“hope”? Yes. “believe”? No. But I think it will pave the way for the next step.
“…eventually…”
It’s already starting.
You are right. On the one hand, it’s kind of bad, naive distributed architecture (my day job), it could have been done much better. On the other hand, the more important point is that it demonstrates an alternative to centralized. We’ll learn a lot about usage patterns here, get new ideas, and either improve Lemmy or build something better from the ground up. Big thanks to Reddit for driving users this way to test scalability and get much better knowledge of usage.
It’s amazing that we had the video and image technology to fake the moon landing back in the 60’s, but we still don’t have the technical ability to fake a cigarette butt poll on the internet over half a century later.