This platform could be a viable alternative for forums (cuz we know in which state they currently are), but the lack of general attachments (any mime/file type) is what I believe stands in the way. I have an electronics forum I run (a local one, nothing too serious) and I believe Lemmy can make it more intereactive (not die out) because people from all over the world will get the feed and not just people that are online on the forum at that time.
Still, we frequently exchange PDFs, schematics (not always in image form), archives, etc., which makes Lemmy useless if there are no plans to implement something like this, even if disabled by default.
So, are there plans for anything like this being implemented?
The thing is (correct me if I’m wrong), if other instances federate with you, they’ll be hosting a copy of the data you store. For images this is manageable (although animated images are basically video), but it will quickly run into the gigabytes range.
Yes, if users from that instance interact with communities on my instance, yes, that is true.
It would be nice if some of the instances actually release some data regarding the growth of Lemmy, so that creators of new instances have an idea at what pace data is being accumulated.