Some people might find the answer to be obvious (yes) but I’ve rarely found it so. In fact, this is a question I often find in the linux community (regarding linux going mainstream, not lemmy) and people are pretty split upon it.
On one hand, you may get benefits like more activity, more content, more people to interact with, a greater chance you’ll find someone to talk to on some specific subject.
On the other, you could run into an eternal September like reddit, where Lemmy would lose its culture, and have far more spam and moderation issues.
I don’t know, what do you think?
Short answer: yes, but I don’t think it happen will any time soon.
Long answer: I think the Fediverse in general is growing at a really healthy rate right now. It maintains an active community, but it isn’t large enough for it to fall apart under pressure yet. So it has time for its culture to ferment, and for devs to work out the kinks that come with federation. And hopefully: for fedi implementations to move beyond what the old platforms offered.
Whenever it attracts a larger audience, the culture of fedi will be probably be immovable the same way the early internet’s was (if not more so, due to its decentralized nature actively flying in the face of the ad business and walled gardens which are largely the culprit for the situation we find ourselves in).
I.e., fedi could be a return to normal for the internet, which reminds people what made it cool to begin with. For that reason, fedi’s honeymoon phase would probably last much longer if that happened.
That being said: I kinda want to see more PeerTubers. That’s the only popular implementation I’ve seen that doesn’t have a blossoming community yet.
Sorry if I too broadly expanded the scope of your question lol :p
Yeah, PeerTube is rather lacking there, but it’s also due to the “limitations” in practicality. Even more mainstream/popular platforms (Odysee, DTube, BitChute, etc) struggle to tackle the massive monopoly that YouTube has, but at least they offer a very easy experience compared to PeerTube. You either have to run an instance yourself (which isn’t neither trivial nor cheap) or register an account on an instance with a pretty limiting quota. Instances with unlimited quotas are few and none of them have a properly good watching experience.
It’s a shame, I’d love to see PT flourish, but the reality is that video hosting/streaming is tricky and expensive which severely limits the growth of platforms like it.
For peertube, there is also the lack of any easy way for creators to make money, due to the lack of built in ads, or equivalent of youtube premium. Money is incentive.
Also true. The best it has is a little customizable sponsor/donate button, which is neat but far from a good solution.