It’s unlikely to topple Reddit regardless, but so long as the scalability proves functional enough to support recommending lemmy.world to non tech-savvy newbies I don’t see this particular issue becoming problematic. Most of the larger recommended instances have open community creation anyway. I guess BeeHaw doesn’t but people aren’t really recommending it to newbies either.

It varies from instance to instance. Some restrict community creation to admins, others don’t. I also believe you can only create communities on your home instance.

While third party app users probably had a larger proportion of contributors, Reddit is big enough to still have plenty of content. Moderators are more interesting and it remains to be seen over time if an erosion of quality moderation happens which would make Reddit even shittier. Especially since Reddit seems to keep fumbling when it comes to providing good first party mod tools, see the whole r/Blind fiasco.

am I wrong in thinking that the users are the product and the advertisers the customer?

As long as profitability is the goal then you are correct.

Okay I was a chronic lurker on Reddit but seeing you here gives me hope for the Soccer community on this site, which has thus far been a huge gaping hole. I honestly haven’t used anything other than r/Soccer to keep up with football news in many years so I hope Lemmy can shoulder that burden sooner rather than later. It’s probably the one part of Reddit that I’m really struggling to replace and/or live without.

Not a bad idea. Might need assistance vetting servers and admins right now though as Ruud is probably busy taking a fire extinguisher to the server room every other minute.

I like the idea and it sounds like a fantastic tool for people who would have been interested in the Fediverse anyway. I just fear taking a quiz is too cumbersome to be an optimal onboarding method for Lemmy as a Reddit replacement. The reason .world exploded in popularity was the simplicity (just go here and sign up and you’re posting within minutes and your Local is the biggest instance so you’re going to find content even if you’ve not discovered the All button).

I think another reason too is that .world is run by Ruud who is a trusted actor in the space (he already runs Mastodon.world, a large mastodon instance), and so many (including me) probably felt it would be a safe harbor and not likely to get shut down or run poorly.