It’s no secret that Lemmy is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Reddit.

I will tell you why this is not true.

Any platform that becomes successful enough to grow and cater to a larger audience eventually gets sold to large corpos. This is inevitable, because the owner usually doesn't have the principles to say "no" to $100m+. This is a bad thing, why? Because you joined the platform due to its reliability and its culture. These things are no longer guaranteed to stay when the owner is replaced. So the previous owner essentially did a bait-and-switch by selling you (the user-base) to a corporation.

On one hand this leads to a more stable platform that can withstand legal trouble and has a steady inflow of money to maintain service. On the other hand, you get cencorship, woke ESG-score-friendly ideology and UX anti-patterns (like when Reddit constantly pushes their app to track you and show you ads). The ending of such a platform is hatred from most common people and aggressive monetization by the owners to compensate for a lower rate of growth. These owners, usually shareholders of publicly traded companies, do not care about maintaining quality as much as they care about generating wealth. This means that they will resort to several anti-user tactics to keep growing their wealth, like for example milking the platform dry with ads & micro-transactions.

Lemmy.world and other large instances are just like Condé Nast Reddit. Same censorship, same garbage. If you think that Lemmy is more free, then let me remind you that Reddit pre-2014 was more free than Lemmy.world. Yes, once upon a time Reddit was much more free and open than the so called "Lemmyverse". Why I say this is because of Lemmy's rules and policies. As an anecdote, I literally got banned from a community for saying that there are only two sexes (no foul language, nothing). For me, who was a Redditor during the pre-2014 era, this was unheard of. Lemmy is less like Old Reddit, and more like Raddle.me (Communist Old Reddit-clone). Lemmy is the LGBT/woke Old Reddit clone. It's not as fringe as Raddle.me, but it is still fringe, and it will therefore not be able to have the same reach as Old Reddit once had. The fact that Reddit is woke now is a bait-and-switch, as I explained earlier. Reddit would have never been successful had it been woke from Day 1. I predict that Lemmy will never grow as large as Reddit because of this reason.

To mods: Leave this post be. If not, you can have your echo-chamber, and I'm fucking out of here.