Do you believe Lemmy/Mastodon can become mainstream and fully replace their centralized counterparts?

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

I think it remains to be seen. The rapid growth of .world has been the first real production test of how the platform handles more users and content. Amazing work by the team, but there are a lot of rough edges and it is a new platform with a lot of unknowns.

The things that spring to mind for me are:

• Sign up needs to be streamlined and made more simple, and find a way to not overload individual servers without just randomly assigning people to instances.
• Live defects, bugs and things feeling rough around the edges.
• Back-end build and scaling.
• Duplicate communities across instances.
• Account migration between instances.
• Data retention past x period - how will various instances handle this with a large number of users.
• GDPR and data request compliance from individuals, governments, etc.
• Funding the costs and resources associated with rapid, large growth. How do people know what their money is going to fund? I think there needs to be real transparency, public roadmaps and backlogs and understand how / if admins are accountable.
• How the platform and users will respond to large corporations or even individual admins on instances adding adverts, using / selling user data in ways the userbase do not expect.

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

fuck dude I hope not. The best part of Lemmy to me is the fact that it's not as big as the others, and what Lemmy gives me is that same feeling of freedom websites in the 2000s and early 2010s felt like they had.

Maybe, but I wish it would be like the Internet pre-2000. That is, it's reserved for mainly nerds our curious people/ early adopters. I really dislike the modern state of Internet and how bloated it is, and why the heck do I need 16gb of ram just to browse Web pages when they don't do anything more for me than 20 years ago.

Back to the original question, it will grow for sure, but some issues: when I google "lemmy" it brings up the musician in the top posts. Also (and I don't understand how this platform works yet) won't bandwidth be an issue if many people visit. How does that work? Especially if it starts hosting images. I read that it's funded by donations. I know Wikipedia functions just fine on that model but that's an outlier when you look at the net.

No I don't think that it will. It doesn't need to. I'd rather it stay less mainstream and be like reddit was long ago.

I think anyone who was around, and online, before reddit/twitter/Facebook became the consolidated social media behemoths that they are, are willing to learn something new. The before-times were replete with smaller communities where your internet handle was the only real source of continuity (and even then, only if you wanted it to be).

But those whose ONLY experience of online discourse is the big 3? It's a lot to adjust to. I don't know if this is what will hit critical mass, but then, maybe that's setting the wrong goal to begin with. Can the communities connected here be self-sustaining for a time, regardless? Definitely.

I think there's good chance for Lemmy and mastodon to become mainstream but I don't they can replace their centralized counterparts. Mainly because I think that the social media in its current form is changing.

While platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and Tiktok are likely not going anywhere for a while, each time these platforms break the trust of their users the more cracks start to form to the service that leak out users. Some of these users will look for something new, some of these users will look for alternate services, some of these users will create their own services.

Many of these platforms rely on the attention economy, so all it really takes to make these platforms struggle is to divide that attention more and more to competitive platforms and services. This fragmentation has been happening for years now with people dividing their attention between multiple services like reddit, twitter, discord, facebook, tiktok, snapchat and whatnot. Now creating similar service for smaller audience is easier than ever and with A.I tools it'll probably get even more easier.

Its a bit similar to video games and live services, with competition for players attention getting more fierce by the day.

Personally seems like an almost insurmountable hill to become popular and mainstream. It's not that I don't think it's possible, I just don't think that there is a significant push for it to do so. There's no corporate advertising to help push it.

Is that a problem though? Does it need to become popular and mainstream?

Well, bugs and UI aside, it seems like Lemmy can work but there's not a lot of substantive discussion right now. The most upvoted stuff are memes and other low effort content. I'm not sure how long a bean meme can sustain serious activity.

Reddit, in my opinion, has become mainstream due to its ability to be searched via engines such as Google. I think Lemmy would need to have that same level of discoverability if the platform should take off. I'm not sure if doing this risks Google or others threatening the platform via "embrace, extend, and extinguish", but perhaps Lemmy needs to be accompanied by a decentralized search engine itself that can browse the entire Fediverse. I'm new to the fediverse so I'm not sure if such a software exists, but clearly I think discoverability is paramount for giving new users a reason to see Lemmy and maybe stick around

My only hesitation is, how does it scale? There might be a good answer, but I can't seem to find it. If a specific page gets excessive popularity like /r/memes, is the entire burden of hosting that left to one instance? And can that load be shared somehow, either by adding more physical servers or getting help from other instances?

I don't really think that Lemmy or Mastodon will really replace their counterparts. At least not for now. As many have already said, the federation system is too complex for many non-technical people. It would take something like a de facto standard app, that abstracts everything federation related away and make it feel like another centralised solution.

Another point for me is the searchability of federated systems. Say you are searching for a technical problem right now, google will surely bring you to a related subreddit in just seconds. I have yet to see a Lemmy related search result.

When I first started using it I did not think so. In the week or so since I've sort of wrapped my head around some of it, and now I think it's certainly possible.

The biggest hangup in my opinion is the very concept. As a normie I get to the login screen and I see that it's asking for an instance along with a username and password. That's scary and you're curious what that even is, so you Google it. And that doesn't help at all. You're fed a very technical description that feels like a brick wall of information. It's intimidating.

Once you are set up on a large instance and logged into a good app, subscribed to some of your niches... Well in my experience at all clicked together pretty quickly. The only thing that's missing from the Lemmy experience is traffic. I know there are already some pretty big communities and people are starting to say it's too big or something, but there's many interests of mine that are booming on Reddit that have a handful or less posts here. Naturally things take time, and I am genuinely starting to believe we're on the way there with this platform (network of platforms?)

The average user on the internet does not really care about the horrible changes or the ads served on the platform. That type of users make up the majority of the internet, so frankly it most likely won't be mainstream anytime soon. It might get big, it might become popular as an alternative, but as long as the internet is mostly made up of people that aren't much knowledgeable about certain things that people are in here, it won't.

I honestly couldn't care less. I rather hangout with you cool degenerates than the rest of the mainstream.

I think it will be hard. However I still have think lemmy will be valuable, successful and fun. At the end of the day though, if lemmy.world or another instance is to reach 3 million subs (for example), that is a lot of costs for the admins. We’d probably need a combination of ads, subscription revenue, or third-party backing. Once investors get involved, then data selling and algorithms get involved.

The way to delay that as long as possible is to guide new users to different instances that are federated to spread the load and costs among all servers and admins.

I would greatly prefer a subscription versus ads or investors. $20-$30 annually for a fun community is very little in the overall scheme of things.

I think that Lemmy has the opportunity to replace Reddit, time will tell how far this can really go. Just weeks ago, posts on here were only getting hundreds of upvotes. However, now I'm seeing multiple posts hit thousands a day on lemmy.world. There are many improvements to make until then, some UI, and UX improvements. I know that many people still have trouble understanding the concepts of federation so until those can be resolved I still think that it's not going to reach that level of accessibility. I think we all know how Reddit failed here and lost many users.

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).

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.

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

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.

My position differs currently for Mastodon and Lemmy.

In the case of Lemmy, I’m not yet 100% sure. Lemmy’s strength may also prove to be a weakness I feel in terms of it replacing Reddit, in that the decentralised nature naturally creates a dispersion of the audience. While anyone on Reddit could create a community, having them in one place really funnelled people into logically named communities. On the other hand while subscribing to a number of communities for Lemmy, it’s not that infrequent to come across the same or similar community on multiple instances and then needing to work out where you want to go. On one hand it’s probably good to have the varying perspectives and culture this will bring, but I think it’ll also make it hard for users looking for that definitive place to go. It’s very much early days though and perhaps many of those communities will naturally assemble in mass on various instances once the dust settles.

We’ll see how that plays out I guess, and right now my Reddit use is at maybe 10-20% what it was and I’m really looking to invest my time here. I think with time that both Lemmy updates an 3rd party clients will make working across instances more transparent and in turn broaden appeal.

I’m more bullish for Mastodon in the short term. The reason for that is my usage concerns me looking to follow an individual rather than locate a community of individuals. Since people will have one account, there’s less impact caused by decentralisation as my interactions with a person I follow is very much 1:1 (unless for some reason they chose to create and maintain multiple accounts). If I want to follow Apple’s account, they’ll presumably have a single one versus there maybe being 6 viable Apple communities across Lemmy instances. I find my use of Mastodon in terms of user experience is much closer and familiar to Twitter than currently Lemmy is to Reddit. Additionally, once it’s enabled for ActivityPub, I think Meta having Threads throws significant support around that particular ecosystem, and brings it to the masses. Can’t imagine we’ll see a billion dollar company spin up a Reddit alternative that is Activity Pub integrated to give Lemmy that same boost, unfortunately.

To be clear I’m very supportive of both Lemmy and Mastodon and want both to succeed. I do think reddit being centralised has some benefits but, especially for people not looking to invest heavily in browsing across instances, and that it’s to be seen how Lemmy will evolve as it grows and if casual users will be able to sign up and easily find the communities and information they are after. The 1:1 person interaction for Mastodon I think simplifies things and Thread potentially will result in a massive boost for Mastodon. It’s early days for Lemmy and I can’t imagine in Jan or Feb that the majority of us here had even heard of it, let alone considered leaving Reddit. It’ll only continue to grow and I’m excited to watch it do so.

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).

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.

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.

This is my first comment! :)

I really think that lemmy can be as popular as Reddit. I just downloaded an app called connect for lemmy on my android and the experience is just the same as Reddit. One good app (like Sync for Reddit, Apollo, etc.) might be what is needed.

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.

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.

Lemmy? Maybe. Mastodon? Not a chance.

Lemmy functions perfectly as a Reddit replacement and only adds a mild amount of complexity on top of using Reddit. Mastodon is only similar to Twitter’s use case if you’ve had a few beers and are squinting.

It will definitely take a while to catch on to the public (if ever) considering the "complexities" with signing up for an account.

You can't just "Sign in with Google" or something like that, plus there isn't one centralized sign up button you have to pick whichever instance you prefer, which to most is to "complicated".

No. As long as people keep using it I think it can grow enough that people can use Lemmy as their primary app. But it'll never become mainstream enough.

We underestimate how technically ignorant the majority of people are, as soon as it hits the point of no official app and which instance to join people give up.

The only way I can see it working is it they prioritised their own official instance, made it default on an 'official' app so it's just as easy as Reddit or Twitter, but in small text allow people to change instance.