No Stupid Questions

Mainstream users value ease of use in a way only a centralised service can offer. Also any social service has the hurdle of being where everyone else is, so every other person in your circles must follow what the simplest and laziest one bothers to use. If you have to resort explaining anything how the platform technically works to use it or to find you, you have already lost.

But I think these platforms are crossing the critical mass (if not already happened) to be useful and fun for those who choose to overcome the tiny hurdles of using the platform. It may be even their strength that not everyone and their mother is active there.

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

It’s inevitable for the federation to dominate. I think it will take a few years though

I hope not tbh. But I’m selfish. Let the masses have their garbage if they choose.

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.

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.

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.

It kind of reminds me of the olden mIRC days.

Why do they need to be replaced? Just use lemmy/mastodon and forget Reddit even exists. Not sure why people are so hung up on “replacement” when all you need to worry about is enjoying the content and interacting. Fuck Reddit and twitter, comparison is the thief of joy.

No, but it's a step in the right direction to rolling back Web 2.0 and the utter shitshow it's turned into.

Open protocols and no single company in charge is like IRC, newsgroups and so on, before we traded it all in for a nicer UI and handing all our data to future billionaires.

It needs to be able to evolve though. IRC could have become Discord, but we just abandoned it. Watch that do the same as everyone else over the next few years, as all those venture capitalists start asking for their money back.

Replace? Absolutely not. But it will definitely be a viable product alongside.

For the time being, no. The average user will be questioning why there are so many different instances of Lemmy and might get confused. For now it looks like this community is for the more tech savvy crowd. Once we figure out a way to make it easier for the average person to sign up, then we'll be good to go.

Easier signup = more people = more content = more demand to sign up

I don't really think that Lemmy or Mastodon will really replace their counterparts. At least not for now. As many have already said, the federation system is too complex for many non-technical people. It would take something like a de facto standard app, that abstracts everything federation related away and make it feel like another centralised solution.

Another point for me is the searchability of federated systems. Say you are searching for a technical problem right now, google will surely bring you to a related subreddit in just seconds. I have yet to see a Lemmy related search result.

Ultimately I see corporations owning all the most popular servers, and attempting to federate with everyone else.

I'm hoping it won't. I've had discussions with my friends from the earlier days of the Internet. The Internet was a much nicer place when you didn't have everyone and their grandma on it. You actually had to be tech literate to use it. This resulted in higher quality interactions and content. You still had undesirable groups and places, but they were sectioned off to their own corner. Now, social media and its algorithms give everyone a soapbox. I'd rather they stay off my fediverse lawn.

I think the idea of a federation: websites being able to talk to each other, could be mainstream. I don't think lemmy will be mainstream, but I do think lemmy will be able to talk to mainstream websites on the federation.

What if you could use your lemmy account to buy stuff online, book a flight, pay bills, sign up for streaming services, etc.? The federation isn't seeing its full potential.

My position differs currently for Mastodon and Lemmy.

In the case of Lemmy, I’m not yet 100% sure. Lemmy’s strength may also prove to be a weakness I feel in terms of it replacing Reddit, in that the decentralised nature naturally creates a dispersion of the audience. While anyone on Reddit could create a community, having them in one place really funnelled people into logically named communities. On the other hand while subscribing to a number of communities for Lemmy, it’s not that infrequent to come across the same or similar community on multiple instances and then needing to work out where you want to go. On one hand it’s probably good to have the varying perspectives and culture this will bring, but I think it’ll also make it hard for users looking for that definitive place to go. It’s very much early days though and perhaps many of those communities will naturally assemble in mass on various instances once the dust settles.

We’ll see how that plays out I guess, and right now my Reddit use is at maybe 10-20% what it was and I’m really looking to invest my time here. I think with time that both Lemmy updates an 3rd party clients will make working across instances more transparent and in turn broaden appeal.

I’m more bullish for Mastodon in the short term. The reason for that is my usage concerns me looking to follow an individual rather than locate a community of individuals. Since people will have one account, there’s less impact caused by decentralisation as my interactions with a person I follow is very much 1:1 (unless for some reason they chose to create and maintain multiple accounts). If I want to follow Apple’s account, they’ll presumably have a single one versus there maybe being 6 viable Apple communities across Lemmy instances. I find my use of Mastodon in terms of user experience is much closer and familiar to Twitter than currently Lemmy is to Reddit. Additionally, once it’s enabled for ActivityPub, I think Meta having Threads throws significant support around that particular ecosystem, and brings it to the masses. Can’t imagine we’ll see a billion dollar company spin up a Reddit alternative that is Activity Pub integrated to give Lemmy that same boost, unfortunately.

To be clear I’m very supportive of both Lemmy and Mastodon and want both to succeed. I do think reddit being centralised has some benefits but, especially for people not looking to invest heavily in browsing across instances, and that it’s to be seen how Lemmy will evolve as it grows and if casual users will be able to sign up and easily find the communities and information they are after. The 1:1 person interaction for Mastodon I think simplifies things and Thread potentially will result in a massive boost for Mastodon. It’s early days for Lemmy and I can’t imagine in Jan or Feb that the majority of us here had even heard of it, let alone considered leaving Reddit. It’ll only continue to grow and I’m excited to watch it do so.

As someone who is currently tutoring computer science courses for college, I think you greatly over estimate the average computer users ability to navigate a place like Reddit, let alone Lemmy. Most people I tutor for intro classes struggle to understand a file browser. Even for me Lemmy was slightly intimidating with how it jumps to the whole open source/ chose an instance thing before I could make an account.

Lemmy will need a basic app before it really jumps to the main stream.