I’m starting to think the Fediverse has the wrong focus. We keep talking about growing MAU and promoting “the Fediverse” as if it’s a product, but that’s backwards. Before Reddit and Twitter, niche communities grew around websites like fansites, blogs, and tools that happened to have a forum attached. People came for the content, and stayed for the conversation.

So instead of just telling people to join Lemmy or Mastodon or promoting sports on Lemmy, we should embed Fediverse features into purpose-built websites. That creates a feedback loop: the site promotes the community, and the community fuels the site. You can build out unique features like scoreboards, event calendars, or curated resources and then use Lemmy threads as the discussion layer. Some users will interact directly on the site, while others can subscribe via their own Fediverse client. Everyone wins.

That’s exactly what I’m trying to do with Vegan Home Cooks. I’m syncing Lemmy posts into the site, but I’m also building out original features beyond just the forum. The goal is for the site to be the thing people discover and remember, with federation as the invisible engine underneath. I’m still figuring out the recipe for success, but I think this model has more potential than evangelizing Lemmy.

Lemmy just isn’t what you think it is. The monthly user count doesn’t matter. If people wanted reddit content they would just go to Reddit. Lemmy is a replacement for the small scale human authored forums of the 2000s. Reddit killed them with embrace, extend, extinguish. Lemmy isn’t a replacement for Reddit, it is a replacement for the thing Reddit extinguished.

I don’t care about reddit posts and traditional social media. If I did I would just use that. I use reddit to moderate and participate in my small community with a few posts a week and I think it is going well.