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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Yeah I love Lemmy but I don’t see it taking off. The separation of federation instances is confusing for new users. There are plenty of communities but they all feel isolated due to the same community existing on multiple instances. There’s a reason why the biggest communities are all Linux/Programming related.
I feel like development of Lemmy has slowed the past few weeks too. I've been following plenty of issues on GitHub both on the front-end and back-end, and there just hasn't been any progress on them. It's a shame because Lemmy has so much potential, but I'm with you I just don't think it will take off. With that said, obviously I will keep using it, and I'm not going back to reddit. It's a shame because I really do miss the smaller niche communities on reddit but reddit is dead to me now because the CEO is really quite the dickhead and I refuse to go back.
Yeah, reddit is dead to me just like Twitter is dead to me. Lemmy will grow over time, it will take years but eventually people will realize ad-free and privacy are very important long-term
Without actually having looked at the issue track but knowing how such things go down: Less visible progress should be expected right about now even presuming constant development efforts.
The great migration brought many users and uncovered various bugs and requirements for new features and devs have been scrambling to address as much of it as fast as possible -- which means going for low-hanging fruit first and if it's not low-hanging, hack around the issue to produce a quick fix. Now that the worst is over proper software development practice dictates that you should worry more about addressing technical debt you just incurred as well as refactor and redesign until high-hanging fruit are hanging lower so you can pluck them. Doesn't make sense to build 100 ladders when you can take an axe to the tree and fix everything with three very well-planned and executed strikes.
I’m going to get crucified for this but without monetary incentive I don’t see improvements coming anytime soon. I respect the Lemmy creators but they’re running on donations and goodwill. Reddit/Digg had a team of dedicated employees working on the user experience because it was their livelihood.
This is true but aren't the two main Lemmy devs paid to work on this full-time? That's something at least, it's better than being truly unpaid to work on this.
Devs do get donations but instances are not able to host advertisements. This means that if any hobbyists hosts a popular server instance they have to pay out of pocket to keep it going.
Instances could in principle run on ad revenue but I rather doubt that will happen given that enough users are willing to donate. Injecting some code into the frontend you serve isn't rocket science.