I am a reddit refugee. Keep seeing that this is supposed to be somehow better than Reddit. As far as I can tell, it follows a similar format, less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose. But It looks like people still get down vote brigaded on some communities. So I’m curious, how it’s better?
You’ve gotten plenty of replies, so I’m sure this has been said. There’s nothing to make the content or behavior better. The thing that’s better is it isn’t controlled by a single entity. If 9ne of the hosts tries to use their power to restrict API calls, for example, the other instances can ignore them. Anyone can always spin up new instances as well.
That said, one instance (Lemmy.world) has far more users and communities than any other, which isn’t ideal. If they were to just cut ties with everyone else then a lot of people and communities would become lost. This doesn’t have to be the case, and hopefully it diversifies, but it is the case right now.
Reddit used to be open-source, its code still archived on GitHub… then we saw what happened. They closed the source (de facto killing every small Reddit clone) and more recently they cut ties with every developer using their APIs.
I honestly see lemmy.world as a problem. Not as big as relying on Reddit source code, but still a problem. We need to prevent centralization as much as possibile, and one instance having >50% of all users is a bad sign.
Mobile apps (such as Voyager) let you choose the instance you want to sign up. I think they should incentivize instances that are not lemmy.world, until it scales back to a smaller size. Like some kind of rubber-band roulette.