From purely practical point of view, what is the selling point of Lemmy for the average user who does not care about the theoretical benefits of software or the open source software movement?
Assumptions:
- The average user will never host a instance.
- The average user is not interested in volunteering or moderation.
- The average user is not looking for NSFW communities or any controversial communities.
I actually think all the posts talking about the size of communities, amount of memes on the frontpage and so on are wrong, since those will naturally change over time and are not fixed.
Every platform will see changes in their user base to some degree. Reddit now is very different to Reddit 10 years ago. The same thing will happen to Lemmy: If growth continues we will see more engagement in niche communities, but also more low effort posts and reposts.
Considering it doesn’t do anything fundamentally different to reddit in the way of being a content aggregator with comment section it will be a similar experience. It would be different if it e.g. had a function to make older posts resurface and stay relevant longer to foster longer conversations, or structure comments differently since right now the further down a chain you go, the less people will engage with it.
Even if the average user doesn’t care about open source or federation, they’ll still benefit (and suffer) from the consequences.
On a centralised platform like Reddit you are beholden to their will for better or worse, and incentives might change over time such in their case with taking investor money and going public. This can have consequences such as forcing out third party software (one of the events that brought a lot of people here), but also censoring specific content or taking away powers from moderators.
There are downsides to it, since smaller, less professionally run instances might disappear at some point or have less reliability. But The upside is the option to choose and the resilience that should things change at one instance/community, you can switch without having to leave the whole ecosystem. And for that you do not have to be a moderator or volunteer
The existence of different instances also to some degree helps identify users to some degree, the obvious choice being political instances like hexbear.
That’s an assumption i’ll challenge. Looking at the amount of porn on the internet, the average person most definitely is looking for it. But that is probably a bit offtopic.