This platform could be a viable alternative for forums (cuz we know in which state they currently are), but the lack of general attachments (any mime/file type) is what I believe stands in the way. I have an electronics forum I run (a local one, nothing too serious) and I believe Lemmy can make it more intereactive (not die out) because people from all over the world will get the feed and not just people that are online on the forum at that time.
Still, we frequently exchange PDFs, schematics (not always in image form), archives, etc., which makes Lemmy useless if there are no plans to implement something like this, even if disabled by default.
So, are there plans for anything like this being implemented?
The main concern is storage. If people start storing more stuff, that increases the costs of running the instance.
So I think it makes a ton more sense for lemmy to integrate with existing hosting solutions. Ideally users would be able to upload stuff to their own accounts elsewhere and lemmy would go fetch it as needed.
I meant as in opening my own instance, thus, all of the hosting fees are on me (and a few other people, but mostly me). I currently run that forum, so I pay the hosting fees, things aren’t gonna change much if just switch to another platform.
The thing is (correct me if I’m wrong), if other instances federate with you, they’ll be hosting a copy of the data you store. For images this is manageable (although animated images are basically video), but it will quickly run into the gigabytes range.