I just discovered this site when looking for an alternative to Reddit...
And so far, I like it a whole lot! I swear, Reddit's entire UI has become so crappy! As long as the site maintainers keep doing a good job, I'll be coming here now!
It also feels like you have a voice that people can hear instead of being drowned out.
You know I think a lot of us get so wrapped up in the lack of traffic on this site that we overlook this particular benefit. There are several usernames on Lemmy that I can, not only recognize, but also associate a bit of a personality with from the interactions I have seen and had on the fediverse. I think that's a pretty neat thing to experience amongst the huddled masses of the Internet in 2024.
It’s like an optional small town, which is the best sort of small town. Or like a Minecraft realm you shared with your friends. Or Animal Crossing but multiplayer. So many analogies!!
Overall I agree, unless of course that voice of yours has an opinion that the lemmy hive mind has decided is bad (Israel, cars, capitalism, renting/landlords, non Linux operating systems)
It'll probably falter once their advertisers start pressuring them to start censoring more what people post on this site. Reddit was the exact same way. It started out all good, but became shit over time after advertisers started pressuring them to censor more and more. The same cycle will repeat itself on this site eventually. It's all about the good ol' money!
You may have fundamentally missed how the fediverse works.
Lemmy isn't one big site, it's a collection of independent federated servers that share content, with users able to interact across the network regardless of what server hosts their account.
The servers are funded by their owners/users, and can run themselves however they like.
One server going down or going bad would be a loss, but the network as a whole doesn't depend on any one server/server owner.
Unless you host your account on an instance or use an app that advertises, the only ads you'll see on Lemmy are spambots. And if you do see ads because of the first two reasons, you can simply switch your instance/app. (I recommend Thunder for the latter)
Lemmy is open source, it doesn't have an "owner" that could unconditionally inject advertising into any part of how it works.
The hope is that instead of having to ditch the whole thing when it goes bad, going forward, we can ditch only the parts that go bad, and thereby keep the good going instead of having to set up a whole new thing.
Oh no, the Fediverse runs a bit differently since there are dozens of servers running independently, all sharing information across the network. I don't think advertisers could exert any sort of rules beyond the instances that get paid. That said, the overwhelming majority of instances seem to run on donations.
The fediverse is currently sitting at 27 000 servers. And that's before you include other federated platforms like matrix that don't use ActivityPub.
Some of those are single user instance, of course, but even that illustrates how the network wont be running out of nodes any time soon, as people are joining it by setting up servers entirely on their own terms.
That's unlikely to happen. The fediverse is supposed to be non-commercial, it's entirely run by volunteers and donations like the old internet. If an admin ever tries to squeeze money out of their users, they can all just move to a different instance and defederate the bad one.
Don't take downvotes close to your heart, I don't think it's appropriate to expect you to have vast knowledge about the site you've just stumbled upon.
But indeed, the model Lemmy runs on is a lot different, and even if some parts will decide to run ads (which I hope they will not), this will be an issue that can be solved on the instance you have an account on.