I just saw this post over on r/modcoord which is basically a massive list of subreddits participating in the blackout protest. If I’m being honest I haven’t seen this much anger and coordinated frustration since the era right before the digg exodus.
Assuming more and more subreddits join in, it’s going to send a pretty massive message to the users who interact with a blacked out subreddit. Then I’m trying to imagine what happens if after a massive coordinated blackout, Reddit continue on the current trajectory. Is Lemmy even prepared to handle the amount of potential incoming traffic that API closure could lead to? It’s absolutely bonkers to me that the Reddit team might just stay the course…
Like I said, #3 and #5 aren’t a problem if you know about federation. But without understanding the concept of federation you might have some misunderstandings about Lemmy. For example, you might think that when you sign up for an instance you can only see communities on that instance. So the choice of instance becomes very important. Alternatively, you might think that all instances are automatically connected. So you might not know that instance admins can block other instances (like how beehaw blocks lemmygrad). Then, because you want nothing to do with lemmygrad, you might decide not to be a part of Lemmy.
By point #6, I just meant to say that Lemmy is a much smaller community than redditors are used to.
Also, as an addendum, not all of these are problems for me. Clearly, I’m using Lemmy so I made it past these hurdles lol. But, yeah, some people are going to see that you have to write an essay and just nope outta here. Some of those people aren’t toxic, they’re just lazy. And, in many ways, Lemmy forces you to go that extra mile which is going to hurt its user growth.
Yes and thats true aswell, some instances aren’t connected to one another so that might be an issue for someone just picking a random instance. The solution is quite simple though, make it clear in the join-lemmy page the federation status, or have a link to all the banned instances the admins have put in place. Overall I’m still very hopeful and worried about the coming days, this community has already grown but its not over yet.