No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
How do you define popular? I think it already is reasonably popular, I see enough activity here that it prompts me to comment at least somewhere on most days. I think it's going to become more popular over time.
If I saw this question posted the first time I visited Lemmy (some months before the Reddit app drama) with "popular" being defined as the current level of activity, my clear answer would be a loud and clear "probably not".
Current as in today? Or then-current (pre-exodus)?
I meant to say that I would never have believed back then that Lemmy would become as popular as it is today.
My point is that it's a moving target. Reddit has a billion active users. Instagram has two billion. I don't think these make sense as targets.
sure. it took reddit 20 years to get to its size.
I think people don't realise how old Reddit is, it was smaller than Lemmy is now when I first started using it.
and no subreddits! i was there too! it really started gaining traction and losing technical users when the 'image macros' started... memes took over
Social media in general was also a lot smaller back then too.
Until the iPhone got popular you had to use a computer to access it. And back then we didn’t really trust sleep mode very much so you had to wait 2 minutes for windows to boot when you wanted to go on the net. VS right now I’m standing in from of my clothes not getting ready for work for 45 seconds.
I really don't think so. The vast majority of internet users just stick with whatever simple thing that serves their need. Lemmy isn't the most difficult thing, but if reddit already exists and is more popular then people won't be leaving that for this if they haven't already.
The boost in people coming here last year was a "last straw" kind of deal from people using reddit who cared enough about not supporting their shit decisions, but by now that has died down and we've seen from recent articles that reddit "won" and they have a metric fuckton of users.
Things need to be really bad at Reddit before most people would consider leaving. On the other hand, Lemmy would need to be amazingly good to produce the same effect. Neither of these have happened yet, so only few people migrated.
the place is infested with bots, and that's probably "winning" to them.
It's already popular enough to be a meme scroll substitute for Reddit so I'm good.
Lemmy doesn't have to be Reddit. Lemmy is Lemmy. Keep coming here and giving it content and it will be all it will ever need to be.
I see folks posting on Mastodon, griping that it’s failing, that it’ll never be as popular as Bluesky and Threads because of X and Y, and I’m like, I’m over there chatting to people all day, having a fine time, following new people, picking up new followers, and generally enjoying it more than I ever really enjoyed Twitter.
I don’t really understand why those folks want it to be more than it is.
“Oh, but there are no journalists!”
Good? I don’t want endless ragebait posted in my feeds. I just wanna be chill, share music recommendations, and enjoy more people interacting with my radio show than ever did on Twitter.
It's popular enough for me already. I kind of hope it doesn't become the online site because that will just attract trolls.
I've also been using Trust Café (aka WT.Social) but I like the Lemmy UI a lot better.
Nah. But it’s already everything I need it to be.
Oh, of course. We'll easily be just as popular as Matrix and Mastodon.
sigh
Hey, I had a conversation on Matrix that one time!
And my Mastodon feed has TONS of content from George Takei.
No. The whole fediverse thing is niche and likely always will be. That might be a good thing though.
It's definitely a good thing. If someone wants to be on the popular platform go back to Reddit or Twitter. That's what most people want. The Fediverse is the minority that wants something different.
I don't want it to be popular. I want to have a good conversation, in the communities i choose to participate in, and that's exactly what I found
I think the Fediverse will be popular. It's already being adopted by Meta in the way of Threads.
Popularity comes when major companies, like Meta, push for something to be in the mainstream. Will Lemmy be popular and be pushed for the mainstream? Probably not. The mindset of the majority of the admins is against streamlining it. It's why we have a bunch of instances and why so many of them defederated from Threads (which I agree with). They've even taken steps to stop having so many people default to the .world instance in an attempt to diversify it.
I think we're going to need to start by defining what "popular" means.
According to https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy, there are 462,745 total Lemmy users. (Note: I know nothing about this site or their metrics; I literally just Googled "Lemmy users.")
If 462,745 people showed up to my birthday party, I would feel like the most popular person on the planet.
So, I think we need to consider a less abstract figure to answer this. Will Lemmy ever be as popular as a place like Reddit? I think that's extremely unlikely, at least not anytime soon. But will Lemmy ever be popular enough to sustain an engaged community? I dunno; I kind of think we're already there.
Maybe this is the old head in me, but I remember the decentralized days of the early internet, where communities weren't oceans of people on social media giants, but rather smaller, close-knit forums and message boards. If you spent a few months interacting, you would likely get to know and have specific opinions about individual users that you would regularly engage with, unlike the sort of hit-and-run buzz style of the modern social internet. I think right now, Lemmy is almost treading a special sweet spot between the two eras, and I'm pretty happy with it.
Although I will concede that I'm as addicted to social media as everyone else is these days, and I would certainly welcome the increase in on-the-minute activity that additional users would bring.
462k are the people that have created an account, Lemmy actually has ~40k active users (and even then "active" just means they logged in once this month). I do share the sentiment that not everything has to be super popular but Lemmy really could use more people.
Might consider that a lot of people have alts, maybe even 5+ alts, and there are a lot of bots.
40,000 monthly active users is probably a more useful number here.
It's already popular with a good userbase. Popular with idiots? Hopefully not.
very hot take:
regular people will never get rid of twitter or meta, Facebook. YouTube. it's incompatible with their psychology.
they need to use what other people are using, they need to see "content" from their followed users
switching to another platform will kill that for them for weeks and stall their "growth"
to be forward thinking and to give up something you've had is too much for the average person
which is why I'm on Lemmy: there's nothing reddit offers to me that makes me "give" it up, it's always been there but now that there's competition it's worth trying something new out
I honestly think id anything Lemmy will have a slow decrease of users until it comes to a halt
I mean, noone used reddit 10 years ago. To a 37 year old like myself, that seems like the reddit shit blew up out of nowhere. Youtube is just a matter of time and outcome of future google break up cases before a legitimate competition comes for its industry share. FB will die with the boomers. The only one I see as a really unmovable object is Twitter because of the universal use by all major sports media/reporting/journalists. It's the only one with end users applying the platform in any comercial sense outside of marketing. I think the question OP is asking will on the reliance of one of the other platforms falling.
Just my opinion tho so take it with a grain of salt.
We need to make it popular against all corporate forces like meta, X, bluesky etc. By creating more content and interacting with it more.
The Fediverse is only gonna get better. The other ones will all come and go.
In some number of years after another social media debacle or two, once the Fediverse has had some time to ditch its FOSS clunkiness, it'll be game over for anything else.
I'm gonna say yes, for the exercise.
Four assumptions:
- Reddit will keep getting worse, due to the nature of enshittification and venture capital. Eventually enshittification reaches a breaking point where people leave or stop arriving.
- Lemmy (in a broad sense - et al!) will keep getting better, due to.the nature of open source software.
- Non-free alternatives to Reddit will eventually enshittify, law of enshittification.
- Free alternatives will use ActivityPub for the obvious advantages.
If these assumptions are met, given infinite rounds of enshittification and unhappy users, eventually a federated and free alternative will be the most lucrative option for the majority of users. Eventually Reddit will Digg itself a hole. Maybe Lemmy won't take over then, but it'll stick around.
The most unrealistic assumption is of course that the federated solutions will keep getting better indefinitely. Maybe they won't. But as long as people keep developing and contributing to the Fediverse, it's alive and improving in a way commercial alternatives cannot in the long run compete with.
It depends whether the servers can handle the inevitable next Reddit exodus.
Honestly no, and that's okay?
Early web2 websites like MySpace did become "popular". But IMO one of its layckings was trying out web2 by evolving something from web1's static websites.
Where Facebook is the platform that popularized web2 in a way that worked with what web2 was and fundamentally build something new off of that.
I think Lemmy/mastatdon/most current federated clones that exist today won't last all that long. Something that is built with federation to its core and instead of just being a feature, is central to its offering.
What is that? Not a god damn clue.
But I'm excited to try it out.
Disclaimer: not a historian. Born in the early 90s so a lot of my judgement above is bassed off of foggy memories and are my opinions and only opions.
I don’t care, I just want a nice place to wander, nothing is forever, but the longer, the better, regardless of popularity
Depends, it's been a bit disappointing to see virtually no change since I started using it, particularly in terms of QoL. It is open source, so that's on everyone, including me, but I had hoped for more speed, etc..
Mastodon is way better when it comes to filtering.
Having the option of a reddit clone is pretty good though and I will stick with it. Who knows when and where it will get that critical bit of momentum.
It's already superior to regular forums, in my opinion, so now the question is what kind of format you want to have discussions in, instead of having to default to forums. That choice is a definite upside and I'm glad it exists.
I hope not. Imagine all the crazies.
so you prefer smaller forums to bigger forums like reddit?
I prefer social media where people post because they have content, need help or want to discuss something, not just post to be hip or the site is popular.
maybe with more porn