Great post. Lemmy right now reminds me of Reddit 15-16 years ago. Mostly tech workers or tech hobbyists who know far more than an average person and thus aren’t put off by something new and different. I don’t think Lemmy is very complicated as a concept and it boggles my mind that people are saying “making a new account on Lemmy.world or Kbin.social is too complicated for normal people.” Yet I see it written all the time, sometimes here but mostly on reddit. And who knows; maybe the latter is a disinformation campaign since we know reddit pulls sneaky shit like that all the time (and targeting Lemmy, like with the warnings they placed on links at one point).

Lemmy’s barriers to entry also somewhat remind me of early Facebook after they expanded to several universities. You needed to have an email address from one of those univerisities in order to create an account. So, not so much self selection in that scenario but another gate to keep people out.

I can respect Tildes’ decision to become invite-only (with a very limited number of invites) for that reason. Lemmy, I think, is prioritizing growth at the potential cost of future community. Tildes is doing the opposite. I don’t think one is necessarily more correct. And, with Lemmy, there are tons of alternatives waiting in the wings. Hopefully a balance can be struck.

I think the real test comes when the first wave of good third party apps are released. Sync, in particular, seems very promising given the developer’s reddit app. Anything that can make it easier for people.

It blows my mind that people are actually defending Reddit on this.

I seriously think Reddit is operating a sock puppet scheme to push a narrative. They’ve done it before, and they’ve bragged about it to the press.

That is why there are so many baby accounts or long dormant accounts that suddenly came to life in the last couple weeks. This is a company which is coming off a month-long campaign of libeling and slandering its top third party developers, and then gish galloping all over the site after the recordings and emails were published.

Then you have Huffman idolizing Musk, saying he wants to do to Reddit what Musk did to Twitter.

Good third party apps cannot come to Lemmy and Kbin fast enough.

I’d argue that you’re right, and that it has already happened. If the bootlicking crowd on Reddit is actually organic users hearing a call to action to start commenting after months and years of inactivity, that is. Reddit is known to operate large networks of sock puppet accounts for fake engagement and narrative control (per Venture Beat’s reporting, which quotes an admission from Huffman).