It’s possible. I think the biggest obstacle is that the corporations feeding on people’s data are not going to just stand by while it happens.

I don’t think you need to have the largest following to have great value, even lemmy as it is right now feels great. I’ll actually want to dive into comment sections compared to the endless scrolling on reddit.

As long as there’s enough people using a platform for a variety of ideas and experience in topics, I think that’s good enough for me.

Not everyone who left Digg went to reddit, and not everyone who left Myspace went to Facebook. “Replacing” reddit should never be the goal, it should be “be better than reddit”.

If this is ever to go mainstream, what we should be concerned about is making good, high quality original content. If people see us having fun and being nice here, they’ll want to join in too.

In their current state, definitely not. There is a real bubble effect browsing on Lemmy because it feels like 1 post out of 3 is just praising the platform, but I think they’re far from ready to become mainstream. I’d say there are for now 2 major problems:

• The global instability (a lot of bugs, many third party apps, but a poor on-boarding with the main website).

• It was made by engineers and marketed by engineers. The federated aspect should IMO be public and known, but seamless. It should be possible to just create an account and start browsing without having to do some research on how the thing works. The technical aspect of the fediverse is great, but it’s also its main drawback, I believe that hiding it for newcomers could be a way of not scaring them.

Replace? No. Be a valiable second option? Sure. Like in the early 2000 when you had dozens of major forums for certain topics. Something Awful, GameFAQs, Digg, Slashdot, 4chan, NeoGAF… It‘s not a natural law that there has to be one service having 95 % of the discussion market locked up.

Yes, but not in the way you’d think.

I think lemmy won’t be easy enough to use for a vast majority of users, they’ll stick to the traditional platforms.

However, I think if the hype continues for a while, and the little kinks are ironed out soon enough, it will give rise to a new, different kind of platform.

People have this idea that lemmy will replace reddit and just become Reddit 2.0. I think lemmy is still a place similar to a phoenix burning. The new bird has yet to take it’s first breath, and it’ll be quiet different from what we imagine or what we are used to today

Being on the internet used to be not cool.

Email and www. … .com was as foreign to the mainstream as the Fediverse is to the mainstream today.

The nerds build cool shit, the corporations chase the hot new thing to milk every last dollar out of the mainstream who want the cool new toys, and the mainstream inevitably ruins the cool new toy because they don’t understand how or why it was made in the first place.

This is the way of human nature. It has played out on the internet since the start (and probably well before that) and it will probably play out again on the fefiverse (just look at Meta).

Absolutely not in their current formats.

Sign up needs to be simplified enough that your gran could do it and we need way more professional UIs. After those two things, it could happen.

Right now? Absolutely not. The platform itself is insanely buggy, normies still can’t wrap their heads around federation, and the big instances are only just beginning to stabilize and take shape.

But long term yes, I’m very bullish, and it’s for this simple fact: this is only the beginning of enshittification. All those r/NBA whiners you saw bitching on Reddit about the protests are gonna have their “leopards ate my face” moment when spez decides to start charging $14.99 a month for the privilege of subscribing to more than three subreddits at a time or some shit.

As many have said, interest rates are high and the gravy train has stopped running. This means the only way these huge platforms with massive server costs are going to survive is by making a profit, and they can’t do that without resorting to Twitter Blue-like subscriptions.

If people want to consoom and shitpost for free, at some point they will have to end up here in the fediverse, where the costs of running such a huge platform can be distributed among a bunch of large and medium-sized instances, which will probably be mainly funded by donations.

I think this is the beginning of a big transition, as big as the one from web 1.0 to 2.0. And ironically it’s gonna look a lot more like the internet of old than the era of massive social media platforms.

As long as you all stay here, I’m happy.

Why do they need to be replaced? Just use lemmy/mastodon and forget Reddit even exists. Not sure why people are so hung up on “replacement” when all you need to worry about is enjoying the content and interacting. Fuck Reddit and twitter, comparison is the thief of joy.

Lemmy has a long way to go in terms of user experience before it can effectively compete with Reddit. The majority of new accounts in the last weeks have been spite users. That is, they’re here not because they love Lemmy - but because they hate Reddit.

That’s not a bad thing, per say. It doesn’t matter how people get here. It’s more important that they have a good reason to stay.

And the average user doesn’t care if something is federated or centralized. They just want a product that works and is simple to grasp. In my opinion, app developers are going to be the gamechanger Lemmy needs Stuff like Memmy (on the iOS app store today!), Mlem, Liftoff, Thunder are pretty much better than the official Reddit app. And that’s how most people consume content these days. When there’s no enshitification ads or microtransactions - there’s clearly going to be a winning experience.

It’ll take time, but as more Federation communities build - the less Reddit is necessary. As well, it usually takes a long time before people start catching on that the tools they once loved have turned to into bots and spam.

Mastodon is in it’s 7th year, and has like 8 million active users. Twitter had 200 million users by it’s 7th year. On one hand, Mastodon is the biggest Federation app. On the other, Twitter was 25x as large. Of course, Twitter is no longer the relevant “town hall” it once was - and is hemorrhaging users and respect. So who knows. It only takes a few celebrity endorsements to get countless folks switching. Who knows

I sure as hell hope not.

To me, that’s like looking around a great little cafe with terrific food and saying, “Do you think this could ever become McDonalds?”

Why would I want that?

It doesn’t need to become mainstream. I’ll be happy to be a part of a smaller but vibrant engaged community. I hope there will be a phone app some day through

We are so used to the idea that a social media network has to dominate the world - ekse it’s a failure. If Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed or your old fishing forum is enjoyed by some people, it’s a success.