I want Lemmy to succeed, I want to be optimistic about it as an alternative to Reddit, but OP is correct, and we need to be honest about this very simple fact:

The Reddit we knew and loved is gone, and that’s a sad, tragic thing, and there likely won’t be a 1:1 replacement for a long time, if ever.

It’s okay to admit to ourselves that this whole situation sucks, because it absolutely does. That doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy Lemmy and other federated things like it, and it doesn’t mean that federation doesn’t have advantages over Reddit, but let’s be honest: most of us were happy at Reddit, using our favorite 3rd party app (like Apollo), and we wouldn’t be here if the admins weren’t happy to kill what we once loved.

All we can do is try to make the best of it.

You seem to be assuming that Reddit succeeded because of some central effort by the admins, but that’s really not what happened. If anything it succeeded in spite of them.

Lemmy is not supposed to replace reddit. Lemmy is it’s own thing that has already existed for years now. The benefit of Lemmy over individual forums is the interconnectivity of separate communities and being able to view content from multiple communities in one single feed. You can subscribe to communities and view all your subscribed community posts in one feed. Theres also the All sort on the main page, which essentially functions as Lemmy front page. Its also, as you said, not centrally controlled. So if one part fails the rest can continue as normal. That makes it pretty robust. But it isn’t meant to replace reddit, a massive social media platform with millions of users.

“How are communities going to grow if there isn’t at least some form of central management. Other than there being an underlying framework that connects the servers, they’re all just doing what they want.”

No one has ever said the Fediverse will be as easily accessible as Reddit, I think it’s pretty much impossible because of the lack of centralization. But in my opinion, this just doesn’t matter. The only solution would be, as you said, would be some form of central management. It is impossible to have a platform which both fixes the issues Reddit has experienced indefinitely AND has central management. Any social platform which cedes some kind of control, or even just legitimacy, to a centralized source (regardless of how the implementation starts out), will eventually turn into another Reddit. (Assuming the growth is there).

From my point of view the only downside to how Lemmy operates vs. Reddit is the slight learning curve of understanding Federation. Once you understand the concept, your concerns about the platform “fizzling out” would be moot. If you understand Federation, how is it confusing that your different sports communities are in different instances? Each community is distinct in its values, rules, and moderators, they get to choose where to exist, and the alternative would be impossible without granting control to a single meta-instance.

“but it seems like it needs a ‘flagship’ server with a group of people maintaining it to set an example. Then other servers that cover more specific areas, such as sports, can be set up and potentially work closely with that flagship group.”

I couldn’t disagree more, and this is one of my main gripes with Mastodon. Over reliance on a flagship instance only serves to shoehorn people into Lemmy without actually understanding how the platform works. Take the top three English-speaking mastodon instances:

1. mastodon.social: 878k
2. mastodon.cloud: 229k
3. mastodon.online: 164k Source

mastodon.online was created by Mastodon as a secondary official instance, next to the original mastodon.social. When the Twitter influx happened, the vast majority of users signed up for mastodon.social because it was the “flagship instance”. Not as many user’s would have chosen mastodon.social if they actually understood how Federation worked, instead of just blindly signing up for the flagship instance.

Also, about communities about the same topic possible being fragmented across multiple instances is a pro of Lemmy, as long as we foster a culture of combining communities together who agree, while retaining the option to split off to another instance.

TLDR; Understanding how Federation works > Pandering to new users with a flagship instance

To be frank, if I had Apollo for Lemmy I would even notice the difference

I think with the influx from reddit, which gathers a lot of technical users (which I think are also among the first users to migrate), I can see lemmy getting a lot more contributors in the coming days/weeks.

Among the features I’d love to see happen, some would also address your concerns about the lack of centralization :

• Community federation : this would make it possible to “fuse” communities from different instances. The admin of a community would be able to add other communities as “subcommunities” and all posts from subcommunities would show up in the “main community’s” feed. If the relationship is reciprocal, the two communities would “sync” with each other in some kind of way.
• “multicommunities” : users would be able to create and share lists of communities that span multiple instances
• Better community discovery across instances

Firstly who said lemmy is a Reddit replacement? Just because there’s overlap doesn’t mean it’s a direct competitor. Secondly Reddit succeeded because of the efforts of millions of unpaid volunteers who room the time to set up wildly disparate subreddits and communities to create reddits unique flavour and space in todays social media climate. To say that it gained its status because it’s overseen by a centralised source is wildly inaccurate and disrespectful to the regular people who made Reddit what is is/was.

The same way IRC servers and forums grew back in the 2000s. Centralized services are something that only started showing up in the early 2010s.

It’s not a direct replacement. It’s a toy for geeks that may or may not blow up in popularity. Look up the history of Linux, how it started, from what philosophy it stemmed, and what it is now.

I think most generally agree that it’s quite a mess, but there’s no reason it can’t be smoothed over time.

We especially need communities over different instances cooperating so that posts in one appear in the others. And some logical signup process so that users would know what to do.

Lemmy will replace Reddit for some people by virtue of being a place they go instead of Reddit. The folks who end up staying for the long term will probably be comfortable with a new online space that’s just plain different. I’m sure changes will occur in the next few months, but Lemmy’s gonna be what it’s gonna be.

There will surely be people who try it and get frustrated because it’s not a 1:1 alternative, ultimately going back to Reddit. Probably the majority, tbh. But that’s fine.

While there is no central authority, there is the Lemmy Community Browser which lets you find Communities across servers, like some central directory

How are communities going to grow if there isn’t at least some form of central management. Other than there being an underlying framework that connects the servers, they’re all just doing what they want.

Why would “central management” be necessary for communities to grow? Email doesn’t have any central management, and yet people are quite capable of building mailing-lists and other services on top of email. While mailing-lists may be “old-school” they still work pretty darn well; I’m on lists for my college alumni, for various interest groups, etc. that all get active discussions.

How are communities going to grow if there isn’t at least some form of central management

What do users need?

• to discover and join new communities that they might be potentially interested in. This already exists.
• to see the content being offered by those communities. This already exists, by the very nature of the federation - for example, OP is posting from feddit.uk, I’m using lemmy.ml, and I’m seeing comments from sopuli.xyz
• to contribute with communities, preferably by registering only once. Ditto as above.

And that is already happening. The tools are there! They might suck but they work at the very least as proof of concept, showing that you don’t need a central management. What we need instead is to improve those tools and create new ones as necessary.

In this sense, the Fediverse is a lot like the very internet that it resides in.

What is the purpose of the Fediverse when forums for niche interests already exist on the internet?

Imagine if those forums were able to connect to each other. That is what we got here.

But then how do you get a consistent naming scheme that lets people know it’s part of the fediverse?

You don’t need a consistent naming scheme. At least, not for that. As instances communicate with each other, it should be easy to figure out that there’s a new instance popping up about sports or anything else.

Maybe Lemmy could work as a replacement, but it seems like it needs a ‘flagship’ server with a group of people maintaining it to set an example.

There is. It’s lemmy.ml.

In fact, one issue that I’ve found is that a lot of people confuse that flagship server with the whole, and they all get on it. I’m posting from it, mind you, but I’ve been here for ~two years and in general I happen to fit well in it. [I think.]

I also wanted to post this to the main Lemmy community, but as I had to register via a different server, I’m not able to access that community from the server I’m using for some reason…

I’m glad that you figured it out, otherwise I wouldn’t see this post!

SOMETHING TO KEEP IN MIND: yes, things are still messy and rough, but they’ll probably get better over time. A better interface, more discoverability for instances and their communities, so goes on.

And IMO the main merit of this federated structure is that you aren’t putting all your eggs (content and users) in the same basket (platform and administrating group). It’s perfectly possible that one platform decides to go rogue, just like Reddit did; but then it’ll be far easier to migrate to another platform in the federation. Centralised platforms have a nasty tendency to try to wall you in, while decentralised ones cannot do it by design.

I agree with what other people said as well: For me it’s not a replacement, it’s just a (for me) new way to interact with people with the same interests. How this will happen exactly and into what it will grow, we will see and should keep an open mind.

That being said I definitely try to find equivalents for my old subscribed subreddits, while also creating the ones that I’m missing. But I already learned that there is quite a lot of new stuff to discover, which is quite exciting to be honest.

it’s not going to happen overnight. six months from now we’re not going to have 400M users like other big platforms, nor 40M, not even 4M. that’s not the timeline to expect here.

every corporate-controlled media platform starts out OK and over time becomes miserable. when that happens i leave. for reddit, that point was about a year ago for me. for you, maybe that point is still 5 years into the future. when i tried Mastodon in 2016, it didn’t work for me even as others were using it daily, but by 2022 it was better for me than whatever i’d used before.

more generally, i’m here on federated systems because i’m sick of investing too much of myself and my community into companies that literally do not care about me or the long-term health of these communities. it’s OK if Lemmy has its shortcomings, because it has the one thing that competitors cannot ever have: it’s operated (and sometimes developed) by the same communities that use it.

federation presents different UI patterns, as you point out, but it’s what makes the above possible. what allowed Reddit to ever be good? a huge part was the 3rd party apps, the community-developed moderator tools, etc. federation is important because it means these things can always exist. if Lemmy was somehow taken over by someone like spez, and they pushed for API fees, those operating the servers simply wouldn’t install the update. and if we grow this enough then as with Mastodon, we’ll have alternative server software (Pleroma, Misskey, etc) that means that something like the above wouldn’t even slow things down.

this is a place where communities that want to exist for the longterm can situate themselves. IMO that’s the #1 objective, and as long as we secure that then all the secondary objectives around user experience and so on will happen organically in time.