I don’t think we can gatekeep it either.
But we can, or not, encourage it. I’d rather not. I’ve never - not even once in more than 30 years online - seen a forum get notably popular without it also, and obviously as a direct result, going to shit.
The great thing about the fediverse is that people have control over which instances they are around, and there will always be some more isolated ones if that’s what you prefer.
If the masses discover the fediverse and move here, that’s not going to remain the case, guaranteed.
They’ll bitch and moan because content isn’t centralized (we’ve already seen that), and the rent-seeking fuckwads will, one way or another, rearrange things so that it is centralized, and specifically so that they can then squat on top of it and suck profit out of it, and it’ll end up just another facebook/twitter/instagram/reddit.
Count on it.
I never really liked Reddit. I avoided it for a long time, but finally relented and grudgingly signed up in 2011.
I was always on the lookout for a new home, and would follow links to any place that looked promising, but none of them ever panned out - they were always too dead or too narrowly focused or too shitty or behind a paywall or something. And I’d go back to Reddit.
Immediately after Spez’s petulant AMA, I happened on a link to join-lemmy.org. I was especially eager to find a different forum then, just because Reddit was set to get much worse much more quickly and the CEO is a twat, but I really didn’t expect anything of lemmy. I assumed that, just as with all the others over the years, I’d browse around a bit, be unimpressed, and leave.
Instead, I looked around and liked what I saw. And the more I looked, the more I liked it. And I just never went back, and have been here ever since.