Sad to see almost none of the devs, from
Apollor (ChristianSelig), RIF (u/talklittle), Infinity (u/Hostilenemy),
Boost (rmayayo), BaconReader, to Relay (u/DBrady), etc. are not considering Lemmy at all.
I know these were hobbies but by atleast developing it for some time just to make transition for your audience to Lemmy easier would have gone a long way!
@lemmy @LemmyDev Lemmy will remain a niche platform if not enough people switch to it
We are one centralised and pretty Reddit alternative away from people flocking to it.
As swanky as it sounds, I doubt fediverse with all its quirks, bugs, instability, confusion etc. will be able to sustain or even gain mass adoption.
I want this to be false, but we have Mastodon as an example and it ain’t getting the traction it needs to replace or even properly compete with Twitter. Especially not once BlueSky opens up, assuming it will happen.
Mastodon requires the people I want to hear from to migrate. If Person X still uses Twitter, I have to use Twitter to hear from them.
Lemmy is different. All we need is enough active users to generate interesting content. We also don’t need it to gain mass adoption. We just need adoption large enough to create interesting content. That means we don’t need to grow 5000x to meet Reddit numbers. We just need to grow X to be great.
Fair point!
Yup. This just needs needs enough people, doesn’t matter much who, to post and repost interesting content like people do on Reddit. There’s no fanbase or content creators here to worry about like on YouTube or Twitter
The ux is already about to be better than reddit in a few weeks (kinda already is with wefwef) too. More people will come as they realize it has the same content with better ux
What makes you say Mastodon isn’t getting any traction? To me https://mastodon-analytics.com tells a different story.
I agree a well thought out centralised Reddit alternative could swoop in, but I’m in no hurry to look at anything other than Fediverse alternatives. I see no compelling reason to.
The active user chart on that site shows a spike after Twitter was sold and then a 50% decline and a flat line after.
It’s not bad, but doesn’t seem to be growing.
Judging by user count alone is deceiving, in my opinion. We need to look at how many “big Twitter personas / companies” are moving to Mastodon, because they are the ones generating content and increasing traction.
As it is right now, I only see some people creating Mastodon accounts and posting 1:1 with what they still post on Twitter. This is not enough.
But at the same time, all migrations take time and we will only be able to determine a “winner” after months if not years of this process taking place.
I’m crossing my fingers and hoping for the best still.
Big twitter personas and companies is the enshittification that is trying to be avoided. The less of that and the more of regular people the better.
Why exactly would anyone want companies to advertise to them? This seems like only a bad thing to me.
Depends on what you use the platform for. I’ve used Twitter as a way to keep up with real time developments, shout at companies whose support does not respond to me and read some news stories occasionally. For the people part I usually went to Reddit.
Now for people like me, Mastodon does not seem to cut it. I’m not caving in and starting to use the official Twitter app, but the fact I’ve lost the platform that covers those use cases is kind of sad.
Quadrupling the daily active user to 1.1-1.2M is so far so good. I don’t know how different your story is but that is barely 0.5% that of Twitter still.
Bots
I think having 100M+ users as a goal is unsustainable and unrealistic. I’m quite happy with where we’re at, and optimistic about where we’re going. If growth in the fediverse continues, we’ll be ok.
My feed on Mastodon already moves quicker than I could ever keep up with.
I just hope we won’t end up having what used to be Reddit (or Twitter) fragmented across 10 different platforms. That would definitely suck :/
I still argue that the pre-reddit/digg days where different communities had there own forums and sites was healthier and more diverse.
Homogeneous != Better
The fediverse is a nice middle ground. You can still have diverse communities but, for the most part, interact with them through one pane of glass.
With apps it’s not too bad. Liftoff already makes it fairly seemless (not perfect, but it’s still in early development)
I think the same. I was with the first wave that jumped over during the Reddit blackout earlier in June and questions like
“Which instance is the best one?”
“Why is there a /c/gaming on lemmy.world and a /c/gaming on lemmy.ml? Which is the best one? Shouldn’t they be centralized?”
“How do I search every instance in existence? What do you mean some instances don’t talk to other instances??”
I get the feeling most users want a centralized and highly managed stream of content and don’t care for content on a network of small, individually managed, forums