Do you believe Lemmy/Mastodon can become mainstream and fully replace their centralized counterparts?
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
UXasUser 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:
- [email protected] for my take on ELI5
- [email protected] for my take on nosleep
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:
-
The global instability (a lot of bugs, many third party apps, but a poor on-boarding with the main website).
-
It was made by engineers and marketed by engineers. The federated aspect should IMO be public and known, but seamless. It should be possible to just create an account and start browsing without having to do some research on how the thing works. The technical aspect of the fediverse is great, but it’s also its main drawback, I believe that hiding it for newcomers could be a way of not scaring them.
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
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
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.
-
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.
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).
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.
Loving the random pheonix analogy
Yes give me the flaming bird people. It's on my 202X bingo card
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.
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.
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
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:
-
Sign up needs to be streamlined and made more simple, and find a way to not overload individual servers without just randomly assigning people to instances.
-
Live defects, bugs and things feeling rough around the edges.
-
Back-end build and scaling.
-
Duplicate communities across instances.
-
Account migration between instances.
-
Data retention past x period - how will various instances handle this with a large number of users.
-
GDPR and data request compliance from individuals, governments, etc.
-
Funding the costs and resources associated with rapid, large growth. How do people know what their money is going to fund? I think there needs to be real transparency, public roadmaps and backlogs and understand how / if admins are accountable.
-
How the platform and users will respond to large corporations or even individual admins on instances adding adverts, using / selling user data in ways the userbase do not expect.
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
-
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,
hotranks recent 2 upvote posts much too high, whiletopignores smaller, less upvote-heavy communities.We either need something in between or
hotto finally take community size into account.Or there needs to be some way to easily filter out certain communities quickly, because most people want to see memes once in a while, just then return to some meme-free content at other times.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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”?
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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:typoBe 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 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”.
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?
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
When you can convince your friends to use Signal, you can convince them to use Mastodon and Lemmy... So, I vote 'No' ☹️
God I hope so, I'm so tired of every aspect of our lives being monetized or having an ad shoved into our faces.
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.
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.
Mastodon doesn't list old post if it'd from another instance. Maybe it's a setting, but if a server died and the content isn't backed up, it will disappear. But the community can move to another instance.
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.
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.
It would need massive UI improvement.
It depends what you mean by "mainstream". If by that you imply that the Fediverse will become a true public forum, and a place to exchange ideas and form opinions, then yes, I would like for it to be a counterweight to legacy media and corporate content silos. However, if the fediverse becomes yet another astroturfed propaganda outlet, then no, I do not want it to become mainstream. Fortunately, the loose Fediverse network makes it hard to take over and control, provided that the ActivityPub protocol remains untainted by actions of bad actors.
They could if starting out it was easier. Once you hit people with "sign up for any instance ..." you will loose the majority of non-technical people.
My best idea for addressing this is a nice clean hub site at a friendly and official sounding url, with a list of as many instances as possible that have open registration, are marked as for general use rather than as specific niche, and don't have any ongoing defederation drama that'd affect users. Then users can sign up there and be randomly assigned an instance without needing to worry about it.
I think we need to see how the content and platform grow organically over time. Reddit is an incredible resource and forum for very niche communities that don't really have a better place to chat outside of Facebook or things like that - where they can remain anonymous.
The whole concept of different worlds connected to communities might scare some people off - but I think naturally new apps will pop up that streamline this whole thing.
Becoming mainstream started the slow strangulation of Reddit for me. The conversations became more polarizing and stiffling. The takes less thoughtful, and the unoriginal comments more prevalent. So I hope Lemmy doesn't become mainstream.
I do think Lemmy can grow, but if the recent events were not able to slow down the Reddit juggernaut; I do not see another platform coming to rival Reddit.
While I sincerely hope so, possibly unpopular opinion... Lemmy will have to offer a lot more than "Not Reddit". It'll have to build up as a primary destination for a lot of "content of substance" and culture around creating and nurturing it (just cross posting from Reddit will not cut it). It may have to offer communities and opportunities Reddit bans or suppresses, although there should be some red lines there. And, like all Federated technologies, it will have to actively work to reduce friction for potential users.
After using it for a few days and having an account for a few hours (this is my first comment), I don't think it will ever directly compete. But I think it does have chance to represent a "significant minority" of internet traffic if it doesn't peter out early on, and it may already be passed the threshold for that happening.
You'd never say email can "compete" with twitter, but it's still a significant way people interact with the internet. If lemmy does for independent communities and niche forums what email does for messaging, I'd consider it a huge success!
I don't think it's really helpful to think about lemmy and mastodon as "replacements".
They're alternatives, with their own quirks and cultures.
They're undoubtedly a significant step on the way to whatever social media will evolve into. Whether they become "mainstream" or more active than their predecessors is kind of irrelevant IMO.
All I need are the quality people and post and reply from reddit to join lemmy
First post on Lemmy. I hope that Lemmy and Mastodon can replace Reddit and Twitter. It feels hard to imagine right now, because finding communities and signing up is really confusing. I already gave up on Mastodon because it was too much of a hassle.
I don't want it to. I want lemmy to stay niche but active
First lemmy post!
Speaking solely wrt Lemmy, I think what's going to happen is we won't get the "brand recognition" of the technology like what Reddit has had. But, we'll probably see instances get closer to that sort of broader familiarity. So someone might not exactly identify as a lemmy user, but maybe as a Beehaw user.
Anecdotally, I had to try a couple of times to fully "get in" to a Lemmy instance because I didn't know that the hell I was doing. I had tried using gerboa as my client but couldn't understand why I couldn't log in or register on an instance. Then I tried again using liftoff, and it kind of clicked more easily.
Maybe email felt like this in the early 00's? I knew what I could do with an email address (e.g. sign up for MSN and AIM), but I had no idea how to get an email address until I had my siblings walk me through it. I think if any instance can pull off a killer onboarding experience, they'll become the Bandaid, Jello, Kleenex, etc of Lemmy.
After seeing several places get mainstream, the last of which being Reddit: I wouldn't want it to. That's when everything starts to suck. Stay niche. Stay cool.
There will always be niche instances. Federation just solves the content problem of niche communities. Ideally you find a instance with a niche community you like and you interact with them first but if you run out of things to look at you can just move on to the infinite content of the fediverse.
Yeah but this is not Reddit. It is not controlled by a company. It's a decentralized platform, so I don't think it would be a problem even if it did become mainstream.
I doubt it would ever get to a full replacement, but that's fine. It doesn't have to become the new Facebook to still be competent and successful in it own right.
By their nature, both Lemmy and Mastodon will be unlikely to have the same kind of reach, simply because they have the added complication of Federation and all of that on top of everything, which complicates things a bunch.
You also have some decent competitors starting up, which would also split things. Lemmy is competing with Reddit, and the similar services, like Kbin/Threads/Tildes.
Sure, the competition is a bit less direct for sites that Lemmy Federates with, but it's still going to split the user base in some way.
Lemmy also has a few technical hiccoughs and other issues that get in the way of it really becoming popular as it is now. Lemmy.world, pretty much the biggest instance around, suffers from several issues where the code-base simply wasn't designed for the sheer volume of users and activity that they're seeing.
Lemmy's devs would have to go and fix those problems before it could sustainably become a mainstream app.
No. As long as people keep using it I think it can grow enough that people can use Lemmy as their primary app. But it'll never become mainstream enough.
We underestimate how technically ignorant the majority of people are, as soon as it hits the point of no official app and which instance to join people give up.
The only way I can see it working is it they prioritised their own official instance, made it default on an 'official' app so it's just as easy as Reddit or Twitter, but in small text allow people to change instance.
If you automate the right parts, its possible to go mainstream. I mean, remember what a hassle it was to get on the internet 20 years ago? You had to get a provider, get a card for your pc…so many roadblocks got removed and it went mainstream
It will definitely take a while to catch on to the public (if ever) considering the "complexities" with signing up for an account.
You can't just "Sign in with Google" or something like that, plus there isn't one centralized sign up button you have to pick whichever instance you prefer, which to most is to "complicated".
The average user does not care enough about the reasons that drive people off the mainstream social media - in short, they're idiots. So, no, these won't replace the shitty mainstream solutions, because most people just have no clue that they really should.
lmao just because you use alternative version doesnt makes you suddenly become smarter than them, the mentality of "Im using this product, Im superior than you" remind me of those apple sheep mentality
That's basically reddit mentality when it was "cool"
I get that, but the reasons for moving towards fediverse away from mainstream social media, which everyone here should now be well-versed in, are so obvious that you'd have to be an idiot at this point to stay on reddit and use the official app.
Like, you'd have to be an absolute idiot at this point.
Sometimes I hate being this cynical--but I'm afraid I agree 100%.
Let go of that thought. Reddit is (probably) here to stay. Lemmy will have less users, less communities, and tbh, probably less quality content. That's okay. Grow your seeds.
I actually think the opposite. Reddit is here to stay, sure. But Lemmy will become a more niche space and with better quality for those interested, but not necessarily mainstream, and that's ok.
Yeah places like Reddit and Twitter will be much bigger targets for bots and regurgitated clickbait content. There may be less content here but I think it will end up being higher quality.
"hope"? Yes. "believe"? No. But I think it will pave the way for the next step.
No, and they never have to.
Tbh, Lemmy is big enough for me. I've always been more into the comments than the posts, I just like posts to set up context. Lemmy has plenty of comment discussion going around in the communities I like that I'm satisfied. More content would not be a bad thing of course, I'm just wary of the implications of the Fediverse being mainstream.
What are the "complexities" people are talking about when they say that lemmy won't catch on? Yes there were some stability issues and bugs in the last couple of days but that's just a bit of growing pains. I don't see how lemmy is harder to use than reddit. Like you google "lemmy", first link is https://join-lemmy.org/, you click Join a Server and then you see "You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server/instance." so then you just pick one of the instances and create an account.
I hope not.
Places like Reddit or Twitter become progressively worse as they get more popular.
Besides, Mastodon is not a replacement of Twitter. It has the same UI and look&feel but it's very different. Twitter is basically a place where internet celebrities post and other people comment and share. Mastodon is more like regular chaps hanging out and exchanging opinions.
Lemmy/kbin and other reddit alternatives, I think they have a higher chance than mastodon, diaspora and other alternatives more focused on "web presence".
Reddit and Lemmy are about threads and posts, stuff that you're supposed to interact with hours, perhaps days, after the initial post, stuff that you're supposed to look for and find later on. Evergreen content
Twitter and Mastodon are about the "right now". Stuff from 3 days ago is a lot less likely to be interacted with, or stay relevant. It needs new content to be consumed on a daily basis, just like Pixelfed (fed insta) or Tiktok. I think that makes Mastodon less likely to remain relevant long term, but what do I know?
I think it would be pretty difficult for Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin to become bigger than for-profit counterparts. For-profit businesses can raise loads of funding and spend all that money on lots of engineers to refine their platforms.
But I do think the fediverse is pushing big tech to alter their platforms. E.g. Meta planning to support ActivityPub in Threads.
By the time it’s gained adoption with a more flexible and strongly principled user base, I’m sure there will be a next thing to dethrone fediverse apps.
Software development principles and modern conventions are surprisingly cyclical, I’d argue that in 5-10 years’ time, if the fediverse picks up, some startup is going to say “are you tired of the same old fractured, fragmented ecosystem? Meet consolishare, a revolutionary idea of taking all the features you know and love from the fediverse and consolidating them into one sharing platform.”
Who knows though.
Tooling/apps will help dramatically. At the moment, it’s nowhere near as rich as the ecosystem that once was around platforms like Reddit.
All this talk about “well, the UX”, “if the servers can”, “but the big companies”, bla, bla, bla. I’m here right now. There is nothing else as far as I’m concerned. Twitter and Reddit are dead to me and I absolutely love Mastodon and Lemmy. I quit Facebook many years ago and never found an alternative for that, outside of starting a shared photo group on iOS with my family.
You better start believing in fediverse alternatives…you’re in one.
Heck yeah brother! I like that energy
🙌
Personally, not in the near future. If the process to sign up gets more streamlined along with people not worrying too much about the federation part, then yeah it has a chance. I saw some reddit threads on a post that explains how federation works, and there was a lot of push back because they felt they had needed to understand everything to even use the website.
Belief is the acceptance of a claim without evidence. There is evidence that Lemmy and Mastodon can, with time, replace their centralized counterparts.
So do I believe it? No. I know it can happen though. Will it happen? Definite maybe. First, all the users that are bunched up on three big servers need to learn the painful lesson of how a federated architecture works. It’s in their best interests to find small instances of lemmy and have accounts there. Why, because all the huge instances of lemmy are having trouble staying functional. Lemmy.world has 87,000 users and an uptime of 97%. That means it experiences 11 days of downtime a year. Almost a day per month. Sh.itjust.works has around 10,000 users and a 99% uptime by comparison (still 3 to 4 days a year of downtime). Many smaller instances have 100% uptime. Look for yourself.
Another thing future users (not users yet) need to stop using as an argument (excuse) is, “but if I have an account on a site and it disappears, I lose my account.” Well, first, that’s true of the centralized service you’re using. And don’t talk to me about “too big to fail…” arguments. If there’s one thing Twitter, Reddit, and YoutTube have proven, it’s that you are irrelevant and disposable. They may not vanish, but the long lasting stupid they do for the sake of… I don’t even know what… has led to multiple migrations to distributed environments.
Are distributed environments perfect? No. They ARE improving though. And the fact is, in a distributed environment when one instance enacts something that you don’t feel is in your best interest… You go to another instance. No drama, no fanfare… just move.
Having more users does not (always) mean a good thing... so I hope not. It's good enough as is, thank you very much.
Amateur radio never became mainstream. It's doing fine.
I think we can... If we think about Disneyland.
Disneyland is a very complicated place with endless things to do and different directions to choose, but you walk in through one simple front door after buying one simple ticket, so it's not as scary to make first approach. Once you're in, you can craft your own adventure, but you have to get in to have the chance.
I know it's somewhat in conflict with a federated future, but for the "mass migration" portion at least, there are just a LOT of choices to make before you've experienced a single benefit out felt delighted by the familiar features of these communities. For that reason, many will be too intimidated to even start.
In the short term it will keep us small and keep certain low effort people out (maybe why energy is fairly ideal here, for now at least). In the long term though, may mean we never gain the mass to threaten the reddits of the world.
Maybe a centralized entry point run by someone else (or the Lemmy devs themselves)? It could explain concepts unique the fediverse and why picking the instance you make your account on is important. From then on, people don’t really need to worry about what instance they’re on (unless the instance they’re on goes on a defederating spree), which removes some of the complexity
I don't want lemmy and mastodon specifically traced their centralized counterparts. I only want the average person to have access to and knowledge of their options.
Imo we don't need to replace anything, this is really nice the way it is. Yes some users for more interactions and content definitely of course would be nice for more people to use it.
I don’t know a lot about lemmy.world, but it seems to be running on “a server”. The person that wrote this may have used it as a simpler way to mean “the overall infrastructure that runs lemmy”.
However, if it really is “a server”, there will eventually be a breaking point where continuing to scale gets a lot harder, more complex, and more expensive. A lot of people don’t really understand that a site like Reddit has a massive infrastructure as its foundation. That’s how it can handle millions of connections, billions of comments, and stay - more or less - available.
It’s expensive to run.
Lemmy can’t ever hope to replace Reddit without some kind of significant investment in infrastructure and possibly development. If the code isn’t written to support scaling out (as opposed to scaling up and just throwing more RAM, CPU, and storage at a single system), it can’t replace Reddit.
That’s not to say that I’m not loving Lemmy. I do. I have barely opened Reddit since Friday after apollo died. At some point, though, money will become a factor here as well.
I have both a Lemmy and Mastodon account besides my Twitter and Reddit account. Every person and channel I follow on both Twitter and Reddit, I immediately follow on Lemmy and Mastodon once they have an account and channel over there. But it's all about content and interaction. Keeping track of the Ukraine war, for instance, was difficult on Mastodon. But posting on Mastodon was a much nicer experience in regard to interaction with members over there.
Mastodon: No. It's a very shitty alternative to Twitter where the quality depends wholly on the instance you join. The discoverability of federated content is so bad that if you go into that tab, you just see nothing but porn.
Lemmy: Possibly... It feels like a far less astroturfed alternative to Reddit.
unfortunately, probably not
it has nothing to do with how the coummnities are ran or what technology/apps we have, the issue is that decentralised networks almost always have worse infrastructures compare to centralised ones. lemmy.world is already lagging quite a bit, and eventually the admins will be overwhelmed by the shear number of users.
Unless federation figures out a way to distribute load or monetize for server cost, I dont think it will become mainstream
Literally all you have to do is join another instance brother, that's how you distribute load. As for monetization, we'll cross that bridge when we get there.
Here I’m referring to automatic load distribution. Expecting users to actively choose a good server requires quite a bit of technical knowledge (how servers work) and effort (search and compare), thats probably not something the general public is willing to do
I think the average and below average users aren't going to figure that out lol
If the mods don't fuck it up like removing the instance, banning people for some nonsense and people donate so that they can keep their servers up and running
It's possible but we need to be careful with META, they can mess things up
https://www.reuters.com/technology/meta-launch-twitter-like-app-threads-2023-07-04/
https://fabulous.systems/posts/2023/06/meta-is-a-danger-to-the-fediverse/
https://fediversereport.com/meta-plans-on-joining-the-fediverse-the-responses/
Thank you for the links, interesting view points on the impact Meta could have.
I believe it can, at least Lemmy. Not saying it will or won't, just that it can. I don't use Mastodon (or Twitter) enough to have an opinion on that.
Yes
It's unpredictable though. Too many influences on that. People, interaction, systematic. Reddit has the size it could remain, or rebound. Lemmy as a project or platform could fuck up.
Lemmy/Fediverse is a sizeable niche now and has a chance to - over time - scale up significantly.
Maybe. Pre-centralization, it was very similar - forum boards run by different people on different servers. A system like Lemmy is basically the same but without the inconvenience of having to make a new account every time, which should make it more accessible in the long run.
What it would need in addition to that is discoverability - if just a few major instances show up high enough in major search engines results it'll be a huge draw. Right now discoverability is kind of abysmal, which worries me a little, but I know people are working on solutions.
Imo what we regular users can do right now that will have an impact is contribute to communities and keep them active, and encourage reddit-based communities to switch over. If we all can prove that this is an effective way to run communities, the people will come.
It's not about what company has the best system and most control, it's about what we as groups of people with shared interests gravitate towards. Lemmy fixes some barriers to running forums and might enable more individuals and small groups to start running their own servers again.
Sure... It's the way of the internet. There's always the next hot thing. Yahoo was it for a minute... Then Digg... Then Reddit...Now... time for something else.
Need the money to work out; definitely not the same dynamics. Maybe more of the people who care for their communities.
this kind of setup was mainstream before the VCs decided to try and buy it all out.
problem for them is, you can't really monetize the commons so you can only throw money at things like this while rates are low.
yes, this will be the new mainstream and the protocol will likely endure well beyond many social systems, including this one. However, as its a standard protocol, whatever system you use in the future will be very likely able to host your entire history from here
I can only hope so. People understand that email is decentralized and that an @gmail can talk to @aol. They also understand that someone using an iPhone with Verizon can text someone using an Android phone in AT&T. But, they need incentive to leave. I was perfectly aware of reddit, but didn't join until digg updated to V4. Ive know about fediverse, but didn't bother joining until recently. Most people won't leave platforms they are used to.
Honestly, it just needs to be large enough to have decent activity; social media becomes garbage as soon as it goes ‘mainstream’.
If a simpler/streamlined on boarding for Lemmy and the like gets going then yes. The average computer user enjoyed reddit for just that, simplicity. The average computer user has zero idea about Federation, instances, hosting, etc. and will have little to no desire to learn. The benefits have to outweigh the cons by a significant margin to get people on board yet another social media platform. Meta and Twitter are definitely shooting themselves in the foot and the possibilities for a federated platform are beyond what we can currently imagine. Lemmy and the like are in their infancy so we will see how the growing pains are handled.
I think, as others in here have already mentioned – There needs to be either inclusion of Federated services on current search engines, or a new search engine that natively incorporates the Fediverse. Though the issue with the second option there is it basically moves the goal posts a little rather than aims to tackle the core issue.
Maybe, I am an exodus from reddit. I got into it with a scammer. They were doing Cashapp doubling a clear scam. I reported them and was perma banned for harassment. I think they are plagued with bots on reddit. I'm looking for more fashion based and hip hop type stuff over here but it seems like its more of the hard internet stuff like politics and open source drone engineering. If you know what I mean.
I don't think it will go mainstream due to the Reddit drama but I do think it will hit critical mass due to it, and hiring critical mass will give it a chance to go mainstream. The biggest issue I've seen people have with Lemmy and the fediverse is the onboarding process, and that is a very solvable problem.
We used to say the same thing about GNU/Linux on the desktop, and we were/are ridiculed constantly. The fact is that it is. While Android isn’t the same as Linux, it (and every other consumer platform besides MacOS, iOS and Windows) is based on Linux.
When Instagram Threads is released in a day-and-a-half, (and if it lives upto it’s potential and isn’t just a case of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish), ActivityPub and the Fediverse will be mainstream.
No and I hope they don’t. At first that’s what I wanted for mastodon / Lemmy but as I’ve been here I’ve realized that having too many people invariably dilutes the quality of content since popularity means shouting over more voices and content which is generic or manipulative (rage bait) or appeals to the least common denominator bubbles up. There’s a critical mass needed for quality and content variety, but too much and it falls apart.
Lemmy: yes
Mastodon: ONLY IF IT CHANGES ITS SHITTY, CLUMSY, UGLY, UNINTUITIVE NAME to something with more of the following features:
- Two syllables with the accent on the first (trochee)
- Bright, sharp consonant and sibilant phonemes that pop (instead of dull, wooden, sonorous ones that flop)
- Has a v or r sound in it to make it sound powerful
- Bouncy and fun to say, therefore memorable
For example, it might catch on with a name like "Trunky" - I'm sure people who are more creative than me might come up with even better names.
If we're talking names, Lemmy is also not really good name, because when you search for it, you find Motorhead dude first
That's true! AND mastodon also has that exact same problem because there's a metal band named mastodon! It's like, how do people fuck up twice in the exact same way in the exact same context (social media services) - are they fucking TRYING to fail?
No, I don't believe it can and I'm thankful for that. We don't need another Reddit.
No, not by a long shot. They suffer the Linux problem because they are built and maintained by groups with narrow, specific, principled goals. Like Linux, fedi-services offer at best a 95% solution for the average user, and introduce a fair bit of friction to general usability. For some people that’s not a problem, they are willing to jump through some usability hoops because they find value in the concepts of decentralization and federated services. But most users just want to shitpost, troll, collect karma, and be with their friends. That place for better or worse is still mainstream services and it likely will be for as long as they exist.
Linux suffers from “works for me”, and “I don’t need that feature” by a lot of developers and maintainers of various distros. We already see that from Lemmy with the dev being clear that he isn’t going to be working on anything but bug fixes and if you want a feature then you have to build it yourself. But even worse was the removal of captchas in 0.18.0 and it took a fair bit of back and forth with the admins of various large instances pointing out that captchas, while not perfect, are really the only thing holding back giant waves of bot signups.
So while lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. may work fine for the devs and 10%ers, for the masses it’s just too much friction when Reddit, twitter, etc still exist and they aren’t principled in the same ways such that they will put up with the inconveniences for a solution that only meets most of their needs when one that meets all their needs and has none of those inconveniences works fine still.
I believe that, just like RSS feeds did not become mainstream while Reddit did, the current state of the fediverse will not gain mainstream popularity; however, it'll serve as a stepping stone towards a new federated internet that'll be seamless and intuitive for non-technically-inclined individuals and those who are indifferent to the implications for privacy and digital freedom.
As others have pointed out, I am content with Lemmy being a niche app with engaged users.
I don't think it'll become mainstream and doesn't have to be. Also, I believe folx are becoming more mindful of their digital privacy. The latter will continue to grow. And that is the new trend.
Technocrats are becoming less irrelevant as well because tech advancements expose their data mining trends and their sole purpose with their "products" is profit no matter the cost (often at our detriments).
I think the idea of a federation: websites being able to talk to each other, could be mainstream. I don't think lemmy will be mainstream, but I do think lemmy will be able to talk to mainstream websites on the federation.
What if you could use your lemmy account to buy stuff online, book a flight, pay bills, sign up for streaming services, etc.? The federation isn't seeing its full potential.
I think this is the answer.
Lemmy and (maybe) Mastodon (I don't know enough about it) will be the inspiration for something that goes mainstream - but I do think that they'll be the Myspace to the next big things Facebook - Perfect for people who know how to take advantage of it and it will be a mild success because of it; but someone will come along, streamline and spruce it up and that will be the new standard
I don't think the fediverse has a realistic shot of breaking into the mainstream. However, I DO believe it has an outside chance of building up enough of a userbase to become a viable reddit alternative for me.
Mainstream? Not a chance. Many people know Twitter and Facebook, but they don't know what Lemmy or Reddit is, for example, and therefore don't use it.
And it usually doesn't matter if solution A is better than solution B. What becomes mainstream and what doesn't usually depends on other things.
Yes. I am a typical reddit user and Lemmy is simply a better product.
No. But this is not important for me. Where is the crowd? Shit is there.
Eventually, yes.
I'd like to think so but it will take a lot to lower the bar in terms of general confusion with the different instances and federation
I’m hopeful but it will take a while. I want to see where we are in 6 months from now. Apps need to be pushed to the stores (at least on iOS).
That being said, it needs protocols for migrating instances when an instance is dead or about to die. Then there are some privacy concerns and such. It’s also not clear how it all can sustain monetarily except via donations.
But seeing the recent growth spurts and increase in new posts, I am still hopeful that this place has staying power.
mainstream's not all it's cracked up to be..
Yes I do. What I am looking for is federated/web3 replacements for Instagram, and some kind of well encrypted, decentralized messenger app
Signal is well encrypted and very much respects privacy of data, but I don't think it's federated. It can interface with normal texts though iirc
I'm already there, and acknowledge my sample size is low. :)
I think Lemmy is coming along nicely. There is lots of content for me to consume. I am on lemmy.ca so I haven't seen any of the bugs other people are talking about, it just works except for subscribing to places on the busy instances which shows pending for a while.
People will get used to how this works and I think it snowballs from here.
Mainstream yes. Fully replace? Never. However I don't think that traditional counterparts will ever be as big as they were before. I think we're seeing a shift in people's relationship with these platforms.
I remember reading old science fiction stories where a freer,more bottom up kind of internet existed. Maybe, maybe, maybe we can get a kind of thing like that? We have the technology. Why not?
It doesn't need to replace anything, that's a sports mentality applied to the free flow of information. What this decade has taught us is that the doomscroll is all there is. Reddit, Tiktok, Twitter, etc. all have constant scrolling through content as their main feature. It's a feature that's extremely reproducible. What the fediverse does is take power away from the corporations that want to make money off of the flow of user-created content. By the fediverse's existence, whenever some company wants to rate-limit or ban 3rd party apps, the people can now just say: "Nah."
Only if a site like join-Lemmy.org can be promoted on every instance and actually direct you to a server that isn’t overloaded and is fully federated.
Right now, it directs you to sadly overloaded servers that are terrible choices.
If that doesn’t happen, then some big instance needs to scale up with its popularity and be well funded by someone for some reason.
I doubt it, it's not complicated to use, but also not an out of the box experience like other platforms
No, but the more pertinent question is why should it? Why do we want that?
No and I hope they don’t. At first that’s what I wanted for mastodon / Lemmy but as I’ve been here I’ve realized that having too many people invariably dilutes the quality of content since popularity means shouting over more voices and content which is generic or manipulative (rage bait) or appeals to the least common denominator bubbles up. There’s a critical mass needed for quality and content variety, but too much and it falls apart.
I don't think it will happen until there are enough informed users, unique information and welcoming communities that create a strong reason to come here. Currently it's quite nice and these things do exist to an extent, but due to the relatively small size the communities feel much less bustling than those on Reddit and I don't think most people we see any advantages to use Lemmy over Reddit. Lemmy will gradually grow, but unless Reddit completely implodes I doubt there will be a significant enough migration here that we would be able to call it mainstream.
No and I hope they don’t. At first that’s what I wanted for mastodon / Lemmy but as I’ve been here I’ve realized that having too many people invariably dilutes the quality of content since popularity means shouting over more voices and content which is generic or manipulative (rage bait) or appeals to the least common denominator bubbles up. There’s a critical mass needed for quality and content variety, but too much and it falls apart.
Yes, will it? No.
I hope not. I'd rather it wasnt mainstream, because that attracts morons.
No, but it's a step in the right direction to rolling back Web 2.0 and the utter shitshow it's turned into.
Open protocols and no single company in charge is like IRC, newsgroups and so on, before we traded it all in for a nicer UI and handing all our data to future billionaires.
It needs to be able to evolve though. IRC could have become Discord, but we just abandoned it. Watch that do the same as everyone else over the next few years, as all those venture capitalists start asking for their money back.
I'm less worried about Lemmy becoming mainstream, and more worried about if it's good enough for me. Right now, it seems more than good enough, and I love the fact that it's not relying on corporate backing or ad revenue.
Mastodon seems like it's approaching an inflection point, especially with the upcoming arrival of Threads. It sounds like Threads won't support ActivityPub on day one, but with that support presumably arriving in the near future, I think a lot of what's happening on the fediverse could be legitimized. I just hope Facebook doesn't do the same thing they did with XMPP ten years ago.
Probably not. And if it ever gets too big, they will find a way to fuck it up 😉
Imo, Reddit has no moat. Twitter's only moat is community notes. In principle, community notes could be replicated and scaled to the size of the internet, adding comments to any arbitrary link and run like Wikipedia.
I don't think they will be the services that do it but maybe the next round will. We are basically waiting for boomers to die off and the portion of GenX that never took to understanding technology. After that we have a society that has basically always had the internet and then its just a matter of education.
Also i think the biggest obstacle is the naming and management of instances. Stop giving your instances stupid names. Midwest.social makes sense as its a social network for people who live in the Midwest. Fanaticus.social could be slightly better but still, made for sports fans. Lem.ee and lemmy.world and all those makes all non-tech nerds scratch their head as to which one to go to. Yeah its federated and people can access any instances but they wont get that if they never sign up. Pick a topic and have that be the gateway to other instances.
I hope not tbh. But I’m selfish. Let the masses have their garbage if they choose.
It’s inevitable for the federation to dominate. I think it will take a few years though
I honestly think it's unlikely. Not because Lemmy is bad or that the tech couldn't handle it. But Lemmy isn't really profit driven - there's no way to really build a moat without defederating, and therefore no capitalist reason to advertise and grow a server - all that would do is increase infrastructure burden and then leave the server owner trying to figure out how to recoup the cost. And if they start running ads, charging fees or running people nuts with merchandizing, that growth they paid for is likely to scatter to other servers offering the same access to content.
So if growing tall isn't likely, what about growing wide? Well, maybe. I'm still extremely new to Lemmy World, but from what I can tell to run a Lemmy instance you have to have or be willing to learn a basic understanding of Linux, and be willing to charitably donate your hardware/bandwidth to the public. That might work out, or that might be constrained either by freeloaders scaling faster than donors, or the learning curve proving too much a barrier to entry. Wikipedia worked out, but it still has to occasionally prod its users to remind them it needs money to keep afloat.
Hmm, I'm mixed about this. If it were going mainstream, some big corp would take notice, join the federation and then eventually enshittify it (see current state of emails where small players have trouble federating with big players such as gmail and outlook). Then we'll have to flee again to a new alternative. But then again, trying to become mainstream is a helpful goal to make fediverse apps actually usable for average people.
replace? no. and that is okay, to be honest and i think part of the appeal is because of the smallness and genuine interactions, deep discussions etc
It's like in voting. Everyone lets do their part. Inviting colleagues, friends. And that will make it become such.
Mainstream users value ease of use in a way only a centralised service can offer. Also any social service has the hurdle of being where everyone else is, so every other person in your circles must follow what the simplest and laziest one bothers to use. If you have to resort explaining anything how the platform technically works to use it or to find you, you have already lost.
But I think these platforms are crossing the critical mass (if not already happened) to be useful and fun for those who choose to overcome the tiny hurdles of using the platform. It may be even their strength that not everyone and their mother is active there.
I do actually
It could be the new public internet, where you don't have paywalls to participate or you don't have a censorship team behind your thoughts.
There is always the censorship factor - it all depends on the team managing the instance you are on. Hopefully they manage it well - like most admins do.
I see the internet just going back to the way it was in the early '00s. It's a fresh start to say the least.
That would be nice but I'm doubtful. Too many people make far too much money from centralization.
I think it'll be a balance. Less 90s internet and more ~2010 internet. Mainstream platforms will stay big, popular and centralised, but the internet has billions of users now. There can be massive thriving networks of people doing their own thing on platforms like Lemmy at the same time as millions of people flock to Twitter or Facebook or whatever.
Yeah, I didn't consider that. I guess it's more unknown since it comes down to the economy and how things are in the future.
Replace? Absolutely not. But it will definitely be a viable product alongside.
No, I don’t think it will grow as big as the other socials. Because for the average Joe Normie it is way too complicated to understand what the fediverse is, and where they should sign up or post. In other words: the entry barrier is substantially higher than the competition.
However with simplified browsers like Wefwef it makes things a bit easier, and I do think it can grow reasonably big. Maybe in the future when there is more information available and the fediverse has matured.
There is a path but a lot of work needs to happen and a established community directory needs to be established so people can find what they are looking for.
No... Because unfortunately a lot of the complexity needs to be abstracted away.
I've been here for a few days now, the complexity is nice, but it isn't conducive to users, maybe Sync can abstract away a lot of the complexity.
As it stands, no Lemmy isn't a thing, and you know it too.
See "Threads" from meta it tries to go on the fediverse
I remember reading old science fiction stories where a freer,more bottom up kind of internet existed. Maybe, maybe, maybe we can get a kind of thing like that? We have the technology. Why not?
I'm hoping it won't. I've had discussions with my friends from the earlier days of the Internet. The Internet was a much nicer place when you didn't have everyone and their grandma on it. You actually had to be tech literate to use it. This resulted in higher quality interactions and content. You still had undesirable groups and places, but they were sectioned off to their own corner. Now, social media and its algorithms give everyone a soapbox. I'd rather they stay off my fediverse lawn.
Possibly, but I kind of don't want to see it happen. I like the smaller communities here. Feels like my people here and I just joined not even a week ago
It kind of reminds me of the olden mIRC days.
oh fuck I hope not.
Mastodon with the meta thing no thanks .lemmy ? Maybe but for that we need more instance . At least local one for each country .
It will take a lot of time before that happens, if it does at all. The platform just needs more people and right now as much as we like to believe Reddit is dying… it still has a massive user base.
Ultimately I see corporations owning all the most popular servers, and attempting to federate with everyone else.
Not until the tendency for the mainstream to gravitate to centralization is changed. Lemmy will need exponential growth to become large enough in userbase to be a mainstream consideration to use the federated replacement.
It can but given how media is ignoring it I dont see that happening in near future. Us user will have to shape the future of the fediverse and I think that is the best thing.
By the time it’s gained adoption with a more flexible and strongly principled user base, I’m sure there will be a next thing to dethrone fediverse apps.
Software development principles and modern conventions are surprisingly cyclical, I’d argue that in 5-10 years’ time, if the fediverse picks up, some startup is going to say “are you tired of the same old fractured, fragmented ecosystem? Meet consolishare, a revolutionary idea of taking all the features you know and love from the fediverse and consolidating them into one sharing platform.”
Who knows though.
Tooling/apps will help dramatically. At the moment, it’s nowhere near as rich as the ecosystem that once was around platforms like Reddit.
Yes, and it won't be as wild-westy as people may like to think thanks to common sensibilities.
No, nothing can. But like everything else in life, they’ll just grow and add to what was there before. A direct replacement would be unnatural. Even AOL is still around.
Yes. Facebook/Meta is attempting to get in on the ground floor. It's important to tell people that there are safer, open, free alternatives to Meta attempting to infiltrate this space. Now's the time to spread the word and stop these corporations.
no
No, I think meta is going to kill it and it'll have been fun while it lasted.
Nope
Unless it politically comes to the center, then absolutely not. Right now it’s a circle-jerk of tankies.