I’ve been using Lemmy for the last couple days and have quite liked it. I want to hear the community’s thoughts on some of the other reddit “competitors”.
The only other (obviously non-federated) one I’m familiar with is tildes.net, mostly just because I have had an account on it for the last few years.
In my view, federation is everything. Without federation, it is just another social media site that (even if it starts off as open source) will face increasing pressures to become more commercialised and end up where Reddit is now. Remember Reddit was open source at one point!
It might be possible to commercialise the fediverse, but the absolute worst case is that we have to create some new instances, forking the code base if need be and create a new network.
Social media that works for users and monetisation of social media are completely incompatible (at least in the long run). Federation is the best way we have of stopping monetisation/commercialisation taking over. So if it’s not federated, I’m not interested.