As long as algoritmically driven centralized content pipelines remain popular, the Fediverse in general will not capture the mainstream.

Say what you will about Lemmy and Mastadon et al being "straightforward and easy to use". I'm sure it is for you. But there's a reason most mainstream platforms treat their users like absolute cretins: the majority of mainstream users are, and they both enjoy and expect being coddled and catered to by the platform.

The very notion of Lemmy being sharded into "instances" and what that means is so antithetical to the common preconceived notion of what a social media platform is to most people. "Oh, it's not just all here in one place?" And yeah, federation greases the wheels a lot so no one even has to think about instances... until a community you like is suddenly rendered inaccessible via defederation.

Also, content discovery on the Fediverse is admittedly kind of ass. Only those who both know what they want going in and where to look for what they want really get anything out of it. Most centralized social media platforms are relentless content recommendation engines because people don't actuslly know what they want until they've had it brought to them. An algorithm that at least attempts to adapt to what you want to see more of is a key part of that. Lemmy does not have this (nor should it).

All that said, the fact that Fediverse platforms like Lemmy filter "common people" in these ways is, from what I can tell from here and elsewhere, a feature, not a bug. By being here at all, you prove a kind of baseline competency and a willingness to put in effort to learn the system that sets you at the forefront of most social media users. Most of us like it that way and are happy to keep growth of the community stunted in exchange for it.

Of course, all of the major platforms were in those shoes at one point. Will the Fediverse be the ship everyone leaps to next when the current platforms become so enshittified that even the main stream hates it? Maybe. But wherever the main stream goes, enshittification inevitably follows. The mainstream success of the Fediverse will synonomously be the death of the Fediverse as we know it. I for one would like some more time to hang out here before then.

It's not going to be as popular while it's hard to browse and post in different communities.

If I'm browsing through the app, Voyager in my case, I can read and reply to anything that's been federated to my instance. If I send myself a link to read later though, I might only be able to read it. Sent links open in the browser instead of the app, and that doesn't let me comment on different instances.

On top of that, accessibility settings don't carry over. Different instances in the browser are treated like different websites. I have trouble reading dark mode sites, so I set my home instance to light mode. Browsing to a different instance might switch it back to dark, and not let me change it without creating an account and logging in. That really puts me off wanting to stick around.

No, we shoudn't. Framasoft, the french libre software NGO published an interesting article about mastodon and twitter (in french). To sum up, the article tells us we shouldn't follow twitter footstep (it was before Elon Musk became the CEO) but embrace the fediverse.

So, imho, after reading their post, it is clear that we are just copy-pasting some proprietary software and it's a mistake because we may integrated some problematic design that were intended for analysis and ads purpose. And those proprietary software were a golden cage.

The fediverse is not lemmy, it's not mastodon. And the timeline is limited by its UI design to lemmyverse or mastodonverse. It shouldn't. We should open them more while having good moderating tool.

But firstly, Lemmy should improve their moderating tool. As a moderator in jlai.lu, and because our admin explained us various issues : the current state of Lemmy is worrying.

So until those matter aren't solved, i don't want to see any community's grow bigger nor openness to the fediverse because we aren't ready and can't protect other communities in the fediverse.

I think you can take this even further and ask if any social media platforms will be as big as those of this past (and rather long) period. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. It’s been a very notable period of centralisation of the web from about 2010 or so. And it’s worth wondering whether it was an anomaly.

There’s certainly been some fracturing lately and for good reasons (we were never the customer and the internet has always worked this way with people moving freely).

On the other hand, the idea of having a personal home on the internet, a true avatar and the idea that huge serious things can happen online … both have gone mainstream and probably can’t be put back in the bag.

Against these requirements, an open protocol is an obvious solution, as we’d all tend to agree, but not trivial as corporations still want to make money some how and so may not buy in. Plus getting the protocol right at the right time is non trivial (I personally suspect avtivitypub has not done this and as a result we’re in an awkward position at the moment).

If a billionaire (or a very big bunch of millionaires) out of the goodness of their heart (yeah, not gonna happen) threw a massive amount of money into advertising for a open source product they dont own, Lemmy could be as or more popular. Even if it has fewer features. Even if its uglier. Even if its more complicated.

I can't count the many times I've seen the worser product has won out because it had big corpo ad budget. Turned me a bit cynical.

I think it doesn't have the same problem a challenger to other social media sites would have.

A Facebook killer has to contend with everyone's friends already being on Facebook, same for Twitter, Instagram, and so on. This problem is probably why threads links to your Instagram account, to try and convince users that their friends are all technically already on the site!

With reddit though? Nobody's on Reddit because of who they know, in fact people discovering each other's handles will sometimes lead to frantic account deletions and reinstallations.

For this reason, I think Lemmy will do much better than other killer sites, however, it's probably still not going to surpass Reddit by a longshot, mainly because while nobody cares about their friends already being on Reddit, they will care about not wanting to go through the bother of creating a whole new account and navigating how the fediverse system works for a maybe better version of what they're already getting.

Reddit's overall quality would have to drop into the damned abyss to cause enough of a mass exodus for a competitor to take it out for good.

Biggest issue is that a lot of features are missing, it desperately needs better moderation tools, and onboarding needs to be so easy that you're technically challenged grandma can figure it out.

If it solves those, then I do think it's possible. But if it actually did, companies would come in and try to become popular instances and probably try to cannibalize it.

It should be clear already that the majority do not care about morals, but just want entertaining content regardless of how badly they're being treated. Even if fedi became dominate, it can be replaced by centralized media just as quickly since they can simply innovate much faster and with way more funding. Lemmy is like two guys doing it full time, so compare that to Reddit's employment userbase when you compare quality.

I mean, eventually? If lemmy keeps getting more robust and people keep creating quality content, then eventually lemmy would get mainstream. 8-10 years ago I was very surprised when I saw reddit on the news for a rare moment. Reddit is too mainstream now. Hope lemmy never gets to that stage.

I assume some will say they don't want it to. I hope it does so more people are no longer giving money to giant social media companies, or being tracked by them.

No way it'll become as popular as reddit but that isn't a bad thing per se

I sure hope not

Yes.

The bigger it gets, the easier it will be to get bigger. It's more a question of if Reddit falls. If it does, Lemmy is the main alternative.