Yeah, and in the Open Source nature of the fediverse applications alternate frontends will also be able to thrive. (though the main fediverse app frontends come less cluttered / cleaner out of the box)

Then one must either resort to the official youtube frontend (which is still bearable as long as content blockers work normally, I could not imagine getting spammed with ads) or using other ways of watching like PeerTube. Circumvention should always be possible in a way though as long as Google doesn’t employ DRM on YouTube videos.

Google might start messing up the alternate frontend Invidious too (the exception The video returned by YouTube isn't the requested one. (WEB client) (VideoNotAvailableException) started appearing, which is still fixable though), which is a nice option to view yt without the clutter, especially when not logged in.

In case you know the media player mpv, you can pass yt links directly into it and view just the video through it. You need to have yt-dlp installed for this. Then you can type

$ mpv 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=....'

This is more for Linux though, idk how it is for Windows

I doubt Reddit will really die though. When Musk got Twitter, many fleed to Mastodon, but over time, many returned back to Twitter (?). Digg did fail though, but I don’t know when that happened, probably wasn’t really in the internet at that time yet.

The hardest thing for me was finding the “right” instance to register in, and that is probably the challenge for most people. Going back to the “popular topics” thing, when bigger communities about a certain thing, or entire instances about that thing exist, people might just register there.

My current guess is that you either pick a general-purpose instance or a specific instance of your interest, if it exists.

Another problem I see is monopolization. If there is only one platform with no competition, there is no incentive to innovate. Good example is YouTube. No one can just afford tbps of bandwidth and exa or even zettabytes of storage, so federation (PeerTube) is a way to balance and distribute the load over many individual servers/nodes. (PeerTube also uses a p2p streaming mechanism to reduce strain on the server)

I first saw lemmy a few months ago, but forgot about it. The recent Reddit events have sparked interest again, and I am feeling adventurous. Major Social media platforms seem to collapse / mess up one after the other now, and the concept behind federation is very intriguing (especially that part that even different applications can communicate with each other thanks to ActivityPub).

I think, for mass appeal lemmy will ultimatively need communities for popular topics (games, trends, etc.), which can bring in lots of new users. From what I’ve seen so far the topics are still rather niche, or can’t compete with identical communites on major platforms. When the traction starts getting big enough, it might just run on its own.

This comment is also more or less a test, trying out the platform.