I mean it’s hard to argue this isn’t true. Mastodon (and Lemmy) have a fraction of the userbase of Twitter (and Reddit).

I want to think that Lemmy will be immune to this to some extent compared to Mastodon, since I think personally Twitter-style engagement is worse and less interesting than Reddit-style engagement.

But the author does address this point a little bit:

We are, however, getting something of a repeat of this with Reddit’s current brouhaha over API changes, only this time with the mooted alternative being Lemmy and, more specifically, Kbin.social. The latter has already avoided a lot of the above pitfalls and is growing quite nicely, but the worry from my side is that the same purism and proselytization about decentralizing everything will eventually bugger up the #RedditMigration exactly as it did the #TwitterMigration.

In truth, I don’t think these things are truly fixable. The decentralized nature of the network introduces inherent issues and trade-offs that ruin the end user experience, and the people who are by and large responsible for anything that might ameliorate those trade-offs are also the people who are least likely to perceive an issue with them. Mainstream adoption as such is not really possible without pissing off a lot of the people who have made Mastodon their home, or at least getting those people to make some compromises they will not want to make. If they don’t want to, that’s fine, but that will have to come at the same time alongside it remaining an obscure, niche network.

The rebuttal I would offer is that if people create higher-quality content and higher-quality communities in Lemmy, then I think people will continue aggregating into it. There’s nothing special about Reddit per se; it started at nowhere too. And there are a ton of subs that required really strict ideological purity so that isn’t a fediverse-exclusive problem either.

Still, I think the article is largely correct about Mastodon, and that it’s reasonable to be concerned for Lemmy.