Interesting read. I was genuinely surprised to read that ChromeOS has 4%+ desktop market share. It’s not popular at all where I am from. I’ve never ever seen one in person.
The apps are already amazing and will not suffer issues of scale themselves because they run on users’ devices. The scaling issues will be in Lemmy server code and ActivityPub in general.
ActivityPub doesn’t seem very scalable IMHO. It works well if all instances are about the same size and communities are well-distributed. Right now a few servers like lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.ml are much larger than others. They host most of the popular communities as well. This creates an imbalance which ActivityPub doesn’t handle well.
I think Lemmy instances should be topic based. But that’d be confusing for people coming from centralized social media who are only trying to find a reliable starting place. So I really hope we reach a point of maturity and mainstream-ness of Fediverse that people feel comfortable with smaller theme-based instances.
It’s been out for less than ten days and it already has more than 35x the number of total users as Mastodon. It might not be for us, but saying that no one would want to use it is just sour grapes.
There are very few examples of Communism put into practice at a large scale.