What could Lemmy.ml do to avoid becoming the next Reddit after a decade?

As users, reject changes that would make Lemmy too centralized, or profit-driven or lose a sense of community.

As app developers make the code resistant to hostile takeover, prioritize transparency, interoperability, as the AGPL has already helped facilitate, and customizability, to allow servers to tailor a community experience.

As server owners/managers foster and promote healthy engagement and discourse within communities, without power tripping unnecessarily. By fragmenting across different servers people can more easily spin up and migrate to servers where they feel more at home and heard.

Email and websites are great federated success stories. Distributing the stakeholdership across companies in an interoperation keeps the peace, even in the face of crony capitalism. Just like each company has their own email server and website, they could and should operate their own federated instance of social media, be it Lemmy, or Mastodon, or Matrix... Or whatever becomes entrenched.

People forget that before SMTP email, there existed proprietary email! Yes, it's true. In fact it took more than 10 years for a federated email format to replace entrenched proprietary IBM and Xerox mail products.

In the end, even corporate clients prefer solutions they can have a controlling interest in, because they want some control of their kingdom, and they usually have the means to get it. You don't need extreme ancap or communistic views to get there, but you need a lot of patience. Decades of patience. It takes a long time for expensive lessons to settle in.

Except that the email game is now very centralized. Companies run their emails through MS or Google. Both of which have created barriers for independent email servers by marking them as spam more often than not. Email is NOT an example of a successful decentralized service.
- I am very aware of the kind of centralization you describe. It is inevitable. And will happen to Lemmy, and Mastodon, and Matrix if/when they become large enough. It'd go so far as to say we are already there with the World Wide Web. What you describe is simply the Pareto Principle in action and it's a law of natural order.
  
  For me the measure of success of a decentralised service is a bit more modest: I need not that the market shares be evenly distributed among parties (that is a discussion of economics I frankly am not all that interested in debating).
  
  But everything else still applies today: I can spin up a mail server today for pennies and start handing out my email to Average Joe, and (most of the time) they won't roll their eyes and say "uh how do I use this?". This is the ultimate, practical test of success of a decentralised communication service. For me it need not be fancy, it need simply to be used.
  
  I am aware that in some developing countries this is not entirely true. I also think that these communities haven't had the time it takes to learn the very expensive lessons of centralization, as I made in my original point.
  
  I also think some backsliding is possible, and probably happening with the marketshare of email providers today. Then there will be come some outtage, companies will lose profits and we'll all collectively relearn that maybe putting all our eggs in one basket isn't such a great thing.
  
  If there is two things you can count on in people, it's greed and forgetting history.
uucp existed before SMTP and is still working for email...

dont try to be a "outrage" generation machine
dont try to capitalize $$$$
open discussion != arguing

God, your third part is so true. The amount of times I've seen threads locked or comments removed because "you're not playing nice."

Like come on. Most of the time it's someone having a debate.
- After a while though it devolves into drivel. Folks "debating" just becomes a volley of insults. Mods probably have notifications enabled on threads, so if I thread blows up....well you can see my point.

The replies already here have touched on the most important factors and why they matter (it's open source under AGPL and it's decentralised, the core devs are ideologically anti-capitalist so they won't go public or sell out to advertisers, the users are the primary stakeholders)

But they haven't mentioned an issue with this question: we are a community. What could WE do to about becoming the next Reddit after a decade?

Most important? Get involved. Acknowledge that volunteering and donations are powerful! The best thing you can do is to help the devs, whether it be coding, translation, documentation, web design, or the many other things that help this place thrive. I see all these posts saying "Lemmy should make onboarding easier!" as if approximately two people are there to do all the work.

I'd say it's a mindset of coming from sites where you don't have the power and the only path for things to happen is complaining to the higher-ups. Being open source and community-driven are things new users need to understand. We may well be their first experience on a non-for-profit social media platform, where we don't have a designated full-time tech-support team, or a professional dev team of dozens.

Thank you, very well said. For me, although I am a programmer, I'm not sure how much I can contribute (I'm just learning Rust now), but I joined the Patreon supporters. I think this is something everyone can consider who'd like to contribute to Lemmy in a meaningful way.
- I haven't checked Lemmy, but I've heard some projects intentionally tag a few easy low-priority features that are recommended for beginners to try and tackle. I've made some really minor CSS theming changes and basic frontend layout edits, the kind of thing which is pretty safe and doesn't require expertise. Small things, but with a noticeable effect (especially when we had most of the Lemmy sites all using the same theme, so making slightly custom themes went a long way towards making it clear they are related but distinct)
Thank you so much for writing this. Its been a really hectic week for @[email protected] and I... hundreds of notifications, private messages, people asking us for tech support, as well as tons of requests for fixes and changes.

We can't and shouldn't be doing this alone, we need all the support we can get, and people's patience. I'm super thankful to all the people that have helped others in setting up instances.

I'm also confident that we will get over the hurdles, and become a threat to the US surveillance machine. The years of work many people have put in making this software will come to fruition, and they won't be able to ignore us.
You're completely right. Community involvement works wonders.

I don't think it's possible due to it being decentralized. If anything goes wrong start your own instance. That's what I think a lot of the new users don't realize. This isn't a reddit clone, it's something with much greater potential

I think one of the big hurdles is the user accounts. If the instance hosting my user account goes down I'll need to make a new one. That's fine once or twice but we should watch out that this does not become a frequent occurence. Otherwise people might get dissilusioned - Nobody wants to create a new account every few months. And some people get quite connected to their accounts, too.
- Mastodon avoids this issue by allowing migration of user accounts from instance to instance, is this / can this be implemented into Lemmy?
- neither reddit nor lemmy are social media platforms in the "conventional" sense. you have no value of identity (save for upvotes, which are meaningless) and it is probably proper etiquette to create new accounts every few months/year to ensure the crawlers can't identify your user to a shadow profile anyway. losing your user account doesn't mean anything because these platforms don't really support an influencer type ecosystem anyway (oh sure, reddit now allows you to follow users and want you to sign up with email etc to lock you in, but don't get baited) and the content you post should mainly be links, pictures or discussion topics that will fade away from value within an average of 24 hours.

We, the users should make sure to stay on lemmy servers that use the open-source lemmy code. If other servers open up, who have closed source code, we should consider blocking them, at a minimum not support them by using their communities.

That will make sure that lemmy servers will keep using the open source code and thus will allow other people to spin up new servers.

I'm no expert, but my understanding of the AGPL license of Lemmy code is that any modification is legally required to display the modification's source code prominently online. So if I'm not mistaken then they can't close source the code, so long as the devs are willing to threaten legal action (like Mastodon vs. Truth Social)
- Okay so they would have to write their own website that supports ActivityPub and is compatible to lemmy :)
I mostly agree, I don’t think I would block closed source servers as long as they weren’t promoting bigotry, and as long as the federation still worked properly. I don’t fault users of a service for the sins of their parent company. It’s the same reason why I probably won’t block the Instagram ActivityPub initially - need to see how it shakes out.
- That's totally fine, but I remember when google users could communicate with XMPP. They captured all the users with better UI, etc, then closed it off.
- I have mixed feelings over faulting users for the sins of the service provider. I know that not everyone can care about everything, politics gets complex very quickly, but users are exactly what gives the service power. So I do fault them for continuing to use it. If a reasonable alternative exists, I think it's important to stop supporting a dangerous company and to help start alternatives. Otherwise, inertia will just prevent any good changes.

Lemmy uses a open source license called the AGPL, which is a type of reciprocal license (called copyleft), which basically means you can't close the source without everyone who contribute agreeing to do it or rewriting their contribution (and i don't think it ever happened, i think it can be extremely difficult ).

setting up a non profit that that has a decentralized power structure and is legally obligated to do public good might also provide another protection (but a copyleft license is probably enough).

It seems like the main driving factor in Reddit’s downfall is simple: money. They are making decisions that we the users hate because they think it’ll make them look more attractive to investors when they go public later this year.

Personally, I think Lemmy just has to avoid corporate greed, bending the knee to advertisers, and not allowing extremists on its platform (or at least forcing them to their own instance that can be de-federated). The first two shouldn’t be an issue for Lemmy as long as it is able to stay funded by users. The third seems like a constant struggle for every platform nowadays.

This is how it always goes. Hate saying always, but I can't think of one instance where a public company made a move to improve something for their customers out of the goodness of their heart. It's always about the money.
- The whole situation doesn’t really make sense to me anyways. It’s not like Reddit isn’t currently pulling in a bunch of revenue. They also have been a private company since what, 2005? I know the answer for going public is “more money” but I’m like you I can’t think of an instance where a public company has done something for the good of its users.
  
  It really does seem like open source user owned systems are the way of the future. We’ve been burned too many times by corporations at this point. Here’s hoping we don’t have to rely on ads and sponsors to keep the fediverse running.

@IverCoder I think Lemmy is different because what could you use the Reddit source code for? There wasn't any federation so it makes perfectly sense that a website which only runs at one company will close source their code to avoid competition. With federation it's different because the instances talk together so there is a difference between the protocol and the large instance. It's like making email closed source. Doesn't really make sense for such a protocol.

@IverCoder And another thing is lemmy.ml would lose users from other platforms such as Mastodon etc. Myself included because I'm using Friendica, not Lemmy. Though I do often interact with Lemmy users and make posts on Lemmy instances.
- It's an interesting point, because I wouldn't see this as Lemmy losing users just because you're on Friendica. We are interacting just fine, and neither site is trying to hoard users to make money from, so I say neither loses!
- This is interesting. I'm new to the fediverse, and I thought that, for example, only lemmy instances could allow users to interact with each other.
  
  Do friendica and lemmy share the same protocol, just implemented differently, or do they have some sort of gatewaway to allow interaction between each other?

Carefully curate and vet both devs and mods. Fight hard to ensure that the character of development and moderation does not depend on just one or two people, but of active internal practices that recruit, support, and otherwise churn out cool people that support the mission and guard it from people who don't get it or are aggressively hostile towards it. Shoot for 2X of what you need (devs, mods) and start getting worried if it dips below that.

Ensure that funding models for hosting and development work are limited but viable. Make a rejection of certain funding models a hard requirement of being a dev or mod. Everyone thinks they can resist corporate pressure, but if you, for example, make a site ad-dependent, you will eventually come to the conclusion that you need to make editorial changes to avoid losing advertisers, and have a very good chance of falling into false dichotomous thinking: either the site dies or we ban X group that makes our site less attractive for advertisers. Trying to find ways to profit off of Reddit is why the APIs are basically planned for demolition right now. This also has a dev implication: optimize for lightweight resource use. Obviously devs try to do this in general, but you'd want to make it a real priority, as cheaper server (and dev) costs are a better way to make the project viable than finding more income.

Keep to your political commitments and ban/exclude those who stand for their antithesis. Those people already have corporations on their side and there's no point to putting in all of this effort to just end up being a Reddit clone full of the incurious and bigoted. I'm sure you already know this, but lax moderation against, e.g., right wingers tends to create spaces where they want to be and nobody else does.