I really like it, but I’m concerned for rough times ahead.

Running instances is hard, thankless but necessary work. A for-profit company like Reddit can afford to pay engineers to do it. A lot of open-source / free software things survive because people are generous and donate their time, creativity, expertise and often even money to keeping them running. But when it’s a hobby not a job, it gets to a point where people often have to think of their own sanity and step away.

The fediverse design seems well suited to handle that without major disruption, but there will definitely be some disruption.

I’m also hoping that people are tolerant of design quirks. Design by committee is often seen as one of the worst ways to do things, and FOSS is nothing but committees. Reddit’s design obviously influenced Lemmy (as Slashdot influenced Reddit, and so-on). But, while I wasn’t a fan of the new Reddit design, at least it was a unified view. I’m incredibly impressed at how smooth Lemmy has been so far, but again, I expect it’s just a matter of time before there are some controversial choices in what new features to add, how to expose them, what defaults to choose, and so on. I hope people are tolerant of the churn that that might cause.

Basically, I just really hope that whatever controversies and rough periods are ahead, that the communities I care about choose to weather the storm and stick around. If we can survive that, social media that isn’t owned by any company, and that isn’t part of the “surveillance capitalism” world is very promising.