Hi, do you think lemmy would be as popular as Reddit ? I mean, many subreddits have much more posts compared to communities on lemmy… sometimes I scroll through Reddit sub top of month and see no end. At lemmy mostly I see 10 posts monthly… I do like concept of moving to lemmy, but it might make no sense if people’s are no active here and tbh I see the trend of disappearing activity
The bigger it gets, the easier it will be to get bigger. It’s more a question of if Reddit falls. If it does, Lemmy is the main alternative.
Let’s hope not.
I don’t think any site should ever reach that point again. The internet should not be four big sites and maybe three social networks. It should be a diverse blend of sites, so if the lemmy creators ever get bored, or mark Zuckerberg gets hit by a car, or Google runs out of money, the entire internet doesn’t go tits up for the next six years.
I once heard the quote “The internet nowadays is 5 websites filled with screenshots from the other 4.” Which is sadly, very accurate.
If you see 10 posts monthly, you’re probably just subscribed to very inactive communities. Personally I don’t really see the need for Lemmy to become as big as reddit though. When you get hundreds of posts a minute, individual voices get pretty much drowned out. If we can sustain a smaller, but less toxic, community than reddit, I think that’s preferrable. By which I don’t mean that there isn’t room for growth still, there definitely is, especially for some of the smaller, more specialized communities.
I don’t want lemmy to be as popular as reddit as the signal to noise ratio was really bad… Way too much noise.
I do want smaller communities that are on reddit to have a lemmy counterpart.
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.
I completely reject the notion that the mainstream success of the fediverse will be the death of the fediverse, what are your reasons for believing that?
Enshittification happens to monetized platforms because they tried to capture as many users as possible and then profit off of them, lemmy instances show no profit motive, and are volunteer run. There isn’t a route to enshittification with federation, because even if YOUR instance enshittifies, there’s still many others that will not, and due to federation, you won’t miss out on any content (as long as your instance doesn’t defed), so it won’t matter.
I also believe the issues you call out, aside from algorithmically driven content, will be solved eventually, as mod tools improve, there will be less of a need for defederation.
Even algorithmically driven content is partially solved by “hot” and “best” being improved, it’s just not personalized.
With the rate of lemmy development being as rapid as it is, these things will eventually be solved, but that takes a lot of time. Lemmy is still barely even beta.
Lemmy is currently suffering from the network effect.
People aren’t hanging out as much because there’s not a lot of content. Less content gets posted because there’s not a lot of people hanging out. Repeat ad infinitum.
What Lemmy needs is people that are brave enough to post in empty communities.
Open license software will never beat paid software in the consumer space. I know that’s a controversial opinion, but it’s been proven a thousand times. There’s no way to beat the user experience of Reddit when they have a hundred experienced UX designers doing nothing but optimising for engagement. We think the overall experience is worse, which is why we’re here, but we are the minority. Lemmy still hasn’t figured out basic problems like what happens to the user experience when an instance defederates from another. The user had no control over that, but suddenly their subscribed communities have disappeared without notice or explanation. Now they have to find another instance to subscribe to, and they lose their entire Lemmy identity.
