Isn’t that API change just the end of the month? It’s nowhere near enough time to sort out all the problems that Lemmy currently has impacting its long term sustainability.

Things like:

• Robust mobile apps. The ones we have are great starting points but they’re not ready for prime time yet. Remember the main reason the average user from Reddit might leave is because they don’t want to use the official Reddit app. When they see the Lemmy one is even worse they will stay at Reddit.
• Robust mod tools. Right now things are going decently well because you have a lot of tech enthusiasts participating in good faith. As more users come on moderating will of the upmost importance to keep it from falling to bots and bad actors
• Instances are currently too confusing for the average person. Some sort of guidance needs to be there, or a way of porting your account to another so that what you join is not a big deal at first.
• Community finding without third party websites
• A huge effort put into UI to help make things smooth for new users
• A multireddit style feature of some kind so people can lazily subscribe to topics without worrying about the multiple instances they are from
• Encrypted DMs and other user protections from a potentially power hungry instance admin
• A simple solution to horizontally scale instances. Right now instance owners are just buying bigger VMs or dedicated servers and moving things over. This will only work for so long until the user count is too high. It’s natural that this will happen because instances are not well understood by the average new user, so they will naturally pick the biggest one. They need to be able to scale the service over multiple servers in parallel in order to accommodate large user bases.
• A counterpoint to the scaling is that instances could cap their users at a certain amount and then new users would move to the next biggest instance. This spreads the load and is more inline with the original goals, but finding an always increasing number of reputable server owners will be difficult. This whole idea takes the control away from a big company like Reddit, but puts it in Joe from Bakersfield’s hands.

That list is getting long enough and my thumbs are tired, but you get the point. I think this is really cool stuff but I don’t see it being good enough for hitting that second wave of new users when the API changes come into effect. The next big wave, I predict, is when Reddit shuts down old.reddit.com. Maybe that will be a year from now and the timing will work out more in Lemmy’s favour.