Lemmy is cool. I’m a big fan.

Sure, there are numerous valid criticisms that can be made against Lemmy. However if you add up all the pros and all the cons, what I personally see is a great platform with a ton of long term potential.

It’s really exciting to me how any community existing around a specific subject, in this case primarily DRS & GME, can set up their own instance and simply “plug in” to the rest of Lemmy / the fediverse.

This instance currently has around 780 user accounts, and of those, only about 50 monthly active users at this time.

However, the largest community on this instance, drs_your_gme, has a total of roughly 1100 subscribers and 165 monthly active users.

I think this necessarily means that, of all the active users in the drs_your_gme community on this instance, the majority of them are accounts hosted on instances other than this one. Roughly 1/3 from this instance, 2/3 from outside of this instance.

Personally i think that is very cool. It’s so powerful!

If we were using some non-federated platform for example, something else other than Lemmy that otherwise serves the functionality that Reddit has, but not federated, not otherwise connected to the fediverse – we would only have our small little bubble and that’s it.

But because of how the fediverse works, we get the benefit of connecting to potentially thousands of additional people, maybe one day millions. We get to enjoy other content on Lemmy, and other Lemmy users get to see our content too, if they so choose.

Sometimes content is posted in the drs_your_gme community that maybe isn’t specifically about DRS or GME, but has larger general appeal, and gains the attention of users outside of this instance. I love it when that happens. And of those users, some of them might be totally unaware or otherwise ambivalent towards GME or towards DRS, but by being exposed to this community organically through the natural machinations of the fediverse, they may feel inclined to subscribe here and learn a little bit more about what we like to discuss.

On Reddit, any sufficiently large subreddit that might get a lot of attention, that might make it for example to r/all, Reddit always retains the ability to prevent that exposure from happening, if they want. I can’t remember the last time anything at all GME related ever made it to the front page of reddit. Not because the content isn’t good enough or popular enough, but I think because Reddit has very specific controls about what does and does not make it onto the front page of r/all.

Here on Lemmy, we have an opportunity to speak our truth and to let it exist without fear of a centralized authority deciding that they don’t want our community to have a voice and unilaterally preventing us from having one.

There might be a long ways to go, but as the fediverse grows it will continue to demonstrate its value as a viable alternative social media platform.

Cheers everyone! 🥂