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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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The bigger a social platform gets, the more synergy it spawns. That's what adds utility to a social platform.
I don't think anyone here wants it to be 'the next big thing', but I do think a lot of people (myself included) want to see it become 'one of the next big things'. As in...we want it to become big enough to be a viable alternative to the proprietary walled-garden corporate establishments that have become the current standard.
More choice = better, and for as long as this platform remains small and elitist (referring back to your 3rd sentence), it will never truly be a viable choice. There's still a lot of engagement I'm required to use Reddit for - and I hate that - and the only reason for it is we just don't have the community size needed (yes, it's getting closer every day) to be that viable alternative.
You are young it sounds like. 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.
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.
So I hope Lemmy stays small. Bigger than now, sure, but not big enough to attract corporations.
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.
@BraveSirZaphod
@ekZepp @CaptainAniki @krayj @mrmanager
(Messaging from mastodon server) I think so too. Your posts may not follow, but the freedom to move from one server to another, and the freedom to follow posts and info from other servers means if threads wants me to join they'd need make the experience better than anywhere else, or I can leave and still follow anybody I was following before.
Okay see, this itself shows exactly what I'm saying. I'm on Kbin, you're on Mastodon, and we're talking on a Lemmy instance. This is genuinely stupid cool.