No Stupid Questions

I think if we all just leave Reddit behind and commit to Lemmy, things will fall into place. I haven’t logged into reddit since the 30th, and things here have been just fine. I’m regularly getting responses to my comments and there’s good discussion everywhere I look on Lemmy. As far as I can see, it’s only a matter of time before it’s “mainstream”.

Be careful what you wish for.

Some of the best online communities I've been a part of in the past are ones that no one outside of that niche group knew about. Now obviously, that can be very limiting if the people on that site ONLY talk about that one and only one subject, but making a site too vague and too big can be an issue (ex: Reddit).

When you can convince your friends to use Signal, you can convince them to use Mastodon and Lemmy... So, I vote 'No' ☹️

Like a lot of people here have already said, I think a different space is being created for those that are more in the know. The average person just isn't as invested or versed in what's going on to move to a different platform when the current is working fine for them.

I really wish people would think a bit bigger. I hear "I don't want regular people here/it doesn't need to grow" all the time but don't you wonder how much better things would be if the average person wasn't constantly on a platform designed to enrage and exploit them?

I see the potential with Lemmy. I was able to adapt to this far quicker than Mastodon. Albeit I was more of a Reddit user and barely touched Twitter.

What I'm curious about is how things will fair once the two competitors of Twitter come out soon. - Threads and Bluesky.

God I hope so, I'm so tired of every aspect of our lives being monetized or having an ad shoved into our faces.

I think it will but not for a while. We need more quality contents and not just beans.

There's already a lot of traffic on Lemmy. I'm constantly surprised to see posts with 400+ responses. I think it's already hit critical mass (Enough activity to keep people here).

I don't understand why everyone is talking about this going mainstream or winning against Reddit. If that happens then in come the corporate interests to ruin it. We don't need to take on the unlimited growth unsustainable business model we can just be happy with what we have

As someone who is currently tutoring computer science courses for college, I think you greatly over estimate the average computer users ability to navigate a place like Reddit, let alone Lemmy. Most people I tutor for intro classes struggle to understand a file browser. Even for me Lemmy was slightly intimidating with how it jumps to the whole open source/ chose an instance thing before I could make an account.

Lemmy will need a basic app before it really jumps to the main stream.

How much horrific awkward teenage shit did Reddit have to go through to get where it is now? Bacon narwhals at midnight, rage comics, bullying an uninvolved brown kid into suicide after the Boston bombings, reluctantly removing CP adjacent subs only after being called out on cable news, the /r/fatpeoplehate nonsense, /r/antiwork mod humiliating xirself on Fox News, the woody harrelson rampart ama, fumbling the bag by firing Victoria, probably 20 more.

Imo reddit and twitter had both become too big and bloated, leading to a lit of the toxicity/recycled content. I think there's plenty of room for more platforms to arise and become successful, while the old ones stay "mainstream"

Basically reddit and Twitter will become the new Facebook over the next 5-10 years.

It doesn't need to completely replace the current platforms. The beauty of the decentralized internet is that platforms suddenly disappearing/dying wouldn't mean we lose years or decades of information that was contained in that site/forum/corporate entity.

Decentralization would also encourage a lot of people to go back to blogging, which would mean information would come from all over the web again.

Becoming mainstream started the slow strangulation of Reddit for me. The conversations became more polarizing and stiffling. The takes less thoughtful, and the unoriginal comments more prevalent. So I hope Lemmy doesn't become mainstream.

I do think Lemmy can grow, but if the recent events were not able to slow down the Reddit juggernaut; I do not see another platform coming to rival Reddit.

It would need massive UI improvement.

I think we need to see how the content and platform grow organically over time. Reddit is an incredible resource and forum for very niche communities that don't really have a better place to chat outside of Facebook or things like that - where they can remain anonymous.

The whole concept of different worlds connected to communities might scare some people off - but I think naturally new apps will pop up that streamline this whole thing.

After using it for a few days and having an account for a few hours (this is my first comment), I don't think it will ever directly compete. But I think it does have chance to represent a "significant minority" of internet traffic if it doesn't peter out early on, and it may already be passed the threshold for that happening.

You'd never say email can "compete" with twitter, but it's still a significant way people interact with the internet. If lemmy does for independent communities and niche forums what email does for messaging, I'd consider it a huge success!

All I need are the quality people and post and reply from reddit to join lemmy

They could if starting out it was easier. Once you hit people with "sign up for any instance ..." you will loose the majority of non-technical people.

While I sincerely hope so, possibly unpopular opinion... Lemmy will have to offer a lot more than "Not Reddit". It'll have to build up as a primary destination for a lot of "content of substance" and culture around creating and nurturing it (just cross posting from Reddit will not cut it). It may have to offer communities and opportunities Reddit bans or suppresses, although there should be some red lines there. And, like all Federated technologies, it will have to actively work to reduce friction for potential users.

First post on Lemmy. I hope that Lemmy and Mastodon can replace Reddit and Twitter. It feels hard to imagine right now, because finding communities and signing up is really confusing. I already gave up on Mastodon because it was too much of a hassle.

It depends what you mean by "mainstream". If by that you imply that the Fediverse will become a true public forum, and a place to exchange ideas and form opinions, then yes, I would like for it to be a counterweight to legacy media and corporate content silos. However, if the fediverse becomes yet another astroturfed propaganda outlet, then no, I do not want it to become mainstream. Fortunately, the loose Fediverse network makes it hard to take over and control, provided that the ActivityPub protocol remains untainted by actions of bad actors.

I don't think it's really helpful to think about lemmy and mastodon as "replacements".

They're alternatives, with their own quirks and cultures.

They're undoubtedly a significant step on the way to whatever social media will evolve into. Whether they become "mainstream" or more active than their predecessors is kind of irrelevant IMO.

I don't want it to. I want lemmy to stay niche but active

First lemmy post!

Speaking solely wrt Lemmy, I think what's going to happen is we won't get the "brand recognition" of the technology like what Reddit has had. But, we'll probably see instances get closer to that sort of broader familiarity. So someone might not exactly identify as a lemmy user, but maybe as a Beehaw user.

Anecdotally, I had to try a couple of times to fully "get in" to a Lemmy instance because I didn't know that the hell I was doing. I had tried using gerboa as my client but couldn't understand why I couldn't log in or register on an instance. Then I tried again using liftoff, and it kind of clicked more easily.

Maybe email felt like this in the early 00's? I knew what I could do with an email address (e.g. sign up for MSN and AIM), but I had no idea how to get an email address until I had my siblings walk me through it. I think if any instance can pull off a killer onboarding experience, they'll become the Bandaid, Jello, Kleenex, etc of Lemmy.