One thing that definitely worries me with federation in general is the barrier to entry to hosting an instance is low, by design. On one hand this is great, but on the other hand it means just about anyone can spin up an instance and collect usernames, passwords, emails, etc. from anyone who signs up

I know this is obviously no better than an single giant corporation who can do that. But it’s interesting to think about.

I’m definitely not suggesting kbin.social is doing this by the way. Your post just spurred this thought for me

As someone who’s been looking for a reddit alternative for a while and occasionally read Hacker News, I must say I really like it here on Lemmy. Similar simplicity of Hacker News, but with more diverse set of communities.

With all due respect and empathy to reddit’s employees who do deserve gainful employment:

Does a link aggregator really need a huge labor pool? In terms of functionality Lemmy is already on par with how I remember Reddit 10 years ago (compared to which the experience of Reddit today is actually worse). And Lemmy achieves it with what, an extreme fraction of the labor cost?

Props to all the devs, admins, etc who are hosting all these Lemmy instances for us, btw :)

I tried to make an account on lemmy.ml and it looks like their servers are (understandably) overloaded

I ended up choosing lemmy.world instead

My understanding is I’m not missing out on anything by chosing a less-popular instance. Did I get that right?