And even if you want to give an elitist vibe to your community by making it invite-only, you can set up Lemmy to be without federation and with restricted applications.
Running a Lemmy instance is a nightmare. Putting aside the questionable Lemmy community, the software takes an enormous amount of resources and is incredibly finicky, always some new bug. The end-user UX is rough, and god forbid you ever want to try to improve it by adding a new feature or improving any existing ones. Not to mention federation woes - it doesn't work reliably in the first place, and you either have to only federate with a select few strictly moderated instances (and abide by their rules yourself), or risk spam and illegal content getting stored on your server.
I'm bitter because I really want to love the fediverse. I fully support the principles behind it, but making an ActivityPub-based server is less like adding RSS to a site and more like running a WordPress site with a bunch of iffy plugins. The relative popularity of the fediverse shows that there's a market for non-corporate social media, but the protocol has fundamental issues that really limit it. Hopefully someday the community can rally around something better.
> Hopefully someday the community can rally around something better.
I don't disagree, but at the same time I always feel like users keep this infinite laundry list of requirements just to conveniently excuse themselves of any commitment.
Case in point: I can host a Lemmy instance for customers (up to 100 users) for less than $20/month. I manage all the software, security and deal with the inconveniences of alpha software. People need "just" to bring friends and make sure that everyone there behave like decent human beings. I also pledge to give 20% of my profits to the developers.
In theory it's a win-win-win. In practice, people just prefer to stick with Instagram or going to Bluesky because that doesn't require anything from them.
Security vs. Liberty. My country claims to want the latter, but gives up the former everytime for something convinient and "it just works".
Most people don't care if it's a black box leeching your data and causing national disrest. they just want to do a simple thing and forget about it. This is partiially why we're heading to doom.
All your issues just sound like "Lemmy is buggy", not necessarily "federation as a concept doesn't work".
> Hopefully someday the community can rally around something better.
It's hard because if no one adopts it, it will improve slower. I'm sure Lobsters has its share of issues and bugs too, but there's simply been less peoeple to battletest it.
If we moved to whatever Bluesky uses it'd probably have the same growing pains. It's just a shame Open Source is slowly corroding and we only "really" fix such issues by paying developers full time to do the boring stuff (which ofc, most OS cannot afford).
And even if you want to give an elitist vibe to your community by making it invite-only, you can set up Lemmy to be without federation and with restricted applications.