Humans who run instances are real people who have jobs and mortgages and kids. I also like having piracy communities around to balance the greedy ass corporations trying to control media and copyright…I’m glad to know they are there if I need them or feel like screwing around with it. I just wonder if the people ranting all indignantly acting like instances are competing for their usership would feel the same if the most active instance was on a server physically sitting in their basement, or paid for by money tied to them in the real world. Yes it seems pretty unlikely that you’re ever going to run into issues with law enforcement, copyright claims, lawsuits…but how much would you risk for a fucking hobby you do for free? Would you risk your house? Your job? I would not. Grow up. No one cares what instance you use.
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Upvotes don’t matter if there’s no other engagement. They’re great in theory, but really don’t do anything. Without an algorithm they’re particularly meaningless since they’re not a metric for what’s being presented to users.
I do niche things like Simracing. The community is a tiny subset of a small subset of gaming. So there’s simply just a small pool of users to pull from. Niche specific communities are really struggling to take off here because there’s not a large enough user base to have enough people interested (and with the disposable income) to participate.
Lemmy is a great platform, but it’s not a solved problem. Growth is absolutely necessary for the platform to survive, or you’re going to quickly start losing users who are looking for specific niches. Also as far as I can tell there’s nothing else out there that has a decent amount of users.
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Absolutely, but growth is needed to make it less barren. Adding additional barriers to entry (what this OP was tangentially about) isn’t ideal because the average user doesn’t want to deal with instances or federation or managing multiple accounts across multiple instances (due to defederation) or anything technical before they even make their account.
We can’t be hostile to less technical users. Not everyone needs to understand the ins and outs of federation and instances to be able to use the platform