In that case, yodspeed my dude

Droop snoot? Yeah, the snoot went droop.

*sigh* Do I have to go abandon Fedora now too? I really hope they don't pull a CentOS on that one

Yeah I originally created an account at beehaw.org before coming over to lemmy.world. The main reason I moved was because I wasn't a fan of the fact I couldn't freely create new communities over there (and I don't think you can create communities on other instances?), but also just ~vibes~.

To be fair, this is actually kinda great to see - it's one of the strengths of this federated system. The folks that run these instances are being pretty generous already to just let us talk and share whatever the heck we want, and it's perfectly reasonable for a host to want to be selective about who they let use their resources.

A lot of sudreddits are vowing to go dark indefinitely in response to this it looks like. Many were already, but the official position on /r/ModCoord is an indefinite blackout for all but critically important subs.

Yeah, I also made a Mastodon account during that big Twitter exodus a few months back, and admittedly haven't used it that much either for the same reasons. I just never really have that many unprompted/creative things to say, which is kinda the primary use case for the Twitter/Mastodon genre of social media.

Reddit/Lemmy on the other hand is way more about the discussion, which is both way more interesting to consume as media and also way easier for me to get involved in.

A year ago, I viewed the Fediverse as an unnecessary, complicated framework created by a handful of well-intentioned individuals as a solution to a problem that wasn't really there.

Today, I view it as a necessity.

This past year has been a hard lesson for me to stop placing trust in massive, centralized web services like Twitter and Reddit and to start federating more of my online activity. There's going to be growing pains, but Lemmy has been pretty good so far and it's definitely going to be worth it in the end.

I've honestly been pleasantly surprised so far.

Like, the communities over here are clearly tiny compared to the ones we've been used to over on Reddit, but they're also large enough that they have enough interesting content to keep you browsing. In some ways, the environment here feels a bit more welcoming right now than a lot of Reddit due to there being a lot of pretty high-quality content from folks that clearly want this place to succeed.

That said, there's still some growing pains. Some of the instances are pretty sluggish, there are bugs that need to be worked out (this isn't to knock on the devs - I'm thankful this works at all!), and the number of niche communities is still vanishingly small.

Also /r/justrolledintotheshop

/r/fountainpens was one of the best! That said, I've been impressed with how active [email protected] has been so far

I think you are definitely right that there will wind up being some degree of centralization, even in the Fediverse, but I think the issue will be far less severe than the one we find ourselves in right now.

The fact of the matter is that it takes some degree of skill and willingness to devote time and resources to complete strangers in order to host a Lemmy instance, which will probably result in there only being a handful of "big" instances where the vast majority of communities are located. These instances could theoretically be bought, sold, and neglected, and potentially face the same conclusion as Reddit, bringing down whatever communities they happen to host.

However, the difference here is that some communities would be unaffected in that scenario. Suppose that Instance A were to go off the rails, taking with it for example the Lemmy equivalents of /r/gifs, /r/politics, and /r/gaming. This would suck, but at the same time other instances would be unaffected, meaning the Lemmy equivalents of like /r/news, /r/dankmemes, and /r/space could continue on. Furthermore, if the mods of those Instance A communities were aware of the possibility of the impending death of Instance A, they could form a migration plan ahead of time to another instance, and communicate this to the users ahead of time.

Compare that to where we are now, where literally every subreddit is shut down and needing to find an alternative place to land with practically no warning. I'd much prefer the federated scenario.

Between this and Twitter, I feel like "enshittification" is really the word of the past year. It's incredible to watch these massive social networks completely turn on their users in the name of profit.