Thanks to federation and open source software, this shouldn’t be an issue.
I think comparing that era and this era is a mistake, besides if Lemmy lets say goes closed source which is EXTREMELY unlikely to happen, someone will not make the mistake again to not fork it to keep an open source version going.
besides it’s not just open source, it is also the FEDIVERSE, this is the most important, this platform is federated and decentralized unlike Reddit ever was as it has always been centralized by design. Both Lemmy and Reddit are very different from design here.
Hello I was the one who wrote this write up on r/RedditAlternatives, just to clarify regarding my Kbin remarks, yesterday on January 3rd, kbin was indeed not working properly for the whole day yesterday with errors almost everywhere, even Ernest, the developer behind Kbin acknowledged this and put an announcement even on Mastodon.
But a one day error is not the only reason, in-fact I’ve made several huge and massive contributions to the Kbin community with the creations of m/AskKbin, m/RedditMigration and so on activaly moderating and contributing when it comes to engagement and so on (I even created multiple guides that had huge reach such as “The Redditor’s guide to Kbin” and even published the guide to a website), I spent tons of months solely as a Kbin user - but I was reaching a point where the unstability and immaturity of Kbin was really pushing me to put it down and come to lemmy, especially considering how mature lemmy has become and is surely much more stable than kbin at the moment and has been so in the forseeable past. So maybe it came of as bashing, but to me as someone who actually gave Kbin a chance, it was the hard reality and I had to say it.
Regarding the open source part, I would like to agree to disagree with you there, sure you are still using Lemmy regardless of the instance and the development is still done by the same devs that led to such concerns, this was exactly my reason to stay away from lemmy and go to Kbin, but now I’ve realized that open source actually helps keep the developers in check as in that they will obviously know that if they do something against the users here and let’s say, push some of their idealogoies in some way hypothetically, there will be a huge chance someone will fork Lemmy and use that as an opportunity to take away the users, this is the advantage of open source, the possibility of forking a project helps keep the original project in check and when it comes to moderation or censorship, this instance is not moderated by the same people behind lemmy.ml or lemmygrad either.
I think a good starting point would be advertising Lemmy where possible on your subreddit, such as pinning an equivalent futurology community from Lemmy linked to a reddit post and pinning that, also mention your lemmy community on other places like mentioning Lemmy and asking users to consider Lemmy instead on the welcome message when new users join/subscribe to r/futurology.
Kbin has this figured out, they now have an in-built community request system.
I already created the discord server a long while back when I was at r/RedditAlternatives, people knew what it was and many average users were already on the platform hence accessible, matrix is great but still not at a stage where the average person uses/knows it compared to tech nerds or enthusiasts, besides we already have around 100 people if not more on the discord server, reusing it made more sense for now although I wouldn’t mind creating a matrix in the future once the community grows to offer another way of keeping in touch with our community for those who have or are ready to go to Matrix :)