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?
Federation.
There’s a reason why [email protected] and [email protected] are not federated with eachother, yet lots of users are subscribed to both.
For lemmy, it’s again a federation thing. You just don’t see many multiple defederated examples due to the small user count.
It’s not the most optimal solution, but it’s still miles better than dealing with single instance or single community issues.
Yeah but what do you do when one instance becomes so big that it dwarfs the other instances, and inevitably pushes them out with its sheer amount of content?
On non-federated platforms, the quantity of content contributes to the cost a user experiences when trying to switch to a different platform.
On federated platforms there is zero cost to switching, and even more, it is not zero sum. I can follow both of I think both have value.
Non-federated platforms don’t allow such a choice, and there is this hidden cost of inertia built into it that the federation bypasses.
If it starts being evil, the same thing that happened to Digg and is hopefully happening to Reddit should happen, but way faster because it’s a one or two-click process.
(Unless you need to switch your home instance, which AT protocol can accommodate but unfortunately not ActivityPub or Lemmy specifically as of yet)