No Stupid Questions

I mean... Reddit itself is already very niche

Lemmy probably won't every be mainstream. Mastodon, probably, not confident about it.

I think Lemmy is coming along nicely. There is lots of content for me to consume. I am on lemmy.ca so I haven't seen any of the bugs other people are talking about, it just works except for subscribing to places on the busy instances which shows pending for a while.

People will get used to how this works and I think it snowballs from here.

It doesn't need to replace anything, that's a sports mentality applied to the free flow of information. What this decade has taught us is that the doomscroll is all there is. Reddit, Tiktok, Twitter, etc. all have constant scrolling through content as their main feature. It's a feature that's extremely reproducible. What the fediverse does is take power away from the corporations that want to make money off of the flow of user-created content. By the fediverse's existence, whenever some company wants to rate-limit or ban 3rd party apps, the people can now just say: "Nah."

As others have pointed out, I am content with Lemmy being a niche app with engaged users.

I don't think it'll become mainstream and doesn't have to be. Also, I believe folx are becoming more mindful of their digital privacy. The latter will continue to grow. And that is the new trend.

Technocrats are becoming less irrelevant as well because tech advancements expose their data mining trends and their sole purpose with their "products" is profit no matter the cost (often at our detriments).

I remember reading old science fiction stories where a freer,more bottom up kind of internet existed. Maybe, maybe, maybe we can get a kind of thing like that? We have the technology. Why not?

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.

this kind of setup was mainstream before the VCs decided to try and buy it all out.

problem for them is, you can't really monetize the commons so you can only throw money at things like this while rates are low.

yes, this will be the new mainstream and the protocol will likely endure well beyond many social systems, including this one. However, as its a standard protocol, whatever system you use in the future will be very likely able to host your entire history from here

Yes. I am a typical reddit user and Lemmy is simply a better product.

Yes I do. What I am looking for is federated/web3 replacements for Instagram, and some kind of well encrypted, decentralized messenger app

I think the idea of a federation: websites being able to talk to each other, could be mainstream. I don't think lemmy will be mainstream, but I do think lemmy will be able to talk to mainstream websites on the federation.

What if you could use your lemmy account to buy stuff online, book a flight, pay bills, sign up for streaming services, etc.? The federation isn't seeing its full potential.

Mainstream yes. Fully replace? Never. However I don't think that traditional counterparts will ever be as big as they were before. I think we're seeing a shift in people's relationship with these platforms.

No. But this is not important for me. Where is the crowd? Shit is there.

I'd like to think so but it will take a lot to lower the bar in terms of general confusion with the different instances and federation

I’m hopeful but it will take a while. I want to see where we are in 6 months from now. Apps need to be pushed to the stores (at least on iOS).

That being said, it needs protocols for migrating instances when an instance is dead or about to die. Then there are some privacy concerns and such. It’s also not clear how it all can sustain monetarily except via donations.

But seeing the recent growth spurts and increase in new posts, I am still hopeful that this place has staying power.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.