I just wish more people were willing to try out the alternatives

This is now the community's Top All Time post.

I mean have they seen how good Ice Cubes and Mlem look? How can they choose the default Twitter and Reddit apps over those masterpieces.

No, they haven't. 99% of people have never heard of the fediverse or any app within it.

If all the average users were here, it would be just as awful as Reddit became when it hit mainstream acceptance level.

Remember that subreddits there were quality when small but sort of became too large to have character after a certain threshold, I seem to recall 300k subscribers and up being about where that delineation was.

Lemmy could stand to be more popular, but not too popular or it would attract the bottom feeders that make stupid one liner comments and upvote wrong answers.

Enjoy the smaller lemmy while it lasts

Edited for clarity, gotta drop the reddit shorthand

I guess most people don’t want to wade through dozens of “eat the rich” posts every time thay open their favorite social media platform.

Yeah, a lot of people have quit Twitter over Musk being a huge douche and migrated to... Blusky. And they think they've done something really great. It's sad.

In other words: Advertising works.

Honestly, if I weren't politically as far left as I am, lemmy would have scared me off a long time ago.

Lemmy doesn't have much to offer compared to the "billionaire run" social media.

You're talking about people that are content with "the internet" being google, facebook, instagram, snap, tiktok, youtube and twitter, nothing more.

I wish that lemmy had the population to sustain more niche communities.

It's unfortunate, but there's a real chicken-and-egg problem here. Those of us who are on here are here because of how strongly we believe in the ideal of it, but for the average person who just cares about talking about their favourite interests, there's a serious lack.

I'll use two examples, one that you clearly care about, and one that I do. /r/stopkillinggames is hardly super active, but in the last 3 weeks it's had 11 posts with a cumulative 68 comments. !stopkillinggames@lemm.ee, by contrast, has had just 8 posts, all by a mod, with just 6 total comments. /r/AgeofMythology is very active with artistic appreciation posts, balance discussion, and advice just within the last 24 hours. !aom@lemm.ee has failed to attract a single post from anyone other than myself, and it's been over 3 months since anyone other than myself has left a comment. It's disheartening, not being able to have conversations about the stuff you love, when you know that just over there it would be so easy.

Lemmy's excellent if you want to talk about politics, or open source, but there's not a huge amount outside of that. The Star Trek communities are pretty good, but they pale in comparison to a great sub like /r/daystrominstitute, and the amount and depth of discussion on ttrpg.network is slim compared to /r/pathfinder2e, /r/dndgreentext, /r/dndnext, etc. And these are some of the best-supported hobbies on Lemmy.

So as much as I'm staying here and trying to do my part to make it better, and frequently encourage others to join...I also can't really blame people who don't.

(I feel less charitably towards people on Twitter. Because that place is a total shithole, and Mastodon is surprisingly good, if you like microblogging platforms. Plus even Bluesky is better than staying on Twitter, and it has most of the celebrities and micro-celebrities some people might want to follow.)

As a non tech expert, in my view, the biggest concern for the fediverse to grow, presently, is how difficult it can be to sign up.

Go to a instance listing, try and choose one, signup... all of this should be acessible but mostly invisible for the average user. The user should only be questioned what sort of content they mostly intend to browse, have a NSFW explicit option, perhaps a server location preference, and that should be it.

Beneath the hood, this process should trigger a call to the network requesting a user slot for any server that could cater to that generic profile the prospect user filled. Even bans should be handled differently, in my opinion.

That coke-rush is just temporary and afterwards, leaves you feeling like this:

I have a feeling that spez was an ordinary man when he started reddit. Then he became an asshat, of course.

The fediverse is like a cafe with an unusual menu and interesting conversations. Most social media is like a McDonald's in Altoona PA.

Which one is Ice Cubes? First time I hear about it

billionaire ran

Billionaire-run

Another contributing factor is that Lemmy & Mastodon "care about privacy". Odd, in my opinion, for a public social network.

Their interpretation of that is that they don't send referer headers. So to any site receiving Lemmy traffic, we're invisible.

Honestly, I would use Lemmy more except that some posts are just people being overly negative or strangely political in the comments. There are good communities without this don’t get me wrong but it can get old

Fruit is not addictive. Cocaine is. There's the answer

We live in a time where you could have a really good alternative FOSS Platforms with all the cool bells & whistles

But they'll never join it because, "It ain't Youtube" or "muh favorite creator is not there" or that there's no large userbase

I wish most people were more interested in learning. But ive settled for people being entertaining at best due to that disinterest.

eats a red delicious

People follow celebrities accounts like good sheeps. Let them stay there.

That behavior is not up to the standard known as "average".

The alternatives are annoying to sign up on and letting the community be in charge just leads to hate speech being allowed. Which tbh also is an issue with traditional social media but there at least they are reliant on advertisers so they have an interest in controlling it.

Yeah people don't want rotten fruit, cocaine is way funnier and comes with ONE website, one mobile app... etc.

People do try it and then are turned off by how crazy the hivemind here is. Wild conspiracies about musk is fun for me to scroll through and laugh at, but lots of people run in the opposite direction.

“everyday people” being autistic furries with opinions on Linux distributions and/or preachy anarchists who take Star Trek a little too seriously