Die4Ever
The rate of growth does matter yea. If an instance gets worried, they can lock signups. Slow growth means the software has time to improve as they notice issues.
Lemmy had many issues scaling before, except Lemmy had huge surges with the Reddit API blackouts.
If people start recommending PieFed now, it's on their own terms instead of a massive wave. They can backoff if they get too many users.
I think it's unlikely that they would attract such a large number of users with 1 post on r/RedditAlternatives or something. Lemmy gets spammed everywhere and we usually don't even gain 1000 users a day overall across all instances.
There's already been some comments about PieFed and they didn't result in huge surges.
We have data on what it costs to run a sizeable instance of Lemmy and it’s not a lot. How does Piefed compare? Anyone starting an instance who envisions it growing large has to contend with this question.
I don't think this is a major concern yet. The largest PieFed instance has 308 active users, 2nd place has 34. They've got room to grow.
https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list
People can start posting about PieFed on Reddit and see how the Reddit users react.
It's definitely a concern. People ask these questions about Lemmy, but no one asks how the horizontal scaling of Twitter functions and then complains that your explanation is too technical.
For like 99% of Reddit accounts, that's all they do anyways lol
Yeah, I created this post so we could figure out how to handle these questions/concerns, because there's a lot here
I think the confusion arises when people try to optimize maximum usage of "Lemmy" instead of just hearing someone say "hey join midwest.social it's fun, I'll see you there", and then they say "ok" and signup and use it as-is, like the old forum days. Don't even need to use the word "Lemmy".
They probably weren't optimally using Reddit to its fullest potential, yet they won't even dip their toe into Lemmy until they have a perfectly optimal gameplan of maximizing their usage of Lemmy better than anyone ever has before. Just jump in! You don't have to be perfect, just click around and upvote and leave comments.
pretty sure on Android an app can read your IMEI if they ask for the Phone Calls permission and you approve it
I don't know if the Reddit app does this, I never used their official app
like I said, hashtags are fun, but the fact that even if you follow the hashtag it only shows posts that were already federated into your instance confuses people
communities/groups will federate the posts for you if you follow, but following a hashtag does not give any federation
Even if you could follow hashtags on Lemmy, you would also need to be able to follow users for anything to show up (so that's 2 big new features required). And since it requires following users, that would also mean a culture shift would be required, you'd need to convince your instance-mates to use their Lemmy accounts to follow people, but people are mostly here to follow communities not people.
I'm not against the features being added, I just don't think they're going to be as impactful to the Lemmy platform as expected.
I don't think it's always easy to pinpoint UX issues and user friction. Sometimes these things just don't stick with mainstream users. I say it's worth a try to see which platform the average Reddit user will prefer.
But if you're gonna use from a phone, Lemmy's selection of mobile apps is unbeatable.