No Stupid Questions

I believe it can, at least Lemmy. Not saying it will or won't, just that it can. I don't use Mastodon (or Twitter) enough to have an opinion on that.

It's possible but we need to be careful with META, they can mess things up

https://www.reuters.com/technology/meta-launch-twitter-like-app-threads-2023-07-04/

https://fabulous.systems/posts/2023/06/meta-is-a-danger-to-the-fediverse/

https://fediversereport.com/meta-plans-on-joining-the-fediverse-the-responses/

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.

All this talk about “well, the UX”, “if the servers can”, “but the big companies”, bla, bla, bla. I’m here right now. There is nothing else as far as I’m concerned. Twitter and Reddit are dead to me and I absolutely love Mastodon and Lemmy. I quit Facebook many years ago and never found an alternative for that, outside of starting a shared photo group on iOS with my family.

You better start believing in fediverse alternatives…you’re in one.

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.

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

Honestly, it just needs to be large enough to have decent activity; social media becomes garbage as soon as it goes ‘mainstream’.

unfortunately, probably not

it has nothing to do with how the coummnities are ran or what technology/apps we have, the issue is that decentralised networks almost always have worse infrastructures compare to centralised ones. lemmy.world is already lagging quite a bit, and eventually the admins will be overwhelmed by the shear number of users.

Unless federation figures out a way to distribute load or monetize for server cost, I dont think it will become mainstream

Maybe. Pre-centralization, it was very similar - forum boards run by different people on different servers. A system like Lemmy is basically the same but without the inconvenience of having to make a new account every time, which should make it more accessible in the long run.

What it would need in addition to that is discoverability - if just a few major instances show up high enough in major search engines results it'll be a huge draw. Right now discoverability is kind of abysmal, which worries me a little, but I know people are working on solutions.

Imo what we regular users can do right now that will have an impact is contribute to communities and keep them active, and encourage reddit-based communities to switch over. If we all can prove that this is an effective way to run communities, the people will come.

It's not about what company has the best system and most control, it's about what we as groups of people with shared interests gravitate towards. Lemmy fixes some barriers to running forums and might enable more individuals and small groups to start running their own servers again.

By the time it’s gained adoption with a more flexible and strongly principled user base, I’m sure there will be a next thing to dethrone fediverse apps.

Software development principles and modern conventions are surprisingly cyclical, I’d argue that in 5-10 years’ time, if the fediverse picks up, some startup is going to say “are you tired of the same old fractured, fragmented ecosystem? Meet consolishare, a revolutionary idea of taking all the features you know and love from the fediverse and consolidating them into one sharing platform.”

Who knows though.

Tooling/apps will help dramatically. At the moment, it’s nowhere near as rich as the ecosystem that once was around platforms like Reddit.

No and I hope they don’t. At first that’s what I wanted for mastodon / Lemmy but as I’ve been here I’ve realized that having too many people invariably dilutes the quality of content since popularity means shouting over more voices and content which is generic or manipulative (rage bait) or appeals to the least common denominator bubbles up. There’s a critical mass needed for quality and content variety, but too much and it falls apart.

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.

this kind of setup was mainstream before the VCs decided to try and buy it all out.

problem for them is, you can't really monetize the commons so you can only throw money at things like this while rates are low.

yes, this will be the new mainstream and the protocol will likely endure well beyond many social systems, including this one. However, as its a standard protocol, whatever system you use in the future will be very likely able to host your entire history from here

Mainstream? Not a chance. Many people know Twitter and Facebook, but they don't know what Lemmy or Reddit is, for example, and therefore don't use it.

And it usually doesn't matter if solution A is better than solution B. What becomes mainstream and what doesn't usually depends on other things.

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.

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

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).

I do actually

I can only hope so. People understand that email is decentralized and that an @gmail can talk to @aol. They also understand that someone using an iPhone with Verizon can text someone using an Android phone in AT&T. But, they need incentive to leave. I was perfectly aware of reddit, but didn't join until digg updated to V4. Ive know about fediverse, but didn't bother joining until recently. Most people won't leave platforms they are used to.

Imo, Reddit has no moat. Twitter's only moat is community notes. In principle, community notes could be replicated and scaled to the size of the internet, adding comments to any arbitrary link and run like Wikipedia.

I don't think the fediverse has a realistic shot of breaking into the mainstream. However, I DO believe it has an outside chance of building up enough of a userbase to become a viable reddit alternative for me.

I doubt it, it's not complicated to use, but also not an out of the box experience like other platforms

There is a path but a lot of work needs to happen and a established community directory needs to be established so people can find what they are looking for.

replace? no. and that is okay, to be honest and i think part of the appeal is because of the smallness and genuine interactions, deep discussions etc