I'm not worried.
We don't have aspirations at lemmygrad to become the biggest or most active instance. We're happy to have a space where we can be with each other. If we wanted to be big we wouldn't be running a communist instance. In fact, we get a lot of new account requests, but we deny a lot of them for being ultras or anarchists (some we let through if they seem good).
Those new arrivals don't understand the nature of federation and the nature of open source software. Like others have said, they want reddit just on a different domain name. Then let them have their Reddit, I'd rather they confine themselves to a single space than spread all over the fediverse.
Frankly Lemmygrad can survive without federation, what's important is that Lemmy is the most advanced open source software to run a link aggregator, no other project comes close. Someone in the reddit thread was saying that because of the devs' political leanings, the project would never grow and this is exactly the type of elitism reddit produces. This person discovered Lemmy yesterday, but has very strong opinions on it and apparently understands the ins and outs of the project. Meanwhile the Lemmy project keeps growing and is the most robust and popular open source alternative to Reddit. But we're sorry our volunteer developers are not slaving away hard enough to produce your toys, great Redditor ๐
Anyone can use lemmy, and what we should start thinking about is when the fascists will start opening their instances. There is no way you can prevent that at a fundamental code level; lemmy cannot stop anyone from opening their instance. All you can do is defederate from them. The fascists are probably not going to start opening their instances because of said politics from the devs though, so once again tankies are saving libs from fascism and get ostracized for it lol. They've had 4 years to try and coopt this project and they haven't done it.
There is no way we will defederate from Lemmy.ml or that Lemmy.ml will defederate from us. People can clamor for it all they want, it's never gonna happen. If they're not happy on lemmy.ml then they can join one of many dead liberal instances that keep popping up because they want to be administrators of their own space rather than work with others.
We've handled an "exodus" before (they go back to Reddit in the end no matter how much they criticise it), we've handled trolls, we've handled DDoS attacks, they can't bring anything we haven't seen before.
