Maybe you’re right. Best we can do is be active here.

That’d be a silver lining if it were to work out that way. However, seeing the stats of old.reddit usage is depressing - it’s a very small minority, would barely make a dent in reddit’s traffic if every old.reddit user migrated in such a case.

My personal issue is that reddit has that critical mass to not only sustain generic wide-appeal communities, which Lemmy also achieves, but also small niche communities, which Lemmy really doesn’t for the most part. Reddit needs to fuck up even worse, way worse than just discontinuing old.reddit.

I find that most of those issues are nonexistent the way I am on reddit - just use old.reddit everywhere. Yes, even on mobile. I’m special, and not in a good way, but it works.

I fear the day old.reddit gets shut down, considering the amount of communities that don’t have an (alive) analog on Lemmy, so for now I use both…

My problem with Lemmy is the lack of activity in niche communities. You’re right that there needs to be a critical mass and arguably Lemmy has it, but only for the most mainstream, generic type of content. It doesn’t have the mass to sustain any sort of niche, outside of maybe tech related topics because of the way the userbase is slanted.

I find myself going back there often because of that, but I hope that the userbase for generic content enough to sustain and grow, from where more active niche communities can spring up.

It’s easy to register on an instance, the hard part is choosing one. “Which one is the right one to choose and commit to?” is a newbie question that honestly is often overthought. Choice paralysis is real for some people…

A central account instance rather defeats the point of a federated system.

Does it? Would it not be possible for a minimal global account system to exist, which ONLY handles logging in and identity? Any user-related data could still exist in instances, not centralized.

I am pretty new to this type of system so maybe I am wrong but it does seem like both the biggest barrier to wider adoption and rather solvable: in current terms, imagine if the “login” instance had no communities, only account log in, while other instances have no log in, but integrate the “central” one. In case decentralization is wanted, I think it’d be possible to have multiple “login” type instances exist in a consensus, at which point problems and solutions start looking similar to cryptocurrency, but without the need to deal with “currency” or any of those ethical landmines - it’d just need to do the task of multiple instances agreeing to dataset of existing users.