Relatable. I was relieved I wouldn't be doomscrolling anymore. Then i found Lemmy, which works as a doomscroll sometimes, ut also goes down or goes slow randomly, forcing me to do something else.
I've found that I'm also browsing (old-school) forums now to fill the time.
I think instances will eventually develop into hosts for specific topics, but that's not a bad thing. You can still startup a new community on any instance. I think smaller communities will be spread over all instances.
Younger people and casual Reddit users never left Reddit. People who were ok with still using old.reddit didn't leave Reddit. When I first joined Lemmy.ml during the blackout, the website struggled to load, the communities were hard to find or non existent, and there wasn't much content (compared to Reddit).
Now that Reddit is dead to me, Lemmy has filled the doomscroll void. I do much less of it now. Also, Lemmy is growing in the right directions.
A reddit instance is conceivable, but the magic of the federation is that no one instance has control. Reddit has control of every subreddit, and they'd lose that control joining the federation. Likewise, there's no financial gain from having an instance.
I think the idea of a federation: websites being able to talk to each other, could be mainstream. I don't think lemmy will be mainstream, but I do think lemmy will be able to talk to mainstream websites on the federation.
What if you could use your lemmy account to buy stuff online, book a flight, pay bills, sign up for streaming services, etc.? The federation isn't seeing its full potential.
Yes. Lemmy goes down too, forcing me to step away from it.