this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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Good plan. Keep locking down your big tech platforms, and we'll all be over here letting folks know where they can find freedom.
Careful. Lemmy is too small to draw the attention of sophisticated, persistent abuse. As a company, Reddit has struggled with revenue and we've all seen those struggles quite publicly. Lemmy instances with those same challenges would probably just fold and close up.
Federated networks give you freedom but the potential for abuse is proportional to that freedom while at the same time, federation is far more expensive taken as a whole.
Can confirm. I set up a pixelfed instance for my city with the goal of moving people from Insta to this version. After about three months, user accounts went from 1-10 signups a week to a hundred a week.
No way did that many business owners sign up. And yep, all spam.
After a while, my random weekend project in Spring became a full time job. I closed it last month.
I've thought of doing something similar, and think, while the federated spam is hard to deal with, signup spam is manageable if you somehow restrict signups to the actual community you want to support. Open signup on the web is a nightmare.
For a city, an interesting idea might be to only allow signups on a dedicated, physical wifi AP placed somewhere strategic in your city. People would literally have to go to a physical location to sign up. Piggy-backing on a library system would be another option if you could somehow get them to buy-in.
I'm sure it would persist even after an event of malicious activity. It may just turn out like email with servers needing to be added to an allowlist at worst and more moderation. I think scalability might be the limiting factor at some point though and as a result we could end up with several disconnected islands of server clusters instead of globally meshed servers.
Or... let them stay on Reddit. I like lemmy much better, and it's possibly due to the people that are not present and the lack of commercial interest.
I think if the fediverse was ever to become more mainstream, it would naturally splinter. For example, the corporate stuff would be big, and those people who value the small-instance experience we have now would probably de-federate from it. There would always be small fediverses, even if the big fediverses got REALLY big.
No harm in that. To each their own. :-) Everyone gets to decide at least.
Gate them in their own space.
Just make your own invite-only server if you're so worried about it. Digital freedom should be for everyone, not just a few antisocial nerds.
I'm not worried about anything.
Well, clearly you are, or you wouldn't suggest that most people should stay on (what I think we both agree to be) an inferiror platform that affords them fewer freedoms.
If you're worried that somehow that would bring unwanted attention or a bad crowd, you can always sequester yourself in a more niche server. That's the whole point of this federated system to begin with - giving us more control of our digital presence.
'freedom' as long as the mod agrees with you.