Mozilla Senior Director of Content explained why Mozilla has taken an interest in the fediverse and Mastodon

The bottom line is, they started something that's bigger than them, and created more than enough tools to fork from them if they become a problem.

I always like to point to Emby/Jellyfin as a perfect example of how this is supposed to work. They created something excellent, the community joined in, and it got popular. Then the maintainers decided to try and cash in, and the community immediately responded by forking into what would become Jellyfin. And nowadays, the discussion is between Plex vs Jellyfin, you rarely ever hear people talk about Emby anymore.

After a certain point of user adoption, FOSS (and copy-left) software should be able to stand on it's own without the creator's direct involvement. The community can take the wheel if necessary. The Lemmy devs have provided enough tools to do exactly that, and I believe there are more than enough experienced devs in this community that we would not struggle to find the necessary talent.

That's doesn't mean there isn't still a risk, though. This is social media, the technology is only half the story. The other half is getting people to move. I don't think I need to explain to anyone here how hard it is to get an entrenched user base to abandon a platform whose mainteners have gone off the rails.

This is the first I've heard of "a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues" and "Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute".

Can you give a summary or examples? I'm not trying to argue, but would just like to know more. I don't follow Lemmy development more closely than reading the dev summaries they post, so wasn't aware of any of this.

I dont know much about the primary developers of Lemmy, but from what I can tell this is a part time labor of love project for them. Its unreasonable to ask people to push beyond their boundaries or capacity so that their pet project can become a 1:1 replacement for an incredibly mature platform like Reddit overnight

Sounds like you should fork it.

Kbin is not a good Lemmy replacement.

Well that or use an instance that isn't theirs, or doesn't even federate with theirs, or simply block theirs.🤔 I mean this is really throwing the baby out with the bath water.

I have no strong love for leninists/stalinists, and think they accomplish little other than making actual socialists look bad while not being socialist themselves. But I'm not that put off by them. They're generally fairly intellectually weak, and easy to maneuver around. Should you choose to interact with them.

I'm not sure if Mozilla is the one for that job, they have their own issues with community relations. I wish they didn't because the world needs Firefox.

They are funded by Google. I much prefer the "some random guys or whoever will fork their code" model of software for this sort of thing.

The biggest issues that have come up so far are moderation and database optimization. The moderation issue is significant enough that large instances have considered shutting down, but the database optimization thing is what really drives me crazy. It is absurdly expensive for hosts considering we only have 35k MAU (just one of our midsized instances should be able to host the whole userbase for the cost they currently pay) and it has been largely deprioritized to the point that contributors who have tried to fix it have been told off.

It’s one thing if it’s just a couple of devs working on the project and trying their best, it’s an entirely different thing when a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues. At this point a significant number of users have been lost because the devs have been largely unable to capitalize on previous waves on growth due to slow development.

Not to mention things like authorized fetch, which if fixed would ensure Lemmy/Mastodon interoperability and would effectively make Lemmy the go to place for groups on the fediverse. This would constitute a huge boost in engagement from the broader fediverse.

Because of all this Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute. A fork would probably be a significant improvement as far as brand perception goes.

Exhibit 1: https://programming.dev/post/5180682

It's the developers of the software itself, not the hosts of any particular instanve.

You can have as many forks as you want, but that's a software engineer's solution to a social problem. Lemmy is the "name brand" now for ActivityPub based federated content aggregation, and it will be orders of magnitudes more difficult to get support for forks, both from a contributor and from a user perspective.

Just look at last year's Twitter migration, and the sea of people complaining about Mastodon not having features they felt were a requirement for adoption, while also ignoring every other Mastodon alternative on the Fediverse that had everything they were looking for.

Yes, bloat and mission creep is going to be an issue with any big non-profit. But maybe that's also their advantage: any organization that becomes focused on sustaining itself is going to provide decent long-term stability. I guess it's a bit like a state.