Yes.

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).

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.

Let’s hope not.

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.

The discussions on Reddit also were so cliche, and low-effort comments were rising to the top (chain threads). It has gotten worse since.

I’m also hoping discussions are more honest here, where facts and science is used, whereas on Reddit, my biggest issue was it got to the point, that evidence wasn’t important in a discussion (but I’ve already noticed the same in some Lemmy communities. Literally had a discussion with someone recently whose argument revolved around insulting everyone they disagreed with, and they had all the insulting buzzwords to support their argument)

Thats actually the beauty of the ability to defederate from crappy communities here on Lemmy too, we can avoid toxic servers, and we can produce high quality discussion.

I think ultimately though, we don’t have to be as popular. Quality, not quantity is important.

That being said though, anyone who moved to Reddit from Digg, knows how quickly things can change. I suspect popularity here is ultimately growing though. But not hopefully at the expense of quality. If Truth Social gets shut down, unfortunately, I suspect that will lead to growth of lemmy, but things will turn to crap :(

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.

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.

No way it’ll become as popular as reddit but that isn’t a bad thing per se

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.

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 sure hope not

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.

I mean, eventually? If lemmy keeps getting more robust and people keep creating quality content, then eventually lemmy would get mainstream. 8-10 years ago I was very surprised when I saw reddit on the news for a rare moment. Reddit is too mainstream now. Hope lemmy never gets to that stage.

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.