It appears to me that the current state of Lemmy is similar to other platforms when they were smaller and more insular, and that insularity is somewhat protecting it.
I browse Lemmy, and it feels a bit like other platforms did back in 2009, before they became overwhelmed and enshitified.
If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar “landed gentry” moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.
If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own “eternal September”, what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?
I agree with everything you said.
I’m thinking/hoping that this new wave of Europeans going to European instances will help spread out the centralization of .world and .ml, now and it’ll hold into the future, but we’ll see.
Hearing that several people have started country specific instances also gives me hope in this. With country/geographicly specific, topic specific, and just general instances, I think/hope it will lead to a more balanced user base.
Not just Europeans. I was talking to my roommate about how I deleted my Reddit accounts and fully committed to switching over to Lemmy, and his main concern was which instances were hosted in America so he could avoid them.
That’s awesome to hear.
Hopefully, the newest reddit influx will be able to settle in without any/too many issues.
I just made another comment that elaborated my stance more too.
I didn’t realize there was a trend of European users. I haven’t really thought about it, but Lemmy could use some sort of translation layer to facilitate multi-but-not-bilingual community. There’s a lot of German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese speakers I’d probably love interacting with and would never know! For now I rely on bilingual non-English natives or the little French I remember and just lurk.
Lemmy has language tags. Clients could offer integration with translation tools.
I don’t know how big the “wave” is but !buyeuropean@feddit.uk has jumped to the 11th(?) most popular/active community in the last week or so. The activity level reminds me of more niche subreddits, where you’d see a couple posts every hour through the day. Quite an increase over what it was at.
I also recall seeing a chart of a German (?) instance that had linear growth and over the past week it went exponential. I doubt the exponential growth will last more than a couple weeks before going back to linear, but still cool to see.
Edit: Added link to the community.