Fediverse

It will come in waves as Reddit would become worse and worse over monetization.

Many communities are getting larger though, I wonder why despite this ?

I think that growth is not going to happen passively. These comercial platforms are deliberately pushed and advertised and there is always some new content whenever you open the app.

Fediverse, lemmy whatever may have the better model in theory but that is not enough to create buzz or to reach a critical mass of users.

"Hello here is the better model now come here, why aren't you here? " is not guaranteed to work.

anecdotally; the lack of content and relatively steep learning fediverse learning curve compared to reddit both make it easy enough to understand why lemmy & the fediverse haven't reached into the millions of users yet.

i'm a reddit refugee and i've handcuffed my ability to participate in reddit because i'm still angry about the api changes. i also work in technical, but i still struggle to understand all of lemmy's (and the fediverse's) quirks. both result me me still spending more time on reddit as an unregistered lurker than with lemmy as a member who can participate.

I think the triggers are likely to die down as the CEOs gradually stop sawing at their own genitalia.

What you have here is a start, but the barriers like having to find all the niches through searching mechanics that send you to a website and back to a client are always going to be a sticking point. There's not much support on any client to just get a list of communities on the instance, much less a different one.

If they come down or the instances centralize enough that it doesn't matter we'll see some growth by enticing other users because it'll be functionally the same thing to them. But there are some definite hurdles in getting here, and there's no incentive to advertise (read $) other than grassroots.

Things take time, progress ebbs and flows. I think there's a critical mass of good content and interesting people here and over time people will use it more. Just keep participating and ignoring the corporate sites.

For example, the friends that started using Reddit because of me are still on Reddit, but I'm pretty sure they'll find their way here. Change isn't something that everyone jumps on.

Seeing as how the servers keep on doing down or there are other similar problems, I'm not sure Lemmy could handle the traffic even if it did stay. And there are far too many subs with next to zero traffic which only makes the whole site look kind of sad. You are better off having 1/2 as many subs with 2x the engagement that they currently have.