I’m a Redditor. I don’t like you.

Thank you for sharing that. Personally, I am unlikely to start my own hosting, but hopefully it helps others to make the fediverse stronger

Users congregating in a larger community has its own problems if that is on an instance that, for some reason, ends up being defederated by many others. I wish the communities could exist independent from the instances, a bit like usenet.

I don’t think it will ever be mainstream. It’s confusing enough for IT literate people with a basic understanding of the concept, I can’t see it ever getting popular with the wider public.
My main concern is the overlap between lemmy instances, meaning me and my mate can be looking at for example a channel named ‘news’ and see different contents because we are on different instances. So you either subscribe to all news channels on all major instances and see lots of duplicated posts, or miss out on some posts.

I initially had a similar reaction, as ‘active users’ in the title makes it look like you are stating a fact. ‘Reported active users’ in the title would have given a suggestion that you are (rightly) questioning the number.

Not sure where you got that impression. I recently joined Lemmy after reddit exceeded my tolerance for suckiness and bullshit. I still use reddit occasionally (my 3rd party app still works) and i have only ever seen people posting suggestions to move to the fediverse, not posting that lemmy/mastodon are bad. There is a lack of mature apps (memmy is the only ios one i think) but this will improve no doubt. I think the main long term risk is around funding. Hosting a popular instance will quickly get more expensive as the userbase grows.

Or dropshippers. Or karmawhores