It’s by far been one of if not the best way to reach their audience for well over a decade. RSS feeds might be well used by lemmy users, but you don’t really think most people get their news that way? Or even know how to use RSS, or what it is. I’ve got friends and family members who have never owned a personal computer, but they have accounts on all the biggest social media platforms.
I wasn’t trying to create an argument, just pointing out not all of those instances are bad. No I didn’t assume that was all of what you meant. To me, it seemed like you didn’t understand the goal of instances like programming.dev. I try to keep in mind that many people are still brand new to Lemmy and wanted to offer counterpoints to your original comment. I wasn’t trying to nitpick your comment, sorry if you got the wrong idea.
I believe the name has now changed to Voyager, which might make it easier to search for.
I think there are some good reasons for servers restricting content. programming.dev is one of the biggest examples of this by not allowing users to create communities, however if you wish to moderate a community or ask for someone else to moderate one, and it falls within the interests of the server, there is a good chance it will be created. It might be obvious with that server, but it is almost all content relating to software development. It doesn’t really make sense to create a community of cooking recipes there, especially since several others exist within other servers. The biggest advantage to this in my opinion is that there aren’t dozens of empty communities. If you look at some of the bigger servers that allow users to create their own, there are tons of communities with 0 posts. I think its good that some servers out there allow users to create any community, but it makes sense for many servers to not.
I’m not a developer but I believe it was the Voyager dev that explained Lemmy currently can’t do this. Apps only reach out to Lemmy servers while they are open. Push notifications would require the developers to run their own servers that the apps would reach out to while running in the background and no one wants to pay for that especially since most apps are free. I may be explaining this wrong.