I’m a reddit transplant and I’m excited about what I’m seeing so far in Lemmy and the Fediverse, but my brain keeps bugging me with concerns:
Maintainability and Scalability - There are a ton of instances now. Lemmy had made it easy to spin up and host your own instance. In some cases, this means people with little/no infrastructure experience are spinning things up and are unprepared for scalability challenges and costs. This post by the maintainer of a kbin instance highlighted this challenge quite well ( https://lemmy.one/post/302078 ). How do we know if an instance is properly maintained, backed up, and is able to scale? Or should we just be prepared to start over on another instance if ours fails?
Monetization - The above cost challenges bring up monetization issues. What mechanisms will instance maintainers have to help with maintenance/hosting costs? As the Fediverse grows, how do we prevent against ads and coordinated upvoting from taking over and pushing ad content?
Legal/Privacy - Privacy regulations are becoming a mine field… GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy frameworks are making it tougher to handle privacy properly. Is there a coordinated Lemmy legal defense or are instance maintainers on their own? How would you even approach a GDPR user delete request across the fediverse?
At the same time, you can keep your online account separate from your real identity, if you are thorough. I don’t even bother anymore (not on this account), but I’m not open about who I am, either.
Not like on matrix where I just straight up use my real name.
It makes sense to me. There’s a place for public forums, and one for private communication. They are mutually exclusive and should not be served by the same systems, they should be entirely separate for anyone who wants them to be.
Not like Meta, with their main public platforms of facebook and instagram, while at the same time sticking their filthy fingers into the private communication pie that is messenger and whatsapp.