Let’s not pretend that these projects are exempt from the real life obstacles. People have real life out there. They get sick, have family issues, change ideologies, you name it. Sometimes the sole maintainer goes missing out of the blue.
Yet some of these projects persevere despite challenges. Solus is a good example.
Assuming what you said is true, this would highlight the fact that kbin was pretty much entirely ran by a single person. Otherwise, someone else would readily take over.
Damn, you did not hold back.
Keeping the verse alive one way or another goes with the spirit of fediverse. The case with .world does highlight the pitfalls of having an instance so big, but it highlight its success. The pitfalls can also be mitigated by having many other instances, big and small (e.g. sh.itjust.works, blahaj, db0, sopuli, lemm.ee, all the feddit instances) that although they have different names, they share the same banner of Lemmy. This is highly successful with Mastodon.
Speaking of the same banner, wouldn’t it be great to have many different link aggregators like lemmy, mbin, piefed, and maybe others to share the same class identity or so instead of what they currently are? This way, they all won’t be treated like competing standards despite being on their own code base and feature set. Maybe with this, forks of the original Lemmy code can be created to address the stuborness of the devs.
Yes, I am aware ActivityPub is supposed to achieve just this, but it also does a lot of things that are not relevant and even confusing to the specific use case (e.g. link aggregator). Also, newcomers would just get frustrated with all this tech stuff and ran off to the warm embrace of big tech.
While that is a reasonable motivation, I’d be more worried about potential fracturing of the marketshare, preventing the critical mass to be reached for smaller ones, while keeping the bigger ones from reaching full potential.
The flame dying out for kbin comes to mind. Mastodon probably saw this and decided they need to up their game.
If we’re talking about feature, wouldn’t it be better to improve on the existing?
I’m definitely not an expert on this, but I find it concerning the massive closed players keep getting all the pies while preying on the players on the verse, waiting to see some weakness to prey on.
Why not Lemmy?
It’s a reasonable concern. The Lemmy codebase development is pretty centralized after all, despite its open source nature.
I think Lemmy, Piefied, and mbin can band together with their shared identity of link aggregator. Fediverse and its ActivityPub protocol in their entirety is great, but it’s too much to keep in our limited mental capacity especially when we’re looking for something specific.
So far, we’ve resorted to “the mainstream apps out there (e.g. Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc) and their alternatives on Fediverse” which is a good start, but doesn’t encompass the varieties out there (e.g. Reddit alternative is often only shown Lemmy).