I don’t remember what caused the Voat’s origin, except it involved Reddit HQ. And then it went under in 2020.
What’s different about this time and with Lemmy to make it a feasible alternative to Reddit? Is it random chance?
I don’t remember what caused the Voat’s origin, except it involved Reddit HQ. And then it went under in 2020.
What’s different about this time and with Lemmy to make it a feasible alternative to Reddit? Is it random chance?
The one problem with this is that most of the content does seem to be pretty centered on only a couple instances (lemmy.world mostly, with some also scattered in beehaw.org, Lemmy.ml, and sh.itjust.works). If one of those goes down, especially lemmy.world, it will cripple this place pretty bad. Maybe if we one day get a way to backup or export user profiles and communities to other instances, but until then, I think this place has a centralization problem brewing as well.
The thing is, the concern people have with lemmy.world is the same concern we used to have with lemmy.ml. The question of how big an instance ought to be is still unanswered. Maybe lemmy.world is below that level and people will naturally shy away from it once it gets there. On top of that, limited resources on the side of instance owners will drive decentralization. For example, Lemmy.ml shut its doors to new users once it became overloaded. Similar things could happen in the future.
Even if a major instance did go down, we’d just lose the content. The people, for the most part, would migrate to whatever new instances sprung up to replace it.
It’s already gone down. Beehaw has almost most other large instances defederated because of Beehaw’s admins having beef.