I just don't get how Lemmy is going to act as a proper replacement for Reddit.
I understand the basic concept of Lemmy and the Fediverse, and people are touting the concept of it being federated and not centrally controlled, but it is an absolute mess and nobody seems to have an idea about what to do with it.
How are communities going to grow if there isn't at least some form of central management. Other than there being an underlying framework that connects the servers, they're all just doing what they want.
Outside of the underlying framework, there's no 'guidelines' or consistency. The servers have random names, and the main Lemmy.ml is telling people to register elsewhere.
How is this going to bring in a wider audience if people are being directed to lemmy.fmhy.ml, sopuli.xyz, or sh.itjust.works?
What is the purpose of the Fediverse when forums for niche interests already exist on the internet?
Does it make sense to have something like a 'sports' server that has communities for soccer, NFL, basketball, MMA? But then how do you get a consistent naming scheme that lets people know it's part of the fediverse?
Maybe Lemmy could work as a replacement, but it seems like it needs a 'flagship' server with a group of people maintaining it to set an example. Then other servers that cover more specific areas, such as sports, can be set up and potentially work closely with that flagship group.
If this doesn't happen, then I can't see how this doesn't just fizzle out.
P.S. I've also compared two different Lemmy servers and looked at the same post in a community, and there are different numbers of comments on each where they haven't synced up...
I also wanted to post this to the main Lemmy community, but as I had to register via a different server, I'm not able to access that community from the server I'm using for some reason...
You seem to be assuming that Reddit succeeded because of some central effort by the admins, but that's really not what happened. If anything it succeeded in spite of them.
I absolutely do not think that the admins made Reddit successful.
However, I think a degree of centralisation is required to enable growth and bring a wider audience in. And without that, Lemmy is at risk of fizzling out or just never reaching a decent user base.
Like markipol@beehaw.org said (sorry I don't know how to mention users yet) in the other comment, this can be resolved without centralization.
For example "unions" of communities could be made that are the equivalent of a multi reddit. They would group together posts across all major "technology" communities into one feed.
Then anyone from any instance can engage via comments. Making a postswould require choosing to which of the communities iin the union to post to because each one would have its own moderators and rules.
Users would subscribe to the union to see technology contents across all technology communities.
Any user could create a union on any instance so major instances would have their own unions that include content from other major instances that they are in a good relationship with.
Would this not resolve the problem while keeping it decentralized?
Better yet, allow the creation of metacommunities which bundle together subs as you're describing at the user level and give users the ability to export their community bundles to share with each other. Sort of like how multireddits work