The trouble I see on the horizon is that while decentralized, in a way, Lemmy relies on a small number of people with the resources，inclination and generosity to setup instances on servers and they look a bit like weak points to me.

To fill the need created by things like Twitter and Reddit, there’s a kind of a critical mass of users required. Yes they can and hopefully will be distributed across instances but there is absolutely bound to be concentration on a relative few and there sort of has to be for things to really start to develop because even if you can subscribe to communities from any federated instances from your home instance the fact is that any one popular community on an instance is still hosted on an instance so there’s still that consolidation and concentration of users and it’s likely self reinforcing just as were subreddits where you wouldn’t be inclined to post something in a small sub focussing on the same topic as another much more popular sub in hopes more people would be able to interact with it your post.

This concentration feels like vulnerability where costs get too high or life changes for the instance administrator or even, people just dying, morbid as that sounds. That’s only the practical concerns. Many have said they don’t see them as a problem because the costs for quite large scale operations (albeit orders of magnitude smaller than Reddit) have been surprisingly low and again distributed amongst multiple instances. However there’s another more sinister worry. A lumpy and consolidated fediverse presents a smaller target list for would be enshittifiers looking to make a buck and we’re already seeing this happen with meta’s secretive meetings with select instance administrators. The hobbyist nature of the motivation for running and instance would seem to only further the risk since, with no previous plan to make a profit nor blueprint to do so, any unexpected offers to suddenly make an income stream from the hobby would be very tempting, understandably so. This type of motivation for hosting probably makes it cheaper to buy an admin too since they’re not a company and had no expectations of profit going in anyway so no legal department, no dreams of a big IPO one day just someone suddenly seeing unexpected $$.

If you persuade only the most popular instances hosting the most popular communities to do something most users would hate, running ads, manipulating top posts, adopting particular moderation policies for corporate ends or just shutting down and going away then you can disrupt most of the fediverse with only a few shots fired. The resilience of the federated model is that users can pack up and leave to go elsewhere but it’s harder when there are less elsewheres with the same critical mass and while someone can immediately make one, the list of people who can is again a limited few as before and they’re vulnerable in the same way. On top of that maintaining a critical mass is hard if there’s constant disruptions, people would get sick of hopping from instance to instance on principal because of fuckery. In the case digg and now Reddit there was a good 10 or so years in between.

The federated model is strong in that it would be basically impossible to kill it off, but keeping it small on the other hand, might not be such a challenge. Those that were here before the redditpocalypse probably might actually prefer it that way, but for the Reddit refugees like myself there might be turbulent times ahead because it seems like the wolves are already at the door.