No Stupid Questions

No. But this is not important for me. Where is the crowd? Shit is there.

It doesn't need to replace anything, that's a sports mentality applied to the free flow of information. What this decade has taught us is that the doomscroll is all there is. Reddit, Tiktok, Twitter, etc. all have constant scrolling through content as their main feature. It's a feature that's extremely reproducible. What the fediverse does is take power away from the corporations that want to make money off of the flow of user-created content. By the fediverse's existence, whenever some company wants to rate-limit or ban 3rd party apps, the people can now just say: "Nah."

I think Lemmy is coming along nicely. There is lots of content for me to consume. I am on lemmy.ca so I haven't seen any of the bugs other people are talking about, it just works except for subscribing to places on the busy instances which shows pending for a while.

People will get used to how this works and I think it snowballs from here.

Mainstream yes. Fully replace? Never. However I don't think that traditional counterparts will ever be as big as they were before. I think we're seeing a shift in people's relationship with these platforms.

Only if a site like join-Lemmy.org can be promoted on every instance and actually direct you to a server that isn’t overloaded and is fully federated.

Right now, it directs you to sadly overloaded servers that are terrible choices.

If that doesn’t happen, then some big instance needs to scale up with its popularity and be well funded by someone for some reason.

Yes I do. What I am looking for is federated/web3 replacements for Instagram, and some kind of well encrypted, decentralized messenger app

I mean... Reddit itself is already very niche

Lemmy probably won't every be mainstream. Mastodon, probably, not confident about it.

Yes. I am a typical reddit user and Lemmy is simply a better product.

We used to say the same thing about GNU/Linux on the desktop, and we were/are ridiculed constantly. The fact is that it is. While Android isn’t the same as Linux, it (and every other consumer platform besides MacOS, iOS and Windows) is based on Linux.

When Instagram Threads is released in a day-and-a-half, (and if it lives upto it’s potential and isn’t just a case of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish), ActivityPub and the Fediverse will be mainstream.

Lemmy: yes

Mastodon: ONLY IF IT CHANGES ITS SHITTY, CLUMSY, UGLY, UNINTUITIVE NAME to something with more of the following features:

1. Two syllables with the accent on the first (trochee)
2. Bright, sharp consonant and sibilant phonemes that pop (instead of dull, wooden, sonorous ones that flop)
3. Has a v or r sound in it to make it sound powerful
4. Bouncy and fun to say, therefore memorable

For example, it might catch on with a name like "Trunky" - I'm sure people who are more creative than me might come up with even better names.

I'm less worried about Lemmy becoming mainstream, and more worried about if it's good enough for me. Right now, it seems more than good enough, and I love the fact that it's not relying on corporate backing or ad revenue.

Mastodon seems like it's approaching an inflection point, especially with the upcoming arrival of Threads. It sounds like Threads won't support ActivityPub on day one, but with that support presumably arriving in the near future, I think a lot of what's happening on the fediverse could be legitimized. I just hope Facebook doesn't do the same thing they did with XMPP ten years ago.

Probably not. And if it ever gets too big, they will find a way to fuck it up 😉

I don't think it will happen until there are enough informed users, unique information and welcoming communities that create a strong reason to come here. Currently it's quite nice and these things do exist to an extent, but due to the relatively small size the communities feel much less bustling than those on Reddit and I don't think most people we see any advantages to use Lemmy over Reddit. Lemmy will gradually grow, but unless Reddit completely implodes I doubt there will be a significant enough migration here that we would be able to call it mainstream.

I’m hopeful but it will take a while. I want to see where we are in 6 months from now. Apps need to be pushed to the stores (at least on iOS).

That being said, it needs protocols for migrating instances when an instance is dead or about to die. Then there are some privacy concerns and such. It’s also not clear how it all can sustain monetarily except via donations.

But seeing the recent growth spurts and increase in new posts, I am still hopeful that this place has staying power.

I see the internet just going back to the way it was in the early '00s. It's a fresh start to say the least.

I'd like to think so but it will take a lot to lower the bar in terms of general confusion with the different instances and federation

No, not by a long shot. They suffer the Linux problem because they are built and maintained by groups with narrow, specific, principled goals. Like Linux, fedi-services offer at best a 95% solution for the average user, and introduce a fair bit of friction to general usability. For some people that’s not a problem, they are willing to jump through some usability hoops because they find value in the concepts of decentralization and federated services. But most users just want to shitpost, troll, collect karma, and be with their friends. That place for better or worse is still mainstream services and it likely will be for as long as they exist.

Linux suffers from “works for me”, and “I don’t need that feature” by a lot of developers and maintainers of various distros. We already see that from Lemmy with the dev being clear that he isn’t going to be working on anything but bug fixes and if you want a feature then you have to build it yourself. But even worse was the removal of captchas in 0.18.0 and it took a fair bit of back and forth with the admins of various large instances pointing out that captchas, while not perfect, are really the only thing holding back giant waves of bot signups.

So while lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. may work fine for the devs and 10%ers, for the masses it’s just too much friction when Reddit, twitter, etc still exist and they aren’t principled in the same ways such that they will put up with the inconveniences for a solution that only meets most of their needs when one that meets all their needs and has none of those inconveniences works fine still.

I hope not. I'd rather it wasnt mainstream, because that attracts morons.

Presenting multiple signup options is already asking a lot of the average user, particularly when you see some have different rules/signup requirements/user counts.

Though the question is, does Lemmy even want that type of user to join?

Hmm, I'm mixed about this. If it were going mainstream, some big corp would take notice, join the federation and then eventually enshittify it (see current state of emails where small players have trouble federating with big players such as gmail and outlook). Then we'll have to flee again to a new alternative. But then again, trying to become mainstream is a helpful goal to make fediverse apps actually usable for average people.

I don't think they will be the services that do it but maybe the next round will. We are basically waiting for boomers to die off and the portion of GenX that never took to understanding technology. After that we have a society that has basically always had the internet and then its just a matter of education.

Also i think the biggest obstacle is the naming and management of instances. Stop giving your instances stupid names. Midwest.social makes sense as its a social network for people who live in the Midwest. Fanaticus.social could be slightly better but still, made for sports fans. Lem.ee and lemmy.world and all those makes all non-tech nerds scratch their head as to which one to go to. Yeah its federated and people can access any instances but they wont get that if they never sign up. Pick a topic and have that be the gateway to other instances.