Die4Ever
The rate of growth does matter yea. If an instance gets worried, they can lock signups. Slow growth means the software has time to improve as they notice issues.
Lemmy had many issues scaling before, except Lemmy had huge surges with the Reddit API blackouts.
If people start recommending PieFed now, it's on their own terms instead of a massive wave. They can backoff if they get too many users.
I think it's unlikely that they would attract such a large number of users with 1 post on r/RedditAlternatives or something. Lemmy gets spammed everywhere and we usually don't even gain 1000 users a day overall across all instances.
There's already been some comments about PieFed and they didn't result in huge surges.
We have data on what it costs to run a sizeable instance of Lemmy and it’s not a lot. How does Piefed compare? Anyone starting an instance who envisions it growing large has to contend with this question.
I don't think this is a major concern yet. The largest PieFed instance has 308 active users, 2nd place has 34. They've got room to grow.
https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list
People can start posting about PieFed on Reddit and see how the Reddit users react.
like I said, hashtags are fun, but the fact that even if you follow the hashtag it only shows posts that were already federated into your instance confuses people
communities/groups will federate the posts for you if you follow, but following a hashtag does not give any federation
Even if you could follow hashtags on Lemmy, you would also need to be able to follow users for anything to show up (so that's 2 big new features required). And since it requires following users, that would also mean a culture shift would be required, you'd need to convince your instance-mates to use their Lemmy accounts to follow people, but people are mostly here to follow communities not people.
I'm not against the features being added, I just don't think they're going to be as impactful to the Lemmy platform as expected.
yea I mean it's fun to use and works well if you're on a large instance like mastodon.social, I use it even on a medium size instance
but communities/groups work better on the fediverse, and maybe something in between the 2 could be created, some kind of federated version of hashtags
hashtags don't work well on the Fediverse, a hashtag doesn't have an owning instance which means there's no way to push/pull the content by hashtag
I don't think it's always easy to pinpoint UX issues and user friction. Sometimes these things just don't stick with mainstream users. I say it's worth a try to see which platform the average Reddit user will prefer.
But if you're gonna use from a phone, Lemmy's selection of mobile apps is unbeatable.