eventually it’ll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site
I somewhat disagree... you haven't considered the increased incentive for occasional posters to become more regular contributors as existing contributors leave.
As the volume of contributions reduces, each contribution is more likely to garner engagement - those sweet sweet endorphins released when someone upvotes or otherwise engages with your post.
I agree. If lemmy continues to grow, inevitably some servers will be shit, but I imagine there will be other non-federated or less-federated instances. beehaw has already started down that path.
Trolls are generally looking for maximum carnage, so I imagine there's less incentive / reward posting somewhere like lemmy.
I think this is something reddit users generally have a hard time grasping about lemmy, including myself.
One of the fundamentals of the fediverse is that there will be communities with the same name on different instances. Users can subscribe to good ones and / unsubscribe from bad ones as they wish.
This is happening all over reddit.
Mods are posting all over the place saying "I have to bend over for the admins because if I don't they'll find someone else who will".
You do you but honestly I find this a bit weird. As an unpaid volunteer you don't have to do anything. Just resign. Reddit's not about to die but it's best days are in the past. I wouldn't want to be a part of the future of reddit.
I came to beehaw because it seemed to very welcoming
I think they're trying to preserve that
users desire freedom to choose how they want their online experience
This hasn't curtailed that freedom in any way. You can sign up at one of many other instances (lemmy.ml for example) and interact with beehaw and lemmy.world and wherever else. In fact you might say this move affords additional freedoms for people to choose their own experience because beehaw will be free fro mthe noise coming from the instances they've defederated from.
I can only see this hurting beehaw in the future
This assumes that the objective is continued rapid growth. Like every instance wants to be a reddit alternative. The opening post pretty much says that's not the objective.
I would also add that you seem to have overlooked the difficulties OP mentioned in administrating the instance. That's easy to do coming from commercial sites where people are being paid. It sounds like there are four people who have a little experience, but very little time and resources to spend running the site. Additionally as they said in the post they're running into the limitations of lemmy's ability to moderate a large community. One of the fundamental characteristics of volunteer contributors is they're free to curtail or discontinue their services at any time. I saw one of the admins of beehaw in another post say that it's been more than a full time job over the last few weeks, on top of all their existing full time jobs. Imagine you'd poured 80 hours over the last fortnight into supporting a community, then telling that community that it's not sustainable, and that community saying "I can only see this hurting [...] hopefully this is a short misstep"
They're on lemmy.ml, not even on any of the effected servers.
this particular cat and mouse has been going on for a long time.
Although I get the impression it's not particularly aggressive.
There was a while there about a year ago where newpipe seemed to break every week and you had to install the next patch version from github. It's not like newpipe had to develop some new workaround or something, just changed class names or something.
Not wanting to pay youtube does not mean not wanting to pay creators.
Too bad that YT, regarding content offer, lacks valid competitors and this position can lead to abuse in front of the user.
It's the same as any other platform - the network effect. People are more likely to produce content for youtube because thats where the users are.
That said, it's easier for content creators to support alternatives because unlike social media where everyone is a creator video content producers have a creator > follower relationship, so there's almost no cost to them to upload the same content on other sites.
I subscribed to nebula a while back. There's not heaps of content, and all (ok almost all) of it is available for free on youtube. However, I'm happy to pay provided that most of the revenue is going to creators, and I'm happy to support a non-advertising-revenue model.
It's inevitable that some communities and some instances will be run this type of fief lord, but I suspect that the fediverse will support a more diverse range of cultures, just by virtue of there being more to choose from.
There needs to be a way to link to a post in an instance agnostic way.
For example, this post is in !asklemmy@lemmy.ml and the id is 1255605, but that id number won't work on any other instance.
If someone shares a link with me like https://lemmy.ml/post/1255605 that will take me to lemmy.ml, where I'm not logged in. If I have an account on lemmy.world then the only way for me to comment on this post is to navigate to lemmy.world/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml manually and then literally look at the feed to find this post. It's a pain in the butt for new / current threads but will be a huge pain for older threads.
This sounds fantastic to me.
It's pretty much what happened on mastodon with the twitter-storm in November.
Huge influx of new users, about a third hung around - but it was the third who were the most like-minded.