Because let’s say you’re Tom Hanks. And you get TomHanks@Lemmy.World
Well, what’s stopping someone else from adopting TomHanks@Lemm.ee?
And some platforms minimize the text size of platform, or hide it entirely. So you just might see TomHanks, and think it’s him. But it’s actually a 7 year old Chinese boy with a broken leg in Arizona.
Because anyone can grab the same name, on a different platform.
The other night 337K people all registered to vote, simply because Taylor Swift sent one message on instagram.
That’s the example used by OP to make their point. Just from a technical perspective, how are instances supposed to handle 300k new users overnight?
To come back to your usual argument, do you expect those hundreds of thousands of new users to get a Communick subscription? Or to even support the hosting costs of the instances they would use?
how are instances supposed to handle 300k new users overnight?
They won’t. Not at first. First we will get maybe 50k, LW will do their thing and try to gobble up the majority of users, alien.top can also help absorb part of this crowd and I could even finally convince some other admins to set up fediverser on their instances to help with the migration.
But the important thing is that this type of backing from the mainstream would mean free marketing.
do you expect those hundreds of thousands of new users to get a Communick subscription?
All of those people, of course not. But I expect the increased user base and media attention to bring the following:
- more instance admins realizing that this is not sustainable to be run as a hobby
- power users who want to run their own instance
- companies looking to establish their presence online (therefore looking for a quick/simple way to set up an instance)
- increased usage in the topic-based instances, which can open potential revenue streams.
- more people realizing the limitations of the server-centric approach and becoming interested in a single “Social Browser app”
All of those things translate indirectly into more business opportunities, none of which need to sacrifice the ideals of the open social web.
In that scenario, let’s say for some reason Taylor Swift really wants to give Lemmy a try for whatever reason.
Her advisors have a look around, see the userbase, and conclude it’s not worth the hassle compared to the millions of people they can reach out on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.
Taylor Swift’s team doesn’t even manage her own forum, why would they want to go through the hassle of setting up a Lemmy instance?
The scenario described by OP is “Taylor Swift posts about the Fediverse”, but why would she care about it in the first place?
Pinging @scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech as they are a Taylor Swift expert. Scrubbles, do you have any opinion on this discussion?
I’m actually flattered that I have this… reputation on Lemmy lol.
Personally, I don’t care if celebrities come and join, even Taylor. Honestly that’s one of the reasons I’m okay with threads starting to federate, I see celebrities joining there and then we can sub from our instances. Best of both worlds imo.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a post of Taylor Swift or someone from /r/wallstreetbets convincing the mob to short RDDT and to move to Lemmy, we are talking about any random scenario that manages to get 300k people interested in Lemmy.
