No Stupid Questions

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.

Replace? Absolutely not. But it will definitely be a viable product alongside.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I hope not. I'd rather it wasnt mainstream, because that attracts morons.

It’s inevitable for the federation to dominate. I think it will take a few years though

I do actually

I hope not tbh. But I’m selfish. Let the masses have their garbage if they choose.

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.

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.

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.

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 see the internet just going back to the way it was in the early '00s. It's a fresh start to say the least.

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 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.

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.

It depends on how many content creators and important community members will be ready to move from centralized social networks to here

Probably not. And if it ever gets too big, they will find a way to fuck it up 😉

No, but the more pertinent question is why should it? Why do we want that?