If you see 10 posts monthly, you're probably just subscribed to very inactive communities. Personally I don't really see the need for Lemmy to become as big as reddit though. When you get hundreds of posts a minute, individual voices get pretty much drowned out. If we can sustain a smaller, but less toxic, community than reddit, I think that's preferrable. By which I don't mean that there isn't room for growth still, there definitely is, especially for some of the smaller, more specialized communities.
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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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.
I completely reject the notion that the mainstream success of the fediverse will be the death of the fediverse, what are your reasons for believing that?
Enshittification happens to monetized platforms because they tried to capture as many users as possible and then profit off of them, lemmy instances show no profit motive, and are volunteer run. There isn't a route to enshittification with federation, because even if YOUR instance enshittifies, there's still many others that will not, and due to federation, you won't miss out on any content (as long as your instance doesn't defed), so it won't matter.
I also believe the issues you call out, aside from algorithmically driven content, will be solved eventually, as mod tools improve, there will be less of a need for defederation.
Even algorithmically driven content is partially solved by "hot" and "best" being improved, it's just not personalized.
With the rate of lemmy development being as rapid as it is, these things will eventually be solved, but that takes a lot of time. Lemmy is still barely even beta.
Your points about the Fediverse being immune to enshittification feel like echoes of what we'd say about the world wide web twenty five or so years ago. The web itself is somewhat of a federated platform. Websites are analogous to instances. And while it would be dubious to claim that the entire web as an infrastructure has enshittified (though Google sure seems to be trying...), I think it's not controversial at all to claim that the biggest players alive on the web have.
Yeah, you can always make your own scrappy little website. But you'll be an island few to no users will want to visit and support if you're competing with the other players. That, or you catch on and grow to the point where you yourself become the villain.
I see two roads for the Fediverse. Either it never grows past some filter and remains scrappy, or several large instances for the biggest platforms will dominate, sap up the market share of attention, and then use their weight to pressure how the protocol is maintained in the future, embrace-extend-extinguish style.
Also, "no profit motive"? Where critical masses of people gather, entrepeneurs surely follow. Someone will figure out a way to monetize hosting a Fediverse instance. Hell, Threads tried, sort of. That alone won't immediately enshittify the whole Fediverse. But given enough time and growth, well, see above.
Yeah, you can always make your own scrappy little website. But you’ll be an island few to no users will want to visit and support if you’re competing with the other players. That, or you catch on and grow to the point where you yourself become the villain.
that's exactly what federation prevents... you can be a scrappy little website and federate, and then you don't need a massive infrastructure that would cause enshittification later. If you enshittify, people will just leave to other parts of the fediverse, the model causes enshittification to just be the failure of your website.
This is different from the world wide web in that the content is not partitioned. I can get the same lemmy experience if I go elsewhere, and not lose out on content. If there's a major new privacy concern on my instance, i'm going to say fuck them and leave, and I'll lose nothing.
Also, “no profit motive”? Where critical masses of people gather, entrepeneurs surely follow. Someone will figure out a way to monetize hosting a Fediverse instance. Hell, Threads tried, sort of. That alone won’t immediately enshittify the whole Fediverse. But given enough time and growth, well, see above.
Except they'll inevitably fail aside from the people who legitimately don't care, and quite frankly, if they don't care, who does? Just go to another instance if that happens, you'll lose nothing, and it won't even be a problem.
Federation makes the part of enshittification where you box in your users not work. The reason facebook could enshittify is because if you left facebook, you'd lose ALL of facebook. They trapped people. You can't trap people like that on the fediverse. The first step fails inevitably, you'll just make everyone on your instance hate you and they'll leave for literally any other instance and it will die.
The fediverse doesn't work well with profit motive because of that, the only real way to profit without causing anybody who knows anything about what you're doing maliciously to leave is... what exactly?
When leaving has no cost, there's no way to force people to stay if you do something shitty.
Even if you keep some users, meh, they won't keep me, and i'll lose nothing by switching.
Lemmy is currently suffering from the network effect.
People aren't hanging out as much because there's not a lot of content. Less content gets posted because there's not a lot of people hanging out. Repeat ad infinitum.
What Lemmy needs is people that are brave enough to post in empty communities.
Also, it's suffering from what programmers call premature optimization. Reddit has hundreds of thousands of subreddits breaking down topics into incredibly niche subtopics. It's good, because the volume of posts is so high that talk about e.g. a particular indie game would get buried in a general videogames subreddit.
So, it seems like Lemmings want to copy that structure, and create a community for every tiny niche right away. But there aren't enough of us. It's like trying to start a nuclear chain reaction with your fuel all spread out. We'll never reach critical mass that way.
Instead, we need communities for general topics, so people actual see and engage with posts. So, for example, instead of hoping that c/whatisthisthing will get going, post such questions in c/asklemmy. There're not so many posts that it'll bury other topics yet, but if requests to identify objects really start taking off, then branch off a new community. That's how Usenet grew back in the day.
The core concept here is to get people talking to each other. That's more important than rigid categorization. That comes later, at this stage it's premature optimization.
(Also, for myself, I'd rather see Lemmy develop its own culture and communities, rather than try to be just a not-Rdddit Reddit.)
This is part of why I chose beehaw as my home
I don't want lemmy to be as popular as reddit as the signal to noise ratio was really bad.. Way too much noise.
I do want smaller communities that are on reddit to have a lemmy counterpart.
This. The more popular it gets, the more people come, the more trolls and idiots are beneath them, the more toxic everything gets...
Advertisements and fake news will also skyrocket once the user bases are big enough to become adequate breeding grounds for them.
Exactly. The amount of /r/adviceanimals level pure shit content on Reddit is high, paired with the bots that repost things until they start hocking some crypto bullshit links.
But I have kept using Reddit for years because every once in a while, you see someone write thoughtful posts about some niche subject you didn't even know existed. That's always interesting.
Lemmy is at a state where it needs more users writing about things that interest them.
Relay Pro just went to subscription, so the last 3rd party Reddit app is gone. I will probably read Lemmy much more on mobile from now on and hope it picks up steam.
That assumes everyone wants the fediverse to be as popular as reddit.
Personally, I don't.
Reddit often felt like walking through waist-high shit to find the odd thread that was worth the effort.
Reddit became terrible once it became a political tool by corporations and international organizations to brainwash the masses.
And that was complete 8 years ago in the lead up to the 2016 US election, and it was well underway before that.
I don't know if I did reddit wrong all the time (I've been there since 2013) or what the hell, but I do want Lemmy to be a replacement of Reddit to me.
I barely ever browsed r/all, I think I have done that more times now since the APIcalypse just to check out "what reddit is, and how it is going"
Reddit was my main source of resources for several topics such as Kodi, SBCgaming, Handhelds in general, Emulation of all kinds, Shield TV/Android TV and more generally gaming and tech news (I think Lemmy does fine in those both last fields), I just placed all my smaller subreddits/topics in the multisubreddits and used my mobile app to browse them all, later I knew about the best sorting in the frontpage and that was okay too, but never stopped using multireddits, that made my navigation more similar to forums, something that I used to frequent.
Usually my main source of finding cool stuff in the wild was if some redditor shared the subreddit in a kinda related thread, and if that caught my attention.
I legit didn't think about Reddit as a glorified Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok resource as it appears to be in r/all.
I was living in my tiny bubble I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, one must have a requirement to achieve this is having a bigger number of active users.
I commented a lot there, and that hasn't changed here, but definitely I'm upvoting more here than I did on reddit lol.
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.
It's like MySpace and Facebook. The momentum can switch at any moment. Like others said, it's better to fix some important issues before Lemmy becomes popular.
It's very likely that Lemmy will be more popular because Lemmy is more open for innovations. This is not Linux where you have to learn something first. If the frontpage is better, people will switch. Reddit cannot rock the boat whereas on Lemmy, each instance can try a new feature and show its usefulness.
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.
Why do you browse to other instances? Apart from channels on defederated instances you can subscribe to all channels on your main instance.
Does Lemmy need artificial 'all' channels that include all channels of an instance? Then there would be no need to directly visit other instances.
If there's a post with information I want to save, I email it to myself, same for FOSS posts where I want to try the software on the PC.
It might just be that I get a notification while I'm on the PC and want to answer. This post is on lemmy.ml, so if I opened it on the computer while I'm logged in to dbzer0, I wouldn't be able to type this reply.
As the others wrote, you should be able to reply.
Additionally, I would like to remind you of the star. You can mark posts and comments and find them in your profile.
Thanks, I always forget about the star. I'm so used to just sending myself links that I forget that there are other ways sometimes :)
This post is on lemmy.ml, so if I opened it on the computer while I'm logged in to dbzer0, I wouldn't be able to type this reply.
That's very incorrect. I'm on midwest.social and I can reply.
That's odd, I can reply now. The link from my replies is https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/5239822 though, rather than the original lemmy.ml link.
I've got https://programming.dev/c/learn_programming open in another tab, a link that I emailed myself to read on the computer, and that's asking me to log in.
Not odd at all. You're logged in on dbzer, you're not on programming.dev, because they're different servers. Your server fetches posts from other servers before you can comment on them.
There is also just a dbzer0 link to this post (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/5239822) that you should be able to send to yourself. I can't imagine Voyager wouldn't let you access that.
Sorry, yes, Voyager lets me read and reply to everything. It's when I try to open a link on my PC that I get the problem. I opened this thread from my replies, and get the dbzer0 link that you posted rather than the original lemmy.ml link, and I can reply on the PC. I've got https://programming.dev/c/learn_programming open in another tab though, a link that I emailed myself to read on the PC, and it asks me to log in, even though I'm currently logged in to dbzer0.
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.
Ya.. I don't know why lemmy devs are not focusing on moderator tools. What are they working on nowadays?
The first few weeks after the reddit exodus, releases were coming in fast with tons of changes, UI, performance improvements, etc..
Nowadays, I don't notice much.
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).
I don't think any site should ever reach that point again. The internet should not be four big sites and maybe three social networks. It should be a diverse blend of sites, so if the lemmy creators ever get bored, or mark Zuckerberg gets hit by a car, or Google runs out of money, the entire internet doesn't go tits up for the next six years.
I once heard the quote “The internet nowadays is 5 websites filled with screenshots from the other 4.” Which is sadly, very accurate.
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.
No, it likely won't be as popular. Might be pretty quiet in general, unless (until..) Reddit shits the bed again or something else happens to boost adoption.
I think maybe the design isn't working ideally, it's relatively complicated stuff and "federation politics" makes it infinitely worse. I think it's going to be a hard sell for casual users.
Of course, I don't think the place is dying off completely any time soon, either. (And the "bunch of nerds" era which we're at, relatively speaking, was arguably the least sucky Reddit period anyway - you can't have Reddit's user count without a large helping of extra toxicity coming with it)
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.
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 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.
No way it'll become as popular as reddit but that isn't a bad thing per se
I don't think so. The apps aren't as intuitive as the old non official reddit apps. I know me personally I don't know how to use kbin that well and I overall don't love it here. I made the switch when RIF died and I haven't actually filled the void yet.
I think the apps are fine. Check out boost for lemmy.. All the apps really need right now is an On Boarding screen. Something like: "Choose instance X or Y or Z and let's go".
That would definitely help someone like me who I guess is just an old person now
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.