Do you believe Lemmy/Mastodon can become mainstream and fully replace their centralized counterparts?
What the title says. I think there is still a long way for that to happen but i've been hopeful. What do you think?
It's possible. I think the biggest obstacle is that the corporations feeding on people's data are not going to just stand by while it happens.
Another big obstacle is the general UX of these platforms. Major companies have teams of user experience analysis and researchers that, while not always "winning" as compared to product or business driven decisions, absolutely have a (generally positive) impact on the product. Onboarding, retention, etc.
The fediverse has all the standard frictions of most OSS, like talking about itself, it's technology, etc when the fact is 99% of users dgaf.
I might go so far as to argue the perceived complexity is a bigger barrier than the risk of sabotage from other businesses. I am optimistic the growing list of third party apps will help solve some of these issues, as long as they take things like the sign up process and server selection into their scope.
I don't think UX will be that big of a problem, in the past the unofficial reddit apps were all better than the official one. Major companies design by committee and the UX is meant too maximize profit and engagement statistics for advertising, rather than be "good". A lot of open source UIs are better than their paid counterparts. I think PopOS is far nicer than windows 11.
That and the servers are under such stress that it makes for a stuttery beginning for any new usrrs. Even just trying to upvote you and comment was a process. First this page wouldn't load properly, then then the upvote didn't show, then the screen jumped around when I tried to reply.
This site and any other will only replace Reddit etc if it's got people. It only gets people if new users can use the platform. We're not quite there yet. The people here now are willing to put up with growing pains but if it doesn't improve soon people will move on
Decentralized nature of Lemmy is also going to be confusing for the average Joe. When they to go to web site of Lemmy and see a list of instances to choose from, with communities spread all over them they are just going to nope out.
yeah, lemmy's current web app is very much in the "made for nerds by nerds" category as far as i see. lots of cool tools to express yourself and not many useless limitations, but on the other hand it's kinda confusing if you're not that techy. it's absolutely learnable but it would do very poorly on a hallway usability test.
and it's understandable why that is so, lemmy itself is being developed by two people who have their hands full putting out a thousand other fires, as well as sorting through the community's contributions. but there's still a lot that will have to improve in the future -- although I'm completely sure that when it does, it will be way better than what a corporate alternative would be like. those tend to do well with attracting new users but they also tend to be out of touch and suffer from stupid one-off decisions by middle managers trying to get promoted.
If only those expert researchers were more focused on a great user experience instead of dark patterns to sell more ad eyeballs. There's definitely good expertise to crowdsource, give it time.
Even a healthy competitor, niche, or mainstream would be so nice. Lemmy already hits with some solid weight imo.
And do what? Make a better product? The beauty of Capitalism is that consumers really are the final say on whether your product succeeds. You can make an app with as many addictive hooks as possible, but that doesn't make those users permanent. And any sabbotage by Reddit will only dig in our heels at this point.
I hear what you’re saying, but Lemmy was created to oppose the capitalist exploitation cycle. With Lemmy, we aren’t consumers or a product. Lemmy is actually firmly rooted in anti-capitalism and arose because capitalism destroys choice.
Capitalism isn’t necessary for innovation. It is just the private ownership of things. Spez didn’t make Reddit great, for example. Other people did. Spez is just a do-nothing owner who is now the mouth piece for bigger do-nothing owners looking to wring out maximum profit from unpaid laborers.
I’d argue that capitalism stifles innovation, which is why everyone agrees that you need competition. A market economy. And broad anti-trust regulations, since capitalism is inherently authoritarian since it is a top-down hierarchical structure. A free-ish market is what allowed us to innovate so quickly.
But Lemmy is outside of that since it isn’t driven by profit.
I don't think you need to have the largest following to have great value, even lemmy as it is right now feels great. I'll actually want to dive into comment sections compared to the endless scrolling on reddit.
As long as there's enough people using a platform for a variety of ideas and experience in topics, I think that's good enough for me.
Personally, I don't even want Lemmy/kbin to become Reddit 2.0.
Reddit from 10 years ago is the goal for me. Reddit has become far, far too bloated for its own good, and that line was crossed a long time ago IMO. Let's just enjoy what we have. Let all the normies stay on Reddit, the people I wanna vibe with are here already.
The problem is that nitch communities won't get populated unless a lot of people join. The league of legends sub is the largest video game sub on Reddit, and here it's barely active at all.
I want it to be Reddit 2.0 in the sense that I can find active communities for specific or niche interests. Before July 1, the smallest subs that I participated in to have similar communities here were ones that had ~400k subscribers on Reddit.
The value of Reddit was never in the 1M+ communities, any content there was usually present elsewhere, and the discussions rapidly became dumpster fires. It was in the smaller dedicated subs for topics that might not have another human-centric discussion forum.
As a normie, I'd still like to vibe with you.
I agree. A vast majority of the userbase don't mind the countless ads on Reddit or Twitter, on even FB. I think people are leaving FB because it's not cool anymore, not because the UE has gotten worse.
I'm just glad that there now are smaller, more tailored for my preferences alternatives like Lemmy
I think you meant UX as User eXperience.
Big true! I'm actually spending most of my time on Lemmy down in the comment section 😁
Yes I think about Hacker News, which isn’t technically sophisticated nor does it have a massive userbase (a little less than 1 million registered accounts).
It manages to have a steady stream of content and an active commenting base
A big part of it is probably having full time paid moderators to manage their community well.
Not everyone who left Digg went to reddit, and not everyone who left Myspace went to Facebook. "Replacing" reddit should never be the goal, it should be "be better than reddit".
If this is ever to go mainstream, what we should be concerned about is making good, high quality original content. If people see us having fun and being nice here, they'll want to join in too.
+1 for doing your part to build a nice community!
Quick plug for my own communities:
Great point about the high-quality original content. I remember before Reddit was popular, that’s where much of the original content was generated, and it would eventually be reposted on Digg. Reddit had the reputation of being tomorrow’s Digg homepage today.
Likewise, I think the way we know we've made it is when the reddit reposts here stop, and Lemmy posts are reposted on reddit instead.
Right, I don't want forwards from Reddit, I want our own ecosystem.
In their current state, definitely not. There is a real bubble effect browsing on Lemmy because it feels like 1 post out of 3 is just praising the platform, but I think they’re far from ready to become mainstream. I’d say there are for now 2 major problems:
I agree about the bubble effect. I feel it, too, even though I don’t consider myself in a bubble. I truly am enjoying Lemmy and the conversations more than anything else even somewhat similar to it. The smallish nature of the community probably combined with the slightly elevated bar for joining means the riff raff isn’t here in large numbers yet.
Lemmy, today, honestly reminds me of Reddit 15 years ago.
Perhaps this is the bubble effect, but I have a high confidence level in the major third party devs being able to streamline the sign up process. It is already happening in some apps.
The stability problems are another story. I encourage people to go to the front page of their respective communities and look for donation links. Even $1/mo on Patreon can snowball into large sums as Lemmy.World shows.
Stability would be fixed if people realized they don't have to all join the biggest two communities, which is part of the education problem we have right now for completely new users.
Although servers have really been scaling nicely regardless of those days right after the privating and then July 1st
I agree, but I'm also optimistic because the glitchiness, server performance, and user interface issues are all things that can be fixed in the future.
I feel like there should be a button of “hey you want me to handle this for you and pick an instance” I managed to figure out the basics and liked the post office example that memmy uses where I can mail a letter to my fellow lemm.ee friends down the street but can also get mail and news from across the country. Helpful admins are also good. I’m not super duper tech literate but I figured it out.
Like I said reducing barriers to entry will be helpful because I didn’t come here till Apollo kicked the bucket
It's something reddit was actually good at. Tons of people used to find reddit way too confusing because they didn't understand subreddits, so reddit responded by making a list of default subs for the "don't know don't care" crowd that makes up 90% of users in practice.
Sure, it opened a different can of worms in that it tanked the quality of those subs when most users didn't really get the pount of subs, but it massively lowered the barrier to entry on the platform.
We have a much higher barrier to entry with instances, and I really think something should be put in place to lower it.
Agreed with the second part. I think the federated servers are a neat concept, but at the end of the day what made reddit easier was that everything was on one server. You create an account and that's it, you can browse every subreddit.
I hope it'll grow more, but rnow I think they should work on making the whole experience more seamless
Just my opinion but that ease of use will come in time. The more the learning curve exists the more we will get the power users that made Reddit special and the more Lemmy will stay special.
I don't want the Reddit of today on Lemmy. I want the Reddit 10 years ago when there was a fraction of the users on it.
We are doomed to ultimately have the same struggles that read it ended up with in terms of content and users but we can keep it held off as long as possible.
Mastodon is pretty good with federation stuff. All that is different from Twitter is that all accounts have two @ signs in their names but that's it. Everything else is pretty seamless, at least on the phone with the official mobile app
Replace? No. Be a valiable second option? Sure. Like in the early 2000 when you had dozens of major forums for certain topics. Something Awful, GameFAQs, Digg, Slashdot, 4chan, NeoGAF… It‘s not a natural law that there has to be one service having 95 % of the discussion market locked up.
Yes! Very much this. Imagine if lemmy would grow to just a few million users. That's the size of Digg when the migration to Reddit happened! Not everything needs to have a billion users and there's more engagement in small communities anyway.
Yeah. This makes me think of people who assume Tumblr is dead and unusable when everyone left, whereas in reality it has had a resurgence of creativity instead. Things like Goncharov happen because the people there still have a critical mass.
Platform don't die. They can flounder a bit, and I'm sure that even Reddit and Lemmy will one day do so too. But they're there.
Yes, but not in the way you'd think.
I think lemmy won't be easy enough to use for a vast majority of users, they'll stick to the traditional platforms.
However, I think if the hype continues for a while, and the little kinks are ironed out soon enough, it will give rise to a new, different kind of platform.
People have this idea that lemmy will replace reddit and just become Reddit 2.0. I think lemmy is still a place similar to a phoenix burning. The new bird has yet to take it's first breath, and it'll be quiet different from what we imagine or what we are used to today
@utg @nostupidquestions that’s a great way to put it. We are just starting to see what this new social media fediverse will look lol. It’s exciting!
So this is how it looks from mastodon? That's pretty rad
There's still a long journey to go through for lemmy so I'm not expecting it to be popular among people for the next 3 years. But as more and more corporate showing their stupid mindset and lash out more shenanigans, it's not unreasonable to be optimistic that people finally find and enjoy the value of the fediverse.
Yes give me the flaming bird people. It's on my 202X bingo card
Loving the random pheonix analogy
Being on the internet used to be not cool.
Email and www. ... .com was as foreign to the mainstream as the Fediverse is to the mainstream today.
The nerds build cool shit, the corporations chase the hot new thing to milk every last dollar out of the mainstream who want the cool new toys, and the mainstream inevitably ruins the cool new toy because they don't understand how or why it was made in the first place.
This is the way of human nature. It has played out on the internet since the start (and probably well before that) and it will probably play out again on the fefiverse (just look at Meta).
Absolutely not in their current formats.
Sign up needs to be simplified enough that your gran could do it and we need way more professional UIs. After those two things, it could happen.
Agreed. Not sure if there is a fair and easy way for the whole "instance" user distribution but the current set up isn't straight forward. Not to say it was difficult but my experience with it was an immediate thought of this barrier of entry is too steep. It's unlike what most anyone has likely ever encountered. (at least knowingly.)
Like mapping a network drive. Is it an actually difficult task? No. Can any significant portion of the general population identify what I just stated? Probably no. Sure a small percent may go on to Google that and figure it out. But in general I find it bad practice to ask that of them.
Would it be reasonable if some algorithm handled that aspect and just default assigned people based on location, maybe a couple quick questions of their interests, and the hosts willing capacity increase rate? Plus some other factors I didn't think of. In some text could also say you can choose from a list of instances if you so choose or just leave it as is.
It should automatically assign by default, but have an "advanced sign-up options" button that you can use if wanted.
Yes. Sign up needs to be like users are accustomed to. but i think the ui is fine.
Why do they need to be replaced? Just use lemmy/mastodon and forget Reddit even exists. Not sure why people are so hung up on “replacement” when all you need to worry about is enjoying the content and interacting. Fuck Reddit and twitter, comparison is the thief of joy.
Yeah hopefully we get past the shitpost/meme stage which seems to be taking over here right now.
This is a necessary stage for all platforms really and also a breath of life.
Look at how Tumblr was basically dead after banning porn, it has held on for dear life thanks to shitpostingto this day.
What got replaced already was the oligopoly on user-created content. That's all that matters.
I use Reddit for duckduckgo searches (if they lead me there) and to look for info. I interact and post to Lemmy.
Lemmy has a long way to go in terms of user experience before it can effectively compete with Reddit. The majority of new accounts in the last weeks have been spite users. That is, they're here not because they love Lemmy - but because they hate Reddit.
That's not a bad thing, per say. It doesn't matter how people get here. It's more important that they have a good reason to stay.
And the average user doesn't care if something is federated or centralized. They just want a product that works and is simple to grasp. In my opinion, app developers are going to be the gamechanger Lemmy needs Stuff like Memmy (on the iOS app store today!), Mlem, Liftoff, Thunder are pretty much better than the official Reddit app. And that's how most people consume content these days. When there's no enshitification ads or microtransactions - there's clearly going to be a winning experience.
It'll take time, but as more Federation communities build - the less Reddit is necessary. As well, it usually takes a long time before people start catching on that the tools they once loved have turned to into bots and spam.
Mastodon is in it's 7th year, and has like 8 million active users. Twitter had 200 million users by it's 7th year. On one hand, Mastodon is the biggest Federation app. On the other, Twitter was 25x as large. Of course, Twitter is no longer the relevant "town hall" it once was - and is hemorrhaging users and respect. So who knows. It only takes a few celebrity endorsements to get countless folks switching. Who knows
We are so used to the idea that a social media network has to dominate the world - ekse it's a failure. If Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed or your old fishing forum is enjoyed by some people, it's a success.
It's a capitalist habit. People are so used to every company having to maximize profits that they forget this is just a space to share and talk about stuff, not an entity aiming to make a profit.
This needs to be instilled into everyone's brain. If the site grows a community it's a success.
If anything having it not turn into the behemoth that Reddit is might make the community even better.
It doesn't need to become mainstream. I'll be happy to be a part of a smaller but vibrant engaged community. I hope there will be a phone app some day through
I’ve been experimenting with WefWef, which is a web app that works really well on iOS and probably works well on Android as well. Reminiscent of Apollo or Sync.
On iOS you can add it to the Home Screen and it acts like an app. I think you can do so on Android as well, but it’s been a couple years since I’ve used Android.
I am using wefwef on android and it works perfectly fine. My goto lemmy app nowadays
Both Mastodon and Lemmy have phone apps.
Connect for lemmy seems to work pretty good so far, and wefwef looks good too.
And all the reddit app devs making new apps seem like it will make a big impact.
I'm using Jerboa on Android and it's really, really nice. Reminds me of Boost.
Omg didn't even know. I installed it and am trying it now. Very promising
I think it remains to be seen. The rapid growth of .world has been the first real production test of how the platform handles more users and content. Amazing work by the team, but there are a lot of rough edges and it is a new platform with a lot of unknowns.
The things that spring to mind for me are:
The biggest issue would be data retention. Reddit serves as a real world database that stores all the historical content and search engines like google make it searchable.
We're talking about petabytes, and lemmy hardly has a few gigabytes.
Who is going to store all this data, even in a distributed environment, the bigger instances would have to store a few hundred terrabytes (per year).
On the other hand, do we really need to store it? Sure some posts will remain relevant, but many and even most posts on reddit, forums etc are outdated. Maybe communities and mods should decide what posts are relevant and make them permanent, where the rest just get erased after a set period of time that the community sets.
Personally I think its ok for instances to delete older posts to save space provided that there are means to archive threads that users find valuable. For fediverse to thrive it should be as easy as possible for people to setup and manage instances without having to think about the storage space too much.
Archival of historical content is something that I feel should be handled separately.
Duplicate Communities are wanted.
That's really interesting, what are the benefits to duplicate communities beyond one server going offline or not retaining data? Is it better to have a lot of smaller communities with duplicate posts in them and having a quite splintered user base, or having everyone in one place but have the risk of having all the eggs in one basket!
There are still a bunch of UI bugs that remain to be solved. That one is also a big hurdle to becoming mainstream
I think anyone who was around, and online, before reddit/twitter/Facebook became the consolidated social media behemoths that they are, are willing to learn something new. The before-times were replete with smaller communities where your internet handle was the only real source of continuity (and even then, only if you wanted it to be).
But those whose ONLY experience of online discourse is the big 3? It's a lot to adjust to. I don't know if this is what will hit critical mass, but then, maybe that's setting the wrong goal to begin with. Can the communities connected here be self-sustaining for a time, regardless? Definitely.
Personally seems like an almost insurmountable hill to become popular and mainstream. It's not that I don't think it's possible, I just don't think that there is a significant push for it to do so. There's no corporate advertising to help push it.
Is that a problem though? Does it need to become popular and mainstream?
Right! Why does everyone need to be here? Quality over quantity.
Well, bugs and UI aside, it seems like Lemmy can work but there's not a lot of substantive discussion right now. The most upvoted stuff are memes and other low effort content. I'm not sure how long a bean meme can sustain serious activity.
The most upvoted stuff, yes, but if you would block those meme communities (or aren't subscribed), you actually do get to the substantive discussion. The problem is the sorting algorithms right now, hot ranks recent 2 upvote posts much too high, while top ignores smaller, less upvote-heavy communities.
That’s my issue right now. Half the posts on the communities page are about how awesome Lemmy/fediverse is (many of which have been there for days). The rest are either trashing Reddit and Twitter or memes and shitposts. I have to scroll quite a ways to find any actual content, and there’s much less interaction on those posts.
I’ve found multiple communities I’d be interested in, but it seems like many of them had some posts a week or two ago and nothing since.
It’s already getting tiring to have to scroll past the same “Isn’t Lemmy awesome!” posts.
I'm finding it way better to go to specific communities right now instead of scrolling all. The "isn't Lemmy awesome" posts are to be expected until the honeymoon period ends. It'll be at least a month until it clears up.
That's fair, but at the same time Reddit is full of the same, but also has 1000x more bots, shills, and karma-collectors. The actual human engagement is only a little bit higher than the fediverse imho.
Yeah but Reddit has 18 years of history and content behind it. So you will always find something worth reading. Here, I'm losing interest quickly. Memes are boring, I want to see some substantive discussion about something I don't know anything about - something which Reddit and its userbase still excels at.
Maybe, but I wish it would be like the Internet pre-2000. That is, it's reserved for mainly nerds our curious people/ early adopters. I really dislike the modern state of Internet and how bloated it is, and why the heck do I need 16gb of ram just to browse Web pages when they don't do anything more for me than 20 years ago.
Back to the original question, it will grow for sure, but some issues: when I google "lemmy" it brings up the musician in the top posts. Also (and I don't understand how this platform works yet) won't bandwidth be an issue if many people visit. How does that work? Especially if it starts hosting images. I read that it's funded by donations. I know Wikipedia functions just fine on that model but that's an outlier when you look at the net.
Wikipedia mainly survives on wealthy benefactors. Amazon donated a million or so recently, for example.
I had the same with mastodon. How they explain it still makes no sense to me, and it seems like some strange echo chamber where youonly discuss 1 topic, whereas twitter is everything, and you just follow what you like.
Turns out I just don't like the twitter format anyway.
Lemmy.world does a good job simulating what Reddit does, but I don't think it will replace Reddit any time soon
No I don't think that it will. It doesn't need to. I'd rather it stay less mainstream and be like reddit was long ago.
Yes and no. Keeping the spammers away yes, but there is still so much more useful stuff that appears on Reddit.
I think there's good chance for Lemmy and mastodon to become mainstream but I don't they can replace their centralized counterparts. Mainly because I think that the social media in its current form is changing.
While platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and Tiktok are likely not going anywhere for a while, each time these platforms break the trust of their users the more cracks start to form to the service that leak out users. Some of these users will look for something new, some of these users will look for alternate services, some of these users will create their own services.
Many of these platforms rely on the attention economy, so all it really takes to make these platforms struggle is to divide that attention more and more to competitive platforms and services. This fragmentation has been happening for years now with people dividing their attention between multiple services like reddit, twitter, discord, facebook, tiktok, snapchat and whatnot. Now creating similar service for smaller audience is easier than ever and with A.I tools it'll probably get even more easier.
Its a bit similar to video games and live services, with competition for players attention getting more fierce by the day.
Only if we fix the servers and reduce the bugs.
I don't think it'll really become mainstream because honestly, a lot of people on Reddit and other platforms don't really care about changes to the platforms. It's frustrating but in the end, they're just casual users and it won't affect them that much, and that's ok, we don't need every single person to be an expert, yk. I do like the way the decentralized internet is now.
Also surprisingly haven't come across bigotry yet haha.
I don't really think that Lemmy or Mastodon will really replace their counterparts. At least not for now. As many have already said, the federation system is too complex for many non-technical people. It would take something like a de facto standard app, that abstracts everything federation related away and make it feel like another centralised solution.
Another point for me is the searchability of federated systems. Say you are searching for a technical problem right now, google will surely bring you to a related subreddit in just seconds. I have yet to see a Lemmy related search result.
Reddit, in my opinion, has become mainstream due to its ability to be searched via engines such as Google. I think Lemmy would need to have that same level of discoverability if the platform should take off. I'm not sure if doing this risks Google or others threatening the platform via "embrace, extend, and extinguish", but perhaps Lemmy needs to be accompanied by a decentralized search engine itself that can browse the entire Fediverse. I'm new to the fediverse so I'm not sure if such a software exists, but clearly I think discoverability is paramount for giving new users a reason to see Lemmy and maybe stick around
When I first started using it I did not think so. In the week or so since I've sort of wrapped my head around some of it, and now I think it's certainly possible.
The biggest hangup in my opinion is the very concept. As a normie I get to the login screen and I see that it's asking for an instance along with a username and password. That's scary and you're curious what that even is, so you Google it. And that doesn't help at all. You're fed a very technical description that feels like a brick wall of information. It's intimidating.
Once you are set up on a large instance and logged into a good app, subscribed to some of your niches... Well in my experience at all clicked together pretty quickly. The only thing that's missing from the Lemmy experience is traffic. I know there are already some pretty big communities and people are starting to say it's too big or something, but there's many interests of mine that are booming on Reddit that have a handful or less posts here. Naturally things take time, and I am genuinely starting to believe we're on the way there with this platform (network of platforms?)
My only hesitation is, how does it scale? There might be a good answer, but I can't seem to find it. If a specific page gets excessive popularity like /r/memes, is the entire burden of hosting that left to one instance? And can that load be shared somehow, either by adding more physical servers or getting help from other instances?
I honestly couldn't care less. I rather hangout with you cool degenerates than the rest of the mainstream.
Hey! Who are you calling “cool”?
My position differs currently for Mastodon and Lemmy.
In the case of Lemmy, I’m not yet 100% sure. Lemmy’s strength may also prove to be a weakness I feel in terms of it replacing Reddit, in that the decentralised nature naturally creates a dispersion of the audience. While anyone on Reddit could create a community, having them in one place really funnelled people into logically named communities. On the other hand while subscribing to a number of communities for Lemmy, it’s not that infrequent to come across the same or similar community on multiple instances and then needing to work out where you want to go. On one hand it’s probably good to have the varying perspectives and culture this will bring, but I think it’ll also make it hard for users looking for that definitive place to go. It’s very much early days though and perhaps many of those communities will naturally assemble in mass on various instances once the dust settles.
We’ll see how that plays out I guess, and right now my Reddit use is at maybe 10-20% what it was and I’m really looking to invest my time here. I think with time that both Lemmy updates an 3rd party clients will make working across instances more transparent and in turn broaden appeal.
I’m more bullish for Mastodon in the short term. The reason for that is my usage concerns me looking to follow an individual rather than locate a community of individuals. Since people will have one account, there’s less impact caused by decentralisation as my interactions with a person I follow is very much 1:1 (unless for some reason they chose to create and maintain multiple accounts). If I want to follow Apple’s account, they’ll presumably have a single one versus there maybe being 6 viable Apple communities across Lemmy instances. I find my use of Mastodon in terms of user experience is much closer and familiar to Twitter than currently Lemmy is to Reddit. Additionally, once it’s enabled for ActivityPub, I think Meta having Threads throws significant support around that particular ecosystem, and brings it to the masses. Can’t imagine we’ll see a billion dollar company spin up a Reddit alternative that is Activity Pub integrated to give Lemmy that same boost, unfortunately.
To be clear I’m very supportive of both Lemmy and Mastodon and want both to succeed. I do think reddit being centralised has some benefits but, especially for people not looking to invest heavily in browsing across instances, and that it’s to be seen how Lemmy will evolve as it grows and if casual users will be able to sign up and easily find the communities and information they are after. The 1:1 person interaction for Mastodon I think simplifies things and Thread potentially will result in a massive boost for Mastodon. It’s early days for Lemmy and I can’t imagine in Jan or Feb that the majority of us here had even heard of it, let alone considered leaving Reddit. It’ll only continue to grow and I’m excited to watch it do so.
I think that Lemmy has the opportunity to replace Reddit, time will tell how far this can really go. Just weeks ago, posts on here were only getting hundreds of upvotes. However, now I'm seeing multiple posts hit thousands a day on lemmy.world. There are many improvements to make until then, some UI, and UX improvements. I know that many people still have trouble understanding the concepts of federation so until those can be resolved I still think that it's not going to reach that level of accessibility. I think we all know how Reddit failed here and lost many users.
The average user on the internet does not really care about the horrible changes or the ads served on the platform. That type of users make up the majority of the internet, so frankly it most likely won't be mainstream anytime soon. It might get big, it might become popular as an alternative, but as long as the internet is mostly made up of people that aren't much knowledgeable about certain things that people are in here, it won't.
Didn't we used to say the same thing about reddit though?
Well, yes. But Reddit is "easier" to use than Lemmy. For example, Lemmy is in the fediverse, that alone makes Lemmy hard to use for absolute newbies that know nothing much. The average user would expect something similar to Reddit, when they are required to browse instances and find out that there are "multiple" lemmy websites and such. On the other hand, they also have Reddit. They just visit the website, register, and it's all done. And then there's also the recommendation engine. Most of the people are lazy, they most likely would want to get things that they enjoy automatically as they browse the platform. Lemmy doesn't have such a thing, they might open the website, browse a bit and then maybe find out that there's nothing interesting being thrown at them automatically. Plus Lemmy is kind of buggy and the app is a bit "classic-looking". Also it doesn't have much features. So my guess is that before Lemmy can even gain major attention, some other corporate will see Reddit dying as a chance to make a copy of it in mere time, advertise it, and leave platforms like Lemmy in the shadows to rot.
Corporate fuckups come in waves. We will have to wait for the next Twitter/Reddit/Threads/etc. protest wave and see.
Mastodon has a bigger hill to climb because twitter depends on known personalities. Joe nobody has never been focus of twitter. On reddit, nobody cares who the OP is. It's all about the content shared on the platform which by it's very nature is going to be from outside sources. Reddit eventually got its own original content, but at it's core it's a link aggregator with a nice commenting system.
I think it will be hard. However I still have think lemmy will be valuable, successful and fun. At the end of the day though, if lemmy.world or another instance is to reach 3 million subs (for example), that is a lot of costs for the admins. We’d probably need a combination of ads, subscription revenue, or third-party backing. Once investors get involved, then data selling and algorithms get involved.
The way to delay that as long as possible is to guide new users to different instances that are federated to spread the load and costs among all servers and admins.
I would greatly prefer a subscription versus ads or investors. $20-$30 annually for a fun community is very little in the overall scheme of things.
I've been on Lemmy for about five minutes; I think that in time it could take a really strong market share from Reddit, because Reddit, even in its success, is kinda niche. The platform just needs to be functional; the communities are what makes it worthwhile. Mastodon, I think, will have a harder time as it's attempting to ape twitter, which is by its nature a bit broader.
It has potential, bu I hope it will not become like those mainstream soc-med..
Fediverse is like a village where each denizen trying to self-sufficent and helping each others while mainstream soc-med is like train station or mall where users just come and go while giving money to its owner for their services..
We may need one or two mainstream soc-med to be alive to keep up with news or to socialize with normies, but we also need a place to retreat like current fediverse.
edit:typo
I think if we all just leave Reddit behind and commit to Lemmy, things will fall into place. I haven’t logged into reddit since the 30th, and things here have been just fine. I’m regularly getting responses to my comments and there’s good discussion everywhere I look on Lemmy. As far as I can see, it’s only a matter of time before it’s “mainstream”.
Be careful what you wish for.
Some of the best online communities I've been a part of in the past are ones that no one outside of that niche group knew about. Now obviously, that can be very limiting if the people on that site ONLY talk about that one and only one subject, but making a site too vague and too big can be an issue (ex: Reddit).
Like a lot of people here have already said, I think a different space is being created for those that are more in the know. The average person just isn't as invested or versed in what's going on to move to a different platform when the current is working fine for them.
I really wish people would think a bit bigger. I hear "I don't want regular people here/it doesn't need to grow" all the time but don't you wonder how much better things would be if the average person wasn't constantly on a platform designed to enrage and exploit them?
When you can convince your friends to use Signal, you can convince them to use Mastodon and Lemmy... So, I vote 'No' ☹️
I don't understand why everyone is talking about this going mainstream or winning against Reddit. If that happens then in come the corporate interests to ruin it. We don't need to take on the unlimited growth unsustainable business model we can just be happy with what we have
I think it will but not for a while. We need more quality contents and not just beans.
I don't think that Lemmy will ever be as popular as Reddit used to be. The recent events deflated the platform, and Lemmy will grow in popularity on their expanse. At this point Reddit is in decline while Lemmy is not mature enough as a community. Times are changing, and users who left Reddit either in protest of the recent changes, due to a decline in content quality or because of both of these things will find a different platform. It might be the end of the glory days of link aggregators in the style of Reddit, of AMAs, announcements and celebrities lurking and commenting. It was so nice to stumble across comments by Rick Astley or Peter Mayhew (The original Chewbacca), or your favorite YouTuber. I don't expect Lemmy to be able to replicate that.
God I hope so, I'm so tired of every aspect of our lives being monetized or having an ad shoved into our faces.
Imo reddit and twitter had both become too big and bloated, leading to a lit of the toxicity/recycled content. I think there's plenty of room for more platforms to arise and become successful, while the old ones stay "mainstream"
Basically reddit and Twitter will become the new Facebook over the next 5-10 years.
As someone who is currently tutoring computer science courses for college, I think you greatly over estimate the average computer users ability to navigate a place like Reddit, let alone Lemmy. Most people I tutor for intro classes struggle to understand a file browser. Even for me Lemmy was slightly intimidating with how it jumps to the whole open source/ chose an instance thing before I could make an account.
Lemmy will need a basic app before it really jumps to the main stream.
It doesn't need to completely replace the current platforms. The beauty of the decentralized internet is that platforms suddenly disappearing/dying wouldn't mean we lose years or decades of information that was contained in that site/forum/corporate entity.
Decentralization would also encourage a lot of people to go back to blogging, which would mean information would come from all over the web again.
It would need massive UI improvement.
How much horrific awkward teenage shit did Reddit have to go through to get where it is now? Bacon narwhals at midnight, rage comics, bullying an uninvolved brown kid into suicide after the Boston bombings, reluctantly removing CP adjacent subs only after being called out on cable news, the /r/fatpeoplehate nonsense, /r/antiwork mod humiliating xirself on Fox News, the woody harrelson rampart ama, fumbling the bag by firing Victoria, probably 20 more.