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Comment by zouhair | Hacker News Reader

Lemmy and its instances could be it.

I've tried to register a Lemmy account but I can't. Many instances require you to write an essay about why you want to join, why you picked your username, etc, and then wait for approval. The Lemmy instances I found that don't do this appear to be overloaded.

Kbin.social seems to be more stable, even if it's alpha software. And it integrates with Lemmy.

On a related note, I tried to find an alternative to /r/nfl a few months ago, signed up for a good looking community, and am still waiting for manual admin approval apparently. It makes me wonder how many of these medium size forums are being killed by bots?

I'm a fairly heavy Reddit user and I've been musing on what I would lose if Reddit shut down. I came to the conclusion that /r/nfl and /r/knitting were far and away the leaders (and in fact otherwise it might be a net positive as I wasn't scrolling through rubbish for hours). There isn't another form of sports coverage that is as rapid and universal (I paid for The Athletic for a while and that was decent), and the knitting subreddit is constantly giving me project ideas and things to learn.

So you can join; it's just a different process you're not used to.

You can (and maybe should) host your own lemmy instance and participate in the discussions.

Good for signal, bad for scale.

I also went with kbin but I gotta say writing an essay to join someone's privately hosted service isn't a bad idea. This is what it was like when people were hosting servers on their personal phone lines.

If we want the internet to be federated, by the people, for the people yada yada, then this is what we'll have to get used to again. Big corps took it away for a while but do we really want their future?

Like Mastodon to Twitter? I like the idea, but it's not really taking off, is it?

As long as Reddit's powerusers are still hoping for a retraction it won't, but if Reddit keep at it, I can see the move happening, especially for the big (over 500K) subreddits.

Lemmy is falling over with less than 100k users. How are they magically going to handle 5x, 10x, 100x? The platform is maybe interesting, but the devs need to own up to the fact that they dont have a scaling story -- written in rust is not a valid answer. Instances are already deciding not to federate, theres no network-wide search, signup flows sound ridiculous (pick server and write an essay? yah no), how do i move servers and what happens when an instance disappears?

In the one of the first big Apollo threads, one of the devs was spamming Lemmy throughout the discussion as the next great reddit replacement: easy, federated, more performant than reddit. I guess he almost got 1 out of 3 correct.

This take seems short sided, at best. Because we don't have a perfect solution with zero friction to swap to, we shouldn't try? Most new tech goes through growing pains, including reddit back in the day.

It's fine to be critical, but it's important to foster an environment that encourages growth and competition. Have electric cars sucked for the last decade? Yes, but we should still invest and promote them as they offer a better future.

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