this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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[–] LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

No. The whole fediverse thing is niche and likely always will be. That might be a good thing though.

[–] multicolorKnight@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

I honestly can't understand why most of the popular social media providers are popular. But, if that's what it takes, could we not?

[–] dinckelman@lemmy.world 9 points 5 hours ago

I don't want it to be popular. I want to have a good conversation, in the communities i choose to participate in, and that's exactly what I found

[–] BilboBargains@lemmy.world 8 points 5 hours ago

It's already popular with a good userbase. Popular with idiots? Hopefully not.

[–] shapis@lemmy.ml 16 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Nah. But it’s already everything I need it to be.

[–] jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world 7 points 9 hours ago

The Fediverse is only gonna get better. The other ones will all come and go.

In some number of years after another social media debacle or two, once the Fediverse has had some time to ditch its FOSS clunkiness, it'll be game over for anything else.

[–] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 10 points 10 hours ago

We need to make it popular against all corporate forces like meta, X, bluesky etc. By creating more content and interacting with it more.

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 17 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

It's popular enough for me already. I kind of hope it doesn't become the online site because that will just attract trolls.

I've also been using Trust Café (aka WT.Social) but I like the Lemmy UI a lot better.

[–] ktowner15@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

(thinking of Reddit) God, I hope not."

[–] GhiLA@sh.itjust.works 16 points 13 hours ago

Lemmy doesn't have to be Reddit. Lemmy is Lemmy. Keep coming here and giving it content and it will be all it will ever need to be.

[–] h3mlocke@lemm.ee 9 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Don't really care either way, i like it here.

[–] daggermoon@lemmy.world 4 points 9 hours ago

I quite like it too

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 84 points 1 day ago (2 children)

How do you define popular? I think it already is reasonably popular, I see enough activity here that it prompts me to comment at least somewhere on most days. I think it's going to become more popular over time.

[–] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 hours ago

Yeah I’m pretty happy with its current activity level

[–] cabbage@piefed.social 22 points 1 day ago (2 children)

If I saw this question posted the first time I visited Lemmy (some months before the Reddit app drama) with "popular" being defined as the current level of activity, my clear answer would be a loud and clear "probably not".

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[–] _____@lemm.ee 11 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

very hot take:

regular people will never get rid of twitter or meta, Facebook. YouTube. it's incompatible with their psychology.

they need to use what other people are using, they need to see "content" from their followed users

switching to another platform will kill that for them for weeks and stall their "growth"

to be forward thinking and to give up something you've had is too much for the average person

which is why I'm on Lemmy: there's nothing reddit offers to me that makes me "give" it up, it's always been there but now that there's competition it's worth trying something new out

I honestly think id anything Lemmy will have a slow decrease of users until it comes to a halt

[–] 11111one11111@lemmy.world 4 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

I mean, noone used reddit 10 years ago. To a 37 year old like myself, that seems like the reddit shit blew up out of nowhere. Youtube is just a matter of time and outcome of future google break up cases before a legitimate competition comes for its industry share. FB will die with the boomers. The only one I see as a really unmovable object is Twitter because of the universal use by all major sports media/reporting/journalists. It's the only one with end users applying the platform in any comercial sense outside of marketing. I think the question OP is asking will on the reliance of one of the other platforms falling.

Just my opinion tho so take it with a grain of salt.

[–] Crashumbc@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Everyone looks at mega businesses as immune to decay. They're not it just takes longer.

I think "x" may actually be the first to topple though. It's losing money at an insane rate and that's with a mega election year propping it up. That's one of the reasons Elon is pushing Trump so hard, is for the government bail out he'll get.

[–] 11111one11111@lemmy.world -1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

You are so fuckin high on the anti Elon hivemind smoke it's clouding your ability to quantify how much money he has and the fact that X is now an entirely private company. You think he is doing all the Trump shit for a bail out from a government who, has only issued a bailout that applied to privately held companies once in its almlst 250 year existence?

Homie, I think he's an idiot as much as the next but let's come down from mars and back to reality. Then we will circle back and cover how much money 250 billion dollars is and how the entire presence of Twitter could leave, bankruptcy the company and still be a massive tax write off without any favorable treatment from DC beyond what perks he already qualifies for by being of the .000000001% tax backracket minority.

It's losing money at an insane rate and that's with a mega election year propping it up.

We won't even make a stink about your typo that twitter's advertisement revenue stream as being driven by the same mechanisms used to figure out a YouTube influencer's advertivment revenue stream. We will call it an autocorrect oversight that your comment accidentally says the election attention and resulting increase of user activity affect how much companies pay twitter for its advertising spots and not the number of likes or subscriptions or user visits because they would be insane to agree to terms where the amount they're invoiced is dependent on statistics that can't decipher between bot accounts and active user accounts.

If ya made it to the end of this and your take away is that I'm a Elon stan, re-read it or tell me why because I cognizantly tried to make sure none of my over the top satirical statements made in this reply would tip a hat or give any slight implications that would credit Elon for being a shrewd or competent business owner. I'm just sick of the fuck Elon hivemind ignoring very objective facts about how shit works in lazy replies only intended to get their shot in at beating the dead horse named Elon's and Idiot.

[–] Crashumbc@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago

JFC, that is a lot of uneducated nonsense. "X" is losing 400-500 million a year, we know this from companies that lent him money and are public. I never said Elon would go bankrupt just "X". Trump has constantly done anything he wants without care to precedence and has shown that he'll do anything for a dollar. He also is a dementia laden fool that can be led around like a puppy right now.

I never said Elon was an idiot, that's why I think he'll get Trump to bail "X" out. Specifically because you don't get that rich by losing money or passing up a chance to earn the kind of money he can off of Trump.

[–] GhiLA@sh.itjust.works 15 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Oh, of course. We'll easily be just as popular as Matrix and Mastodon.

sigh

[–] AndrewZabar@lemmy.world 5 points 18 hours ago

Hey, I had a conversation on Matrix that one time!

And my Mastodon feed has TONS of content from George Takei.

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 47 points 1 day ago (2 children)

sure. it took reddit 20 years to get to its size.

[–] jonathan@lemmy.zip 39 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I think people don't realise how old Reddit is, it was smaller than Lemmy is now when I first started using it.

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 20 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It also took death of a platform "Digg" to jump start its growth.

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 0 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

haha this is not true.. dude i was there, digg came/went and little impact on reddits user base

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I was there too i was one of the ones that jumped over. I know its a big internet so maybe we both had different experiences. So maybe you are right and the timing was just a correlation and not causation.

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

reddit used to release page-views and maybe user info (i forget) annually.

there was a bunch of users that jumped over to digg, but they continued to also use reddit. when digg died there was a small bump of digg users, but i dont recall anything noticable in the big subs

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

Ah I only used Digg and never heard of reddit till Digg died and never joined most of the big subs. But also reddit was so small back then a small bump is a good kick start. Google trends data correlates with what I saw Digg was more search for in 2008 then by 2011 Digg was dead after the 4.0 debacle in 2010 and reddit took off in 2011.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

And it's arguably in the process of dying itself right now, in quality if not in user count yet.

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

and no subreddits! i was there too! it really started gaining traction and losing technical users when the 'image macros' started... memes took over

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[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Social media in general was also a lot smaller back then too.

Until the iPhone got popular you had to use a computer to access it. And back then we didn’t really trust sleep mode very much so you had to wait 2 minutes for windows to boot when you wanted to go on the net. VS right now I’m standing in from of my clothes not getting ready for work for 45 seconds.

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[–] DrDickHandler@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago

Delusional and wishful thinking. Lemmy will most likely slowly fade out of existance.

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 28 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think it's already popular.

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[–] Asafum@feddit.nl 38 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I really don't think so. The vast majority of internet users just stick with whatever simple thing that serves their need. Lemmy isn't the most difficult thing, but if reddit already exists and is more popular then people won't be leaving that for this if they haven't already.

The boost in people coming here last year was a "last straw" kind of deal from people using reddit who cared enough about not supporting their shit decisions, but by now that has died down and we've seen from recent articles that reddit "won" and they have a metric fuckton of users.

[–] TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 19 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Things need to be really bad at Reddit before most people would consider leaving. On the other hand, Lemmy would need to be amazingly good to produce the same effect. Neither of these have happened yet, so only few people migrated.

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[–] ohellidk@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago

the place is infested with bots, and that's probably "winning" to them.

[–] accarezzu@lemmy.ml 2 points 16 hours ago
[–] wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 23 hours ago

Honestly no, and that's okay?

Early web2 websites like MySpace did become "popular". But IMO one of its layckings was trying out web2 by evolving something from web1's static websites.

Where Facebook is the platform that popularized web2 in a way that worked with what web2 was and fundamentally build something new off of that.

I think Lemmy/mastatdon/most current federated clones that exist today won't last all that long. Something that is built with federation to its core and instead of just being a feature, is central to its offering.

What is that? Not a god damn clue.

But I'm excited to try it out.

Disclaimer: not a historian. Born in the early 90s so a lot of my judgement above is bassed off of foggy memories and are my opinions and only opions.

[–] IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 7 points 23 hours ago

It depends whether the servers can handle the inevitable next Reddit exodus.

[–] Sundial@lemm.ee 14 points 1 day ago

I think the Fediverse will be popular. It's already being adopted by Meta in the way of Threads.

Popularity comes when major companies, like Meta, push for something to be in the mainstream. Will Lemmy be popular and be pushed for the mainstream? Probably not. The mindset of the majority of the admins is against streamlining it. It's why we have a bunch of instances and why so many of them defederated from Threads (which I agree with). They've even taken steps to stop having so many people default to the .world instance in an attempt to diversify it.

[–] Vespair@lemm.ee 13 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I think we're going to need to start by defining what "popular" means.

According to https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy, there are 462,745 total Lemmy users. (Note: I know nothing about this site or their metrics; I literally just Googled "Lemmy users.")

If 462,745 people showed up to my birthday party, I would feel like the most popular person on the planet.

So, I think we need to consider a less abstract figure to answer this. Will Lemmy ever be as popular as a place like Reddit? I think that's extremely unlikely, at least not anytime soon. But will Lemmy ever be popular enough to sustain an engaged community? I dunno; I kind of think we're already there.

Maybe this is the old head in me, but I remember the decentralized days of the early internet, where communities weren't oceans of people on social media giants, but rather smaller, close-knit forums and message boards. If you spent a few months interacting, you would likely get to know and have specific opinions about individual users that you would regularly engage with, unlike the sort of hit-and-run buzz style of the modern social internet. I think right now, Lemmy is almost treading a special sweet spot between the two eras, and I'm pretty happy with it.

Although I will concede that I'm as addicted to social media as everyone else is these days, and I would certainly welcome the increase in on-the-minute activity that additional users would bring.

[–] simple@lemm.ee 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

462k are the people that have created an account, Lemmy actually has ~40k active users (and even then "active" just means they logged in once this month). I do share the sentiment that not everything has to be super popular but Lemmy really could use more people.

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[–] cabbage@piefed.social 8 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I'm gonna say yes, for the exercise.

Four assumptions:

  1. Reddit will keep getting worse, due to the nature of enshittification and venture capital. Eventually enshittification reaches a breaking point where people leave or stop arriving.
  2. Lemmy (in a broad sense - et al!) will keep getting better, due to.the nature of open source software.
  3. Non-free alternatives to Reddit will eventually enshittify, law of enshittification.
  4. Free alternatives will use ActivityPub for the obvious advantages.

If these assumptions are met, given infinite rounds of enshittification and unhappy users, eventually a federated and free alternative will be the most lucrative option for the majority of users. Eventually Reddit will Digg itself a hole. Maybe Lemmy won't take over then, but it'll stick around.

The most unrealistic assumption is of course that the federated solutions will keep getting better indefinitely. Maybe they won't. But as long as people keep developing and contributing to the Fediverse, it's alive and improving in a way commercial alternatives cannot in the long run compete with.

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