A thought prompted by seeing instances growing and struggling to have enough resources. Then and now, people in groups trying to communicate something. Hardware became incredibly faster over decades, storage became incredibly more huge, and software bloat kept pace?
Usenet plus voting, reputation, moderation by default, and a different content propagation model. Usenet died out for a variety of reasons, but unmitigated spam didn’t help. I’m hopeful lemmy with “ownership” of a community built in will foster more quality engagement.
The biggest hurdle I see is identity, asking people to create an account is lots of friction. Using existing identity providers (google, apple, microsoft, github, stackoverflow) would reduce the friction and let more people participate.
deleted by creator
It can be done optionally, right? I fully agree that creating an account, which (ironically) cannot be federated using one of the big IDPs, creates unnecessary friction.
To be honest, when I see what happens to reddit with the normies left behind, I see the lack of authentication via a big brother company as a pro.
It is tracking, sure, but there is a tradeoff. Some people might not care that github knows they have a lemmy account, and for those people they don’t have to manage yet another login, so they are more likely to participate.
Heck Lemmy could build in federation identity into lemmy, so it doesn’t matter your on lemmy instance X, you can still bring your identity from instance Y and not have to post from your home instance.
The more options the better.