It depended on how you used reddit. They were extremely fast, had no ads, trackers or javascript so were extremely privacy friendly. But they were read only so you couldn't engage with the reddit content through them.

Right now it's not even mastodon compatible let alone lemmy. There are some arguments on how federating with them will allow people to migrate to a more privacy respecting instance and still view threads content, and some users say this will allow them to still communicate with their friends who don't want to switch away from threads.

So while we do lean towards defederating from it, it's some months away before we need to actually decide and till then we are simply listening to and discussing both sides of the argument.

I'm totally willing to discuss my thoughts since it seems I'm in the minority on this threads mania-

Once Threads launches it'll obviously have a lot more users than the whole fediverse combined, maybe even 90% of all users. Now let's say some instances with barely 1-2% users and small content feed defederate from it. Do people think a new user who does not care about things like open source or privacy will join the niche instance? No, people will go where the content is. Big social media giants will jump on fediverse bandwagon and instances who dont fetch their data will become extremely niche communtites (some might like that but it's not good for overall fediverse health).

Instead let's say we keep federated with threads, and make posts like how YSK: other instances don't track your data, other instances are free from corpo greed, other instances are run by normal people etc etc and make users aware and let them naturally migrate. Ideally, meta will bring the eyeballs which we can help to make fediverse as a whole grow.

imo it's naive to think that us 100k users defederating will put even a dent on threads. Insta tik-tok people will join the new trendy social media and generate content. The only solution is to make people constantly aware that better alternatives to view the same content exist.

for personal use, main reasons are you won't have to worry about instance admins making arbitrary decisions that you don't agree with, and no worries about server overload or downtime.

for making an instance for public, helping fediverse become a more viable alternative by spreading the load over more instances and helping it grow.

All I want is that top comments under posts are something insightful and related to the post, and not just the same one liner boring jokes that keep getting upvoted for some reason.

Hey, appreciate the gesture but we are not taking any donations at the moment. We want to wait as long as possible before accepting any.

kinda surprising to see voting is leaning towards ban. if scat won't be on lemmynsfw, where else is it supposed to be in?

Block the community if you don't like the fetish, but banning scat makes no sense to me.

You're right, I've been thinking of how to handle empty communities for a while now.

I've seen some people saying they can't add banner and icons on their communitie because the image upload is broken sometimes so I'll give them the benfit of the doubt. But once lemmy is stable enough we'll make a post that a community with 0 posts will be purged after a certain time (a month perhaps) has passed.

Each instance will have different perspective on it. Some would obviously censor more stuff than us. It will depend on the user what kind of experience he is looking for.

UPDATE: the fault was on our end, one of the admins added an instance in the allowed instances which meant we were only federating with that instance for a few hours.

Sorry for our mistake, and thanks for pointing it out quickly. It has been reversed and things should be back to normal now.

While the other recommendation in the thread are good, I think they are hard to implement things that will take time.

A quick fix solution can be to add a button on join-lemmy which says something like 'Confused on where to join? click to join a recommended instance' that redirects to the sign-up of one of the recommended instances (there is already a list).

This will allow for load balancing and easier time for people to just come and join.

In case people missed it, lemmy devs reponded to this post here https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2977