3mo ago

do you think lemmy will ever be popular?

113 comments

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.
- 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".
  
  Current as in today? Or then-current (pre-exodus)?
- Yeah I’m pretty happy with its current activity level

sure. it took reddit 20 years to get to its size.
- I think people don't realise how old Reddit is, it was smaller than Lemmy is now when I first started using it.
  
  It also took death of a platform "Digg" to jump start its growth.
  
  and no subreddits! i was there too! it really started gaining traction and losing technical users when the 'image macros' started... memes took over
  
  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.
  
  it was smaller than Lemmy is now when I first started using it.
  so now we know whom to blame for its enshittification
- One difference though is social media. Reddit was able to gestate and grow without that massive clusterfuck sucking up all the internet’s oxygen. Nowadays with all the social media sites proper plus Facebook groups AND let’s not forget Reddit itself, there’s just massively more competition for attention online. The old 1.0 web forums are still around, many of them, but they’re small and relatively static. That could also be Lemmy’s fate.
- Delusional and wishful thinking. Lemmy will most likely slowly fade out of existance.

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.
- 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.
  
  I think the only thing that would 100% kill Reddit is a paid subscription, anything other than that I don't see it.
- the place is infested with bots, and that's probably "winning" to them.

It's already popular enough to be a meme scroll substitute for Reddit so I'm good.

I think it's already popular.
- Yeah, I loke ig a lot!

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.

I see folks posting on Mastodon, griping that it’s failing, that it’ll never be as popular as Bluesky and Threads because of X and Y, and I’m like, I’m over there chatting to people all day, having a fine time, following new people, picking up new followers, and generally enjoying it more than I ever really enjoyed Twitter.
I don’t really understand why those folks want it to be more than it is.
“Oh, but there are no journalists!”
Good? I don’t want endless ragebait posted in my feeds. I just wanna be chill, share music recommendations, and enjoy more people interacting with my radio show than ever did on Twitter.
- “Oh, but there are no journalists!”
  Good? I don’t want endless ragebait posted in my feeds.
  I don't think that's the kind of "journalism" your strawman desires.
  
  I have no strawman. I had a wickerman, but, well, it’s awkward.
- Honestly I find it a little weird that Lemmy is so pro-Mastodon. Like a lot of people when the twitter implosion started I went and parked a username on a few potential replacements. And like a lot of people, when I saw that mastodon was all little specific instances, I didn't bother because the whole point of twitter is that it's a big public thing with everybody and everything. I haven't really seen anybody outside of Lemmy mention mastodon in months. Everyone is going to bluesky.
  
  It’s not that weird, given that they’re both examples of Fediverse software that can (in theory, though not well in practice) interact with each other.
  As for Masto being separate instances; I’ve never really had a problem with that. Follow a bunch of people from different servers and you’ll soon begin to federate and link up with other people.

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

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

Oh, of course. We'll easily be just as popular as Matrix and Mastodon.
sigh
- Hey, I had a conversation on Matrix that one time!
  And my Mastodon feed has TONS of content from George Takei.
  
  I've heard, and I haven't tried myself, that Matrix has tons of utility between other messaging apps, sending messages to and fro or remote controlling other clients, or moderating large amounts of rooms at once.
  It's nice that it isn't just for drugs and crypto, tho.

No. The whole fediverse thing is niche and likely always will be. That might be a good thing though.
- Right now, it's definitely a good thing it's not popular. We are not in any way shape or form ready for the spam that popular platforms receive.
  
  Yeah I don't want it to become a cesspit like Reddit, Facebook, and Xitter.
- It's definitely a good thing. If someone wants to be on the popular platform go back to Reddit or Twitter. That's what most people want. The Fediverse is the minority that wants something different.
  
  I'd argue plenty of people are simply not aware such alternatives even exist, and don't bother researching.
  Internet could be a different place if more people cared.
  With that said, even then we'd probably be in a minority.
  
  I think a lot of people would like the idea of decentralized social media in principle but most of them just want to download an app on their iPhone and get going instead of learning anything.

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.

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.
- 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.
  
  I appreciate the clarity, thank you. As I said, I pulled a random googled number and wasn't trying to use it as the sticking point of my commentary. But also for what it's worth, it's not exactly a fair comparison to the larger giants either as lemmy's smaller scale means it is also less trafficked by bots, fake accounts, secondary novelty accounts, etc. Depending on what source you're looking at, twitter is claimed to be anywhere between 15-75% bot or fake accounts. In general my point was there are still a large number of people using lemmy on most scales, we are just choosing to view it on the scale of established corporate social media metrics.
- Might consider that a lot of people have alts, maybe even 5+ alts, and there are a lot of bots.
  40,000 monthly active users is probably a more useful number here.
  
  40,000 monthly active users is probably a more useful number here.
  I fully agree. Again, I did not think that the random figure, which I tried to appropriately caveat, was the salient part of my comment.
- This right here

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

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
- 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.
  
  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.

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

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

Don't really care either way, i like it here.
- I quite like it too

I'm gonna say yes, for the exercise.
Four assumptions:
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.
Lemmy (in a broad sense - et al!) will keep getting better, due to.the nature of open source software.
Non-free alternatives to Reddit will eventually enshittify, law of enshittification.
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.

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.

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

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.

Depends, it's been a bit disappointing to see virtually no change since I started using it, particularly in terms of QoL. It is open source, so that's on everyone, including me, but I had hoped for more speed, etc..
Mastodon is way better when it comes to filtering.
Having the option of a reddit clone is pretty good though and I will stick with it. Who knows when and where it will get that critical bit of momentum.
It's already superior to regular forums, in my opinion, so now the question is what kind of format you want to have discussions in, instead of having to default to forums. That choice is a definite upside and I'm glad it exists.

I don’t care, I just want a nice place to wander, nothing is forever, but the longer, the better, regardless of popularity

I was on Reddit when it was small. So you never know.
- I was gonna say I think I liked reddit more before the digg folks came. Maybe Lemmy is right where it should be.

I hope not. Imagine all the crazies.
- so you prefer smaller forums to bigger forums like reddit?
  
  I prefer social media where people post because they have content, need help or want to discuss something, not just post to be hip or the site is popular.
  
  I prefer fresh ideas and thoughts, even (especially) if they don’t align with my own values and beliefs. I thrive in that kind of environment. We, for the most part, seem to be at that stage. A stage Reddit was at circa 2009.
  What I don’t want is this place becoming so popular that everything moves too fast and becomes derivative. I am not looking forward to an endless September. It’s probably inevitable, but if it could hold off another 5 - 10 years up to the point when I’m more into gardening or something rather than the Internet, that would be ideal.
  I also fear that the model is unsustainable at a certain point. I trust Dessaslines and co aren’t chasing endless profits, but there does need to be enough people out there willing to donate and fund operations. Lichess is able to make it happen, so I hope we do here too.

Satisfactory had more than 1000 users this month. Popular enough in my book.
(I really need intsall Spellcheck on my device)

maybe with more porn

Not with how federation works on Lemmy.

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?

It's more popular than Usenet! Take that, nntp.

I sure hope not

I wish

I can't foresee Lemmy specifically reaching levels of popularity comparable to platforms like Twitter or Reddit. Barring some very strange disastrous upheaval of the whole landscape they and their ilk will continue to be Leviathans even with decisions at the top that look like outright sabotage. There is so much inertia. Maybe those two examples might disappear, but only if they're devoured by another just like them.
I can see Lemmy and similar Federated platforms with their quite sizeable yet comparatively miniscule user bases carrying on as they are and even growing a little bit and having some effect on the zeitgeist with the occasional piece of local culture seeping in to the wider platforms though people there will likely not know that's where it came from. I also think efforts like Threads or likely something similar that comes after will be where the fediverse meets any mainstream success essentially becoming part of those bigger platforms in some way I can't yet predict in detail.
The big appeal of Lemmy is ideological and technical, this will always limit the number of people drawn to it. If there weren't already giants in this space that wouldn't matter because there'd be a snowball effect that would draw crowds who came because of other people not because of any interest in how the platform functions or ideals to pursue and with those crowds could come more crowds until you have a critical mass. But with the situation as it is now, the big crowds that draw yet more crowds still, are elsewhere so you'll only ever have enthusiasts or ideologues that go out of their way to be here.
- I much rather that Lemmy remain the domain of people who want to use it because of how & why it differs from the commercial sites. Good! Then I can have a reasonable expectation of the demographics. The occasional shit mod notwithstanding.

Not unless it gets a good marketing team.

Which instance?

I don't think the form of Lemmy as a federated service will be able to scale.
What I expect is that, if Lemmy is successful, it will be as a platform for various Reddit alternatives, kind of like how Truth Social is Mastodon.

No.
They just copied redit. That included some bad decisions. Even when redit would do it better in the future, it still does not help lemmings.
- Do you have any examples?
  
  https://lemmy.world/comment/13161749

113 comments