As long as algoritmically driven centralized content pipelines remain popular, the Fediverse in general will not capture the mainstream.

Say what you will about Lemmy and Mastadon et al being “straightforward and easy to use”. I’m sure it is for you. But there’s a reason most mainstream platforms treat their users like absolute cretins: the majority of mainstream users are, and they both enjoy and expect being coddled and catered to by the platform.

The very notion of Lemmy being sharded into “instances” and what that means is so antithetical to the common preconceived notion of what a social media platform is to most people. “Oh, it’s not just all here in one place?” And yeah, federation greases the wheels a lot so no one even has to think about instances… until a community you like is suddenly rendered inaccessible via defederation.

Also, content discovery on the Fediverse is admittedly kind of ass. Only those who both know what they want going in and where to look for what they want really get anything out of it. Most centralized social media platforms are relentless content recommendation engines because people don’t actuslly know what they want until they’ve had it brought to them. An algorithm that at least attempts to adapt to what you want to see more of is a key part of that. Lemmy does not have this (nor should it).

All that said, the fact that Fediverse platforms like Lemmy filter “common people” in these ways is, from what I can tell from here and elsewhere, a feature, not a bug. By being here at all, you prove a kind of baseline competency and a willingness to put in effort to learn the system that sets you at the forefront of most social media users. Most of us like it that way and are happy to keep growth of the community stunted in exchange for it.

Of course, all of the major platforms were in those shoes at one point. Will the Fediverse be the ship everyone leaps to next when the current platforms become so enshittified that even the main stream hates it? Maybe. But wherever the main stream goes, enshittification inevitably follows. The mainstream success of the Fediverse will synonomously be the death of the Fediverse as we know it. I for one would like some more time to hang out here before then.

Probably not, but that’s OK. Reddit is optimizing to be popular, while Lemmy has the opportunity to optimize to be useful.

Reddit largely displaced independent web forums. It wasn’t originally designed to do that; it didn’t even have comments at first, but that’s its most useful niche. It’s not actively optimizing to be good at that though; it’s optimizing for a combination of getting more people to spend more time there and getting people to click on ads. The latter is probably best served by encouraging fast-paced low-value meme type content rather than deep discussions.

Perhaps oddly, or perhaps because my Reddit feed is more curated, I see the latter on Lemmy more than on Reddit. For those who care about Lemmy’s success, you have a role to play. Post in communities related to your interests, or start one if it doesn’t already exist.

I don’t think Lemmy will reach or overtake Reddit. That’s a good thing in my opinion, because massive platforms come with massive moderation problems that aren’t so easy to tackle for decentralised networks. We’ve seen that when someone posted kiddie porn and several servers went down to scrub the filth from their systems.

If anything, Lemmy already has a pretty high amount of troll communities, thankfully mostly contained within their own servers, which enables separation through defederation (speaking of defederation, I’d love to have an option to block servers on the user level).

Probably not, the vast VAST majority of average internet users are basically brain dead and want maximum convinence at any cost, including privacy and being treated right by the service as a user. They quite simply don’t care what happens as long as they can still get their garbage content drip fed to them without any work, learning, or inconvinece on their part. Lemmy is great, but its nuanced and we all kboe how well the general population handles nuance. Decentralization and the fediverse can be hard topics for some people to mentally digest.

It’s not going to be as popular while it’s hard to browse and post in different communities.

If I’m browsing through the app, Voyager in my case, I can read and reply to anything that’s been federated to my instance. If I send myself a link to read later though, I might only be able to read it. Sent links open in the browser instead of the app, and that doesn’t let me comment on different instances.

On top of that, accessibility settings don’t carry over. Different instances in the browser are treated like different websites. I have trouble reading dark mode sites, so I set my home instance to light mode. Browsing to a different instance might switch it back to dark, and not let me change it without creating an account and logging in. That really puts me off wanting to stick around.

I think you can take this even further and ask if any social media platforms will be as big as those of this past (and rather long) period. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. It’s been a very notable period of centralisation of the web from about 2010 or so. And it’s worth wondering whether it was an anomaly.

There’s certainly been some fracturing lately and for good reasons (we were never the customer and the internet has always worked this way with people moving freely).

On the other hand, the idea of having a personal home on the internet, a true avatar and the idea that huge serious things can happen online … both have gone mainstream and probably can’t be put back in the bag.

Against these requirements, an open protocol is an obvious solution, as we’d all tend to agree, but not trivial as corporations still want to make money some how and so may not buy in. Plus getting the protocol right at the right time is non trivial (I personally suspect avtivitypub has not done this and as a result we’re in an awkward position at the moment).

It’s like MySpace and Facebook. The momentum can switch at any moment. Like others said, it’s better to fix some important issues before Lemmy becomes popular.

It’s very likely that Lemmy will be more popular because Lemmy is more open for innovations. This is not Linux where you have to learn something first. If the frontpage is better, people will switch. Reddit cannot rock the boat whereas on Lemmy, each instance can try a new feature and show its usefulness.

Biggest issue is that a lot of features are missing, it desperately needs better moderation tools, and onboarding needs to be so easy that you’re technically challenged grandma can figure it out.

If it solves those, then I do think it’s possible. But if it actually did, companies would come in and try to become popular instances and probably try to cannibalize it.

It should be clear already that the majority do not care about morals, but just want entertaining content regardless of how badly they’re being treated. Even if fedi became dominate, it can be replaced by centralized media just as quickly since they can simply innovate much faster and with way more funding. Lemmy is like two guys doing it full time, so compare that to Reddit’s employment userbase when you compare quality.

It’s inherently niche. If reddit has more controversies can see more waves coming over.

I like the vibe of the smaller forum, but would be lying if I said I use it as much as reddit.

Lemmy still scratches my forum need, but I found myself devoting more time to other things. Probably for the best honestly. 🤷‍♂️

Nope. It’s like Whatsapp/Telegram. If it does the same basic stuff, many people won’t switch for the sake of it.

Also, Reddit got much traction in part because there was little to none censorship at the beginning.

Most of those banned subs on Reddit would be banned here immediately too or if the hosting instance allowed them, others would defederate it.

In a way I’m hoping not; I’m hoping kbin and other similar fediverse link aggregators also get a healthy portion of the pie.

If the quality it’s better don’t mind about popularity.

Yes.

I think it doesn’t have the same problem a challenger to other social media sites would have.

A Facebook killer has to contend with everyone’s friends already being on Facebook, same for Twitter, Instagram, and so on. This problem is probably why threads links to your Instagram account, to try and convince users that their friends are all technically already on the site!

With reddit though? Nobody’s on Reddit because of who they know, in fact people discovering each other’s handles will sometimes lead to frantic account deletions and reinstallations.

For this reason, I think Lemmy will do much better than other killer sites, however, it’s probably still not going to surpass Reddit by a longshot, mainly because while nobody cares about their friends already being on Reddit, they will care about not wanting to go through the bother of creating a whole new account and navigating how the fediverse system works for a maybe better version of what they’re already getting.

Reddit’s overall quality would have to drop into the damned abyss to cause enough of a mass exodus for a competitor to take it out for good.

I assume some will say they don’t want it to. I hope it does so more people are no longer giving money to giant social media companies, or being tracked by them.