world. One post per day in here. It’s over.
The entire LCS regular season I made post match threads at [email protected] . I always enjoy those discussions. Six weeks, 2-3 days a week, so maybe 15 posts. I probably got a dozen comments combined. I went into a few team discords asking for engagement.
On Reddit that’s more like 78 posts. Each of those posts on Reddit will get hundreds of comments. 12 comments on Lemmy versus way more than 1600 comments on Reddit.
The league communities here aren’t anywhere close to 0.1% of the league community there.
It’s hard to build from absolutely nothing.
A lot of those are bots though, fr.
Reddit experienced migrations earlier from disgruntled users at slashdot and was already somewhat known and in use among the tech crowd before the Digg influx. It already had a sizable user base before which is why it was able to absorb so many users. Service issues and downtime were pretty regular issues at the beginning though just as they are now on Lemmy.
Service issues and downtime were pretty regular issues at the beginning though just as they are now on Lemmy.
Yep, unscheduled service interruptions and planned downtime were a fact of life on reddit for years. I can still remember when the reddit admins always announced downtime before swapping out the hamster powering their server.
Actually, I’d say when reddit stopped announcing downtime that’s when things started to noticeably change. Admins stopped even trying to pretend to be redditors themselves and their comms became a lot less casual and authentic.
What year do you place as the beginning?
The large jump off point for Reddit was 2006, and I would say it was truly mainstream by about 2012.
Reddit was big before the Digg migration and got bigger still. It didn’t happen overnight, it took many years. Reddit also benefited from celebrities and other influencers using it to become the default site for this type of content. Lemmy’s problem is there’s no void to fill, Reddit took a hit from the API fiasco but it’s still going strong because 99% of the users didn’t care, or returned soon after. Every subreddit I was in that chose to close down has returned to normal operation, and it’s not even 2 months later.
I like Lemmy, I’m going to keep coming here to see how it grows. Right now, it’s not even close to being a Reddit alternative. It’s barely hanging on, but I wish it the best.
My experience has been the communities are growing and getting more active. I’m seeing a lot of new communities with new posts in my feed as well.
How are people using Reddit, now that all available user interfaces with it are garbage?
There’s plenty of newer Reddit users that got in when the official mobile app and the new theme was default. They got used to it and never cared about the death of third party apps or the eventual downfall of old.reddit.
RES + old reddit on desktop.
Always was and remains the best Reddit UI.
I had no idea until I found this just minutes ago myself, but in case you or anyone isn’t aware… https://old.lemmy.world/
I LOVE it.
There’s a few third-party apps that have been granted exemptions from the API pricing changes, but other than that the majority of users are using the official reddit app or “new” reddit website because they don’t know any better.
What happened is that Digg died, allowing reddit to thrive for over a decade with no competition. The admins learned from this and have been rolling out their shitty changes bit by bit, instead of all at once like Digg did. Eventually it’s all going to collapse. You can’t be king forever.
You can be king forever, with consent of the users.
For a long time Reddit was fairly altruistic. I supported them with a subscription, and was proud to be a member. Reddit gold was an amazing way to monetize with the full support of the community.
As things tend to go, eventually the leadership got greedy and began to care more about money than their life’s work.
Reddit got to where it is because they did listen to the community and have public support. They’ve only squandered that in the last few years.
I’d say the downfall started with the AMA fiasco. It was never the same once they fired Victoria.
The software architect of lemmy is unfortunately doomed. The very concept of how it works means exponential storage and bandwidth needs as it grows in sublemmits and instances. A better design would have been instances being the sublemmits themselves, and leaving it up to the clients to subscribe and aggregate them into a feed. This way scaling is a lot more horizontal, and communities that get too big can scale up individually or purge old data without affecting the rest of the system.
I assume this is a larger theme across the Fediverse?
Could you expand on what causes the massive bandwidth needs? I’m have a vague idea but I’d be very curious to know.
If a user of an instance subscribes to content from another instance, their home instance is pulling, storing and sharing that content. With more and more instances, more time will be spent on sharing that content.
If the design itself is bad, then something will eventually spring up that will replace it. That’s the beauty of nascent platforms; they haven’t completely cornered the market.
