No Stupid Questions

I'm less worried about Lemmy becoming mainstream, and more worried about if it's good enough for me. Right now, it seems more than good enough, and I love the fact that it's not relying on corporate backing or ad revenue.

Mastodon seems like it's approaching an inflection point, especially with the upcoming arrival of Threads. It sounds like Threads won't support ActivityPub on day one, but with that support presumably arriving in the near future, I think a lot of what's happening on the fediverse could be legitimized. I just hope Facebook doesn't do the same thing they did with XMPP ten years ago.

It depends on how many content creators and important community members will be ready to move from centralized social networks to here

I don't think it will happen until there are enough informed users, unique information and welcoming communities that create a strong reason to come here. Currently it's quite nice and these things do exist to an extent, but due to the relatively small size the communities feel much less bustling than those on Reddit and I don't think most people we see any advantages to use Lemmy over Reddit. Lemmy will gradually grow, but unless Reddit completely implodes I doubt there will be a significant enough migration here that we would be able to call it mainstream.

No, but the more pertinent question is why should it? Why do we want that?

See "Threads" from meta it tries to go on the fediverse

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.

No, I don’t think it will grow as big as the other socials. Because for the average Joe Normie it is way too complicated to understand what the fediverse is, and where they should sign up or post. In other words: the entry barrier is substantially higher than the competition.

However with simplified browsers like Wefwef it makes things a bit easier, and I do think it can grow reasonably big. Maybe in the future when there is more information available and the fediverse has matured.

It's like in voting. Everyone lets do their part. Inviting colleagues, friends. And that will make it become such.

No... Because unfortunately a lot of the complexity needs to be abstracted away.

I've been here for a few days now, the complexity is nice, but it isn't conducive to users, maybe Sync can abstract away a lot of the complexity.

As it stands, no Lemmy isn't a thing, and you know it too.

I honestly think it's unlikely. Not because Lemmy is bad or that the tech couldn't handle it. But Lemmy isn't really profit driven - there's no way to really build a moat without defederating, and therefore no capitalist reason to advertise and grow a server - all that would do is increase infrastructure burden and then leave the server owner trying to figure out how to recoup the cost. And if they start running ads, charging fees or running people nuts with merchandizing, that growth they paid for is likely to scatter to other servers offering the same access to content.

So if growing tall isn't likely, what about growing wide? Well, maybe. I'm still extremely new to Lemmy World, but from what I can tell to run a Lemmy instance you have to have or be willing to learn a basic understanding of Linux, and be willing to charitably donate your hardware/bandwidth to the public. That might work out, or that might be constrained either by freeloaders scaling faster than donors, or the learning curve proving too much a barrier to entry. Wikipedia worked out, but it still has to occasionally prod its users to remind them it needs money to keep afloat.

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.