Aside from the usability learning curve he talks about, the other very pointed criticism is scalability problems that instance owners face. From what I understand, Lemmy and Mastodon are both similar in that they use the ActivityPub protocol. Could Lemmy get too big to scale and still be decentralized?
There are technical ways to solve this. If we can identify some way for instances to determine users’ interests and allow instances to query based on interests, that can reduce load. We can do all sorts of caching to reduce load even further.
It complicates the system, which is a risk, but it leads to a better user experience and better performance.
We just need the right people with enough time and desire to implement these kinds of technical solutions.
Guess it’s time for me read the ActivityPub spec.