No Stupid Questions

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

Maybe. Pre-centralization, it was very similar - forum boards run by different people on different servers. A system like Lemmy is basically the same but without the inconvenience of having to make a new account every time, which should make it more accessible in the long run.

What it would need in addition to that is discoverability - if just a few major instances show up high enough in major search engines results it'll be a huge draw. Right now discoverability is kind of abysmal, which worries me a little, but I know people are working on solutions.

Imo what we regular users can do right now that will have an impact is contribute to communities and keep them active, and encourage reddit-based communities to switch over. If we all can prove that this is an effective way to run communities, the people will come.

It's not about what company has the best system and most control, it's about what we as groups of people with shared interests gravitate towards. Lemmy fixes some barriers to running forums and might enable more individuals and small groups to start running their own servers again.

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.

Sure... It's the way of the internet. There's always the next hot thing. Yahoo was it for a minute... Then Digg... Then Reddit...Now... time for something else.

I don't see why not. Mastodon is already pretty mmainstream with more than 13 million accounts.

Maybe, I am an exodus from reddit. I got into it with a scammer. They were doing Cashapp doubling a clear scam. I reported them and was perma banned for harassment. I think they are plagued with bots on reddit. I'm looking for more fashion based and hip hop type stuff over here but it seems like its more of the hard internet stuff like politics and open source drone engineering. If you know what I mean.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 believe that, just like RSS feeds did not become mainstream while Reddit did, the current state of the fediverse will not gain mainstream popularity; however, it'll serve as a stepping stone towards a new federated internet that'll be seamless and intuitive for non-technically-inclined individuals and those who are indifferent to the implications for privacy and digital freedom.

No, not by a long shot. They suffer the Linux problem because they are built and maintained by groups with narrow, specific, principled goals. Like Linux, fedi-services offer at best a 95% solution for the average user, and introduce a fair bit of friction to general usability. For some people that’s not a problem, they are willing to jump through some usability hoops because they find value in the concepts of decentralization and federated services. But most users just want to shitpost, troll, collect karma, and be with their friends. That place for better or worse is still mainstream services and it likely will be for as long as they exist.

Linux suffers from “works for me”, and “I don’t need that feature” by a lot of developers and maintainers of various distros. We already see that from Lemmy with the dev being clear that he isn’t going to be working on anything but bug fixes and if you want a feature then you have to build it yourself. But even worse was the removal of captchas in 0.18.0 and it took a fair bit of back and forth with the admins of various large instances pointing out that captchas, while not perfect, are really the only thing holding back giant waves of bot signups.

So while lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. may work fine for the devs and 10%ers, for the masses it’s just too much friction when Reddit, twitter, etc still exist and they aren’t principled in the same ways such that they will put up with the inconveniences for a solution that only meets most of their needs when one that meets all their needs and has none of those inconveniences works fine still.

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, I don't believe it can and I'm thankful for that. We don't need another Reddit.