Open source software is safe because so few people use it it's not worth a hacker's time to break into it (joking, but of course that doesn't apply to server software)
We're there any early internet standards you were super bullish on at the time that didn't get picked up? In retrospect, if it had been adopted do you think it would have had the impact you were hoping for
There will always be niche instances. Federation just solves the content problem of niche communities. Ideally you find a instance with a niche community you like and you interact with them first but if you run out of things to look at you can just move on to the infinite content of the fediverse.
The ui code can be reused so a lot of the polish can be ported over. I don't care for Lemmy to get as big as Reddit. I want it to get bigger than it is now but once you got a critical mass extra users don't make the community any better.
I've signed up for a bunch of them and still haven't decided where I want to make my main. I know that annoys some people but I love it because it means I get to have a choice! I think I'll have a Lemmy world account since they're big, buti also want to find a good smaller community to have slower more meaningful conversations. I hope the Lemmy protocol adds support for account linking some day.
Connect is good but the 3rd party Reddit apps were so crazy polished. The absolute dumbest thing spez did as an outcome of his dumb decisions was he sent all the best app developers on his platform, straight to his biggest competitor.
I'm curious why you would go back? I'm totally happy on Lemmy. There are some growing pains but it'll get better and I think there's already plenty of content. Lemmy doesn't need as many users as Reddit, it just needs to hit a critical mass to have enough content to keep you busy and I feel like it's already pretty much there.
Unfortunately meta owns Instagram, and while Facebook and oculus are floundering, Instagram isn't.