No Stupid Questions

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 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.

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.

Having more users does not (always) mean a good thing... so I hope not. It's good enough as is, thank you very much.

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.

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

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.

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.

Amateur radio never became mainstream. It's doing fine.

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

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.

It might get a huge boost in usage now that Meta released Threads. In the main page, it said that the app will be able to connect to the fediverse and specifically mentioned Mastodon as an example. Maybe someday I’ll be able to stop using reddit altogether. But that day is not today.

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.

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/

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.

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.

Honestly, it just needs to be large enough to have decent activity; social media becomes garbage as soon as it goes ‘mainstream’.

Need the money to work out; definitely not the same dynamics. Maybe more of the people who care for their communities.

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.

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.