Jesus Christ, everyone here seems to have invented their own definition of what Lemmy is.
Lemmy doesn’t have competitors. It isn’t competing. It isn’t what you think it is.
Except the actual Lemmy developers describe it as:
“a decentralized alternative to Reddit and other link aggregators”
They’ve been calling it a Reddit alternative since at least 2020.
So no, I’m not imposing some imaginary “corporate framing” onto Lemmy. I’m using basically the same framing its own developers used to explain why they built it.
And “there is no manager or corporate goal” doesn’t mean adoption suddenly becomes meaningless. If you’re building an alternative to corporate-controlled link aggregators, whether anybody actually adopts the alternative fucking matters.
Otherwise what are we celebrating? Software existing?
And that’s why 35k MAU matters to me. Reddit has spent years handing alternatives opportunities on a silver platter, and Lemmy hasn’t capitalized on them.
You can personally define success as “35k enthusiasts are happy.” Fine.
But stop pretending your definition of Lemmy is the official one while telling everyone else “you don’t understand what Lemmy is.” Even the developers explicitly called it a Reddit alternative.
Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you’re interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.
For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere.
It is an easily self-hostable, decentralized alternative to Reddit and other link aggregators, outside of their corporate control and meddling.