As toxic as Reddit is, it is a huge wealth of information if you can search and parse it. It also encourages small niche topics that wouldn't get any attention without a huge audience to draw from. If Reddit is no longer going to feed that role, I hope SOMEPLACE becomes that kind of place in the future. If it's the Fediverse nothing stops instances from creating smaller communities within it. Could be best of both worlds. Or it could ruin it. I guess I don't know.

I think the Fediverse model has a really strong advantage compared to past platforms. Corporations are always going to have a profit motive, and that will necessarily eventually make the user experience worse. With how easy it is to move things around in the Fediverse, there's a meaningfully lower risk of that since the lock-in factor is reduced. I'm sure we will see monetized corporate instances (see, Threads), but if that experience eventually gets intolerable, it'd be relatively easy for users to jump ship without drastically changing the experience.

It's not perfect, but we're in a better position I think.

You are young it sounds like.

No. But it's humorous to me that you immediately go there for anyone who disagrees with your take. I'm >5 decades.

If Lemmy becomes that size, all good things about it goes away, and we get ads and corporations moving in to profit from it. That turns the entire thing into the same shit as everything else.

Sounds like massive speculation. Especially for an open platform system that anyone can self-host. If you don't like ads or paying for service, light up your own instance and self host. That is, by definition, why lemmy works the way lemmy works. I hate to accuse you of making shit up, but you are making shit up.

It happens over and over and over again in tech. It’s a pattern that all older people knows about because we have lived it.

I've probably lived through more of this than you have. I've made my career in the tech industry and have been at it since 1991. Again, you keep trying to imply that you somehow have more experience or more time in industry just because I disagree with you. That's awfully pretentious.

So I hope Lemmy stays small. Bigger than now, sure, but not big enough to attract corporations.

That's elitist. And it's self-defeating. Sounds like you'd be happy just joining a few email list servers...because you aren't going to get any more value than that out of the self-inflicted handicap of keeping community sizes tiny.

You seem to have equated what you think is superior age and experience with superior wisdom. You're wrong on multiple counts and committing numerous logical fallacies while you're at it. Larger platforms are more successful because they have the community sizes needed to make even niche topics relatively engaging. There's a critical mass of users needed to make that happen. Lemmy is a few orders of magnitude too small for that yet, but that's what it will take to be a viable alternative. I'm not suggesting that Lemmy should get so big that it causes places like Reddit to disappear...just that it gets big enough to be a viable alternative. If it's not big enough to be a viable alternative, then what's the point? To just be an elitist circle jerk for for a few people discussing a few popular topics somewhere outside the mainstream so they can think they are some kind of techno-hipsters? What a waste.