Being open source won't prevent this, sadly. 4 years is still young, but if a critical mass shifts back to Reddit then Lemmy will be considered a failure.

[–] RoundSparrow@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Being open source won’t prevent this, sadly. 4 years is still young, but if a critical mass shifts back to Reddit then Lemmy will be considered a failure.

you express very limited understanding of open source and how competition works. Just because Microsoft kept selling Windows and "Linux on the Desktop" never came to displace Windows by 2005, it doesn't mean Linux on end-user machines was a failure. Android Linux came along and is the biggest Linux distro ever, defeating Windows CE / Windows Mobile.

if a critical mass shifts back to Reddit then Lemmy will be considered a failure.

Again, that is like saying "people looked at Linux on desktop in 2003 and went back to Windows, so Linux was a failure". Trying to displace entrenched players is often not how it works, it is when people leverage the source code and some parts of the system in different ways - like Android did with Linux - that things often change.

Regarding Reddit specifically, the Reddit code was open source for a very long time, nobody wanted to leave Reddit for different owner/operators... that changed in 2023 when every alternate to Reddit has seen a surge in developer interest (even non-federated apps like Tildes). That's not really happened in the decades Reddit has been around before that specifically large groups of people and app developers have specifically expressed interest in moving away from Reddit in mass (Voat was the only prior big movement, but API apps were not really a focus in that movement).

By “MySpaced” I mean “become irrelevant”.

8-bit video games stopped selling in the 1990's, but then in 2023 there is a huge "Retro gaming" and "retro computing" movement. Same with vinyl music records going out of style then coming back in as retro. Right now TikTok and video dominate Reddit front page - which Lemmy hasn't even been taking on with video clips that reach Reddit's technology level, let alone TikTok. There are trends of changes that are more than just one platform owners vs. another. Some of those may be in favor like federation/networked servers that Reddit does not have - that even drew the attention of Facebook.