Please indulge a few shower thoughts I had:
-
I wouldn’t worry about Lemmy having as many users as reddit in the short term. Success is not just a measure of userbase. A system just needs a critical mass, a minimum number of users, to be self-perpetuating. For a reddit post that has 10k comments, most normal people only read a few dozen comments anyways. You could have half the comments on that post, and frankly the quality might go up, not down. (That said, there are many communities below that minimum critical mass at the moment.)
-
Lemmy is now a real alternative. When reddit imploded Lemmy wasn’t fully set up to take advantage of the exodus, so a lot of users came over to the fediverse and gave up right away. There were no phone apps, the user interface was rudimentary, and communities weren’t yet alive. Next time reddit screws up in a high profile way, and they will screw up, the fediverse will be ready.
-
Lemmy has way more potential than reddit. Reddit’s leadership has always been incompetent and slow at fixing problems. The fediverse has been very responsive to user feedback in comparison.
Do your part and try a smaller instance. http://lemmy.today has not been down even once. I’m a heavy user there.
But if you don’t like that one, pick any other smaller instance and you won’t have this problem.
Yeah, I joined lemmy.today so I could have a place to go when my OG lemmy.world is down. I like lemmy.world, but it’s constantly down (like right now). I suppose there’s no reason I shouldn’t just use this one as my primary, though I do like the other skins that lemmy.world added (old.lemmy.world and a.lemmy.world) when I’m on desktop.
I haven’t looked into it but couldn’t those skins be installed on other instances also? Hopefully open source thingies.
Yeah, but they have to be installed by the server admins. lemmy.world added them. I’m not aware of any other instances that have them, but I’d love for them to be standard. The a.lemmy.world is my favorite lemmy experience so far (though I can’t…ummm…use it right now).
Admin of Lemmy.today added all of the them yesterday. I like how fast old is actually, but I’m on mobile app almost always anyway.