No Stupid Questions

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.

sure. it took reddit 20 years to get to its size.

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.

I think it's already popular.

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

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.

No. The whole fediverse thing is niche and likely always will be. That might be a good thing though.

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 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.

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

We need to make it popular against all corporate forces like meta, X, bluesky etc. By creating more content and interacting with it more.

Don't really care either way, i like it here.

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:

1. 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.
2. Lemmy (in a broad sense - et al!) will keep getting better, due to.the nature of open source software.
3. Non-free alternatives to Reddit will eventually enshittify, law of enshittification.
4. 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.

I was on Reddit when it was small. So you never know.

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.

maybe with more porn

Not with how federation works on Lemmy.

I honestly can't understand why most of the popular social media providers are popular. But, if that's what it takes, could we not?