The communities I want that aren’t on Lemmy are extremely niche.
And this is exactly the communities that fediverser wants to bring!
Reddit’s moat is not on the popular content, it’s in the long tail. Reddit knows that people on /r/politics or /r/gifs are mostly to pad their numbers, but their real strength is that you can not find people to talk about Kerbal Space Program and Rain World outside of Reddit.
These “extremely niche” communities are the ones that are being held by network effects. These are the communities that I’d like to have on fediverser.network, and these are the communities that I wish we could get coordinated enough to pull away from Reddit.
No one is going to bridge all the content on Reddit to Lemmy (…) because of the immense computational, storage, and bandwidth requirements,
alien.top was mirroring about 150 subreddits for two months, most of them of the niche type. The database of “1M comments” is taking less than 10GB of disk space. Looking at the last backup, the whole database uncompressed is 18GB. It’s running on commodity hardware. Even with the mirrors making copies of the images to object storage, my object storage bill this month was a whooping $0.66.
If we focus on the long tail, it is not that expensive. And by the time that we actually start getting bigger number of users, I’m sure that we can come up with different strategies to deal with the data. We can create a common pool of resources for shared storage, we can divide the instances in “topic-based” and “user-home” (like I’ve been doing with communick.news and the ones on !communick_news_network), etc.