We are so used to the idea that a social media network has to dominate the world - ekse it’s a failure. If Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed or your old fishing forum is enjoyed by some people, it’s a success.

No. As long as people keep using it I think it can grow enough that people can use Lemmy as their primary app. But it’ll never become mainstream enough.

We underestimate how technically ignorant the majority of people are, as soon as it hits the point of no official app and which instance to join people give up.

The only way I can see it working is it they prioritised their own official instance, made it default on an ‘official’ app so it’s just as easy as Reddit or Twitter, but in small text allow people to change instance.

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.

The average user on the internet does not really care about the horrible changes or the ads served on the platform. That type of users make up the majority of the internet, so frankly it most likely won’t be mainstream anytime soon. It might get big, it might become popular as an alternative, but as long as the internet is mostly made up of people that aren’t much knowledgeable about certain things that people are in here, it won’t.

Replace? No. Be a valiable second option? Sure. Like in the early 2000 when you had dozens of major forums for certain topics. Something Awful, GameFAQs, Digg, Slashdot, 4chan, NeoGAF… It‘s not a natural law that there has to be one service having 95 % of the discussion market locked up.

When you can convince your friends to use Signal, you can convince them to use Mastodon and Lemmy… So, I vote ‘No’ ☹️

Yes

It’s unpredictable though. Too many influences on that. People, interaction, systematic. Reddit has the size it could remain, or rebound. Lemmy as a project or platform could fuck up.

Lemmy/Fediverse is a sizeable niche now and has a chance to - over time - scale up significantly.

It’s possible. I think the biggest obstacle is that the corporations feeding on people’s data are not going to just stand by while it happens.

I think it remains to be seen. The rapid growth of .world has been the first real production test of how the platform handles more users and content. Amazing work by the team, but there are a lot of rough edges and it is a new platform with a lot of unknowns.

The things that spring to mind for me are:

• Sign up needs to be streamlined and made more simple, and find a way to not overload individual servers without just randomly assigning people to instances.

• Live defects, bugs and things feeling rough around the edges.

• Back-end build and scaling.

• Duplicate communities across instances.

• Account migration between instances.

• Data retention past x period - how will various instances handle this with a large number of users.

• GDPR and data request compliance from individuals, governments, etc.

• Funding the costs and resources associated with rapid, large growth. How do people know what their money is going to fund? I think there needs to be real transparency, public roadmaps and backlogs and understand how / if admins are accountable.

• How the platform and users will respond to large corporations or even individual admins on instances adding adverts, using / selling user data in ways the userbase do not expect.