I don’t think Reddit will die and agree that the majority will return. I will browse my favored communities in both and favor participating here. That said, the Lemmy universe has been in rapid expansion for 2 weeks. It’s premature to judge it for the fragmentation of communities at this stage. I strongly suspect the ergonomics of finding and subscribing to a community you want will improv over the next six months.

You can rss instances, but I don’t think that is possible across all instances.

There certainly seem to be topics I track where forum activity outpaces Reddit. Haven’t explored Discord for the purpose. I would like to see communities emerge or move to something on the activitypub - lemmy devs made a forum frontend (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB). The potential seems to be there to provide a forum interface/experience that federates.

I like your ranking. I sit in a couple of xmpp muc for xmpp client projects, but there are virtually no public non-xmpp related xmpp rooms. But doesn’t really cost anything to start one I suppose.

Small servers also tend to disappear, though. As far as I know, federated content simply goes away when the server does.

I think that would be a great addition.

Internet moderation seems like a fun combination between anonymity, group dynamics, and a reflexive attitude to distrust authority. I had my first post deleted on Reddit in my ~12 years just recently, and my first reaction was to get hot under the collar and spout off to the moderator. I held off sending for a few minutes, softened my language, and sent a respectful message. No group and I like to think I am reasonably self-aware.

I don’t know what the answer is. The friction will always be there, and I think that 1x1, it’s reasonably easy to find a place of understanding and forgiveness with people and moderators acting in good faith. But groups seem to create a toxicity bomb and fly off the rails - one of those things you can’t really control for - you can only do your best.

I’m conflicted about the slur filter episode. Sure, a clever way to moderate a brand of toxic community participants. If I’m not mistaken, moderation tools were far from mature at that stage and lemmy.ml was an active community dealing with community issues. I wasn’t involved in the community outside of keeping an eye on the project development and perhaps the community needed a heavy handed solution - not for me to say. But the implementation left some questions and from my memory, dev response to pushback was not positive. I think it took over a year, maybe two, to remove.

That was the first exposure many, many people had to the Lemmy project - it probably resulted in a lasting erosion of trust in the software among people who had/have no interest in using the blocked slurs, and formed an impression that will continue to echo for many years despite the filter being removed. The impact goes far beyond people who would use or defend the use of the excluded language.

leetnewb, new as of today 6/1/23. Long-time follower of the open source Lemmy project. Redditor of ~13 years and forum person for many year prior. Have had the hope that communities would eventually migrate to platforms such as this. Interests are pretty mundane: gardening, tennis, some tech and hobby programming. Usually more interested in reading than commenting.