jadero

I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, but I don’t think Lemmy has any hope of survival as a truly global platform.

I’ve been through this a few times: Usenet, Digg, Reddit. They started off small and stayed mostly civil even though there is a wide range of opinion. Then they start growing rapidly and people see an opportunity to “get their message out”, whether that’s spam, personal aggrandizement, a political message, or whatever: exploitation vs participation. After a while it becomes just too much for some people, so they find somewhere else to congregate.

As they leave, that platform becomes ever more useless, leading to more migration. The platform eventually becomes useless even to the exploiters, so they figure out where everyone went and follow them.

And the cycle continues. I think that the cycle can only accelerate as “exploiters” become more proactive in following “participants” to new homes. That implies an eventual breakdown of the whole concept of global discussion communities. Are we seeing that already on Lemmy? I don’t know, but I’m registered on 4 different instances, each with their own primary focus, and there has already been a bit of federation/defederation drama on every one them.

I think the only way to break the cycle is to figure out a way to eliminate exploitation. That may well be impossible, at least on any platform that has global reach, centralized or not. As far as I can tell, those who would exploit a system have always found ways to do so.