Some people might find the answer to be obvious (yes) but I’ve rarely found it so. In fact, this is a question I often find in the linux community (regarding linux going mainstream, not lemmy) and people are pretty split upon it.
On one hand, you may get benefits like more activity, more content, more people to interact with, a greater chance you’ll find someone to talk to on some specific subject.
On the other, you could run into an eternal September like reddit, where Lemmy would lose its culture, and have far more spam and moderation issues.
I don’t know, what do you think?
I think that the more people that move to the Fediverse the better. As it gets popular Lemmy will be more and more populated with instances that can be curated to the user’s wants. Don’t like how one instance is running things? Move to another. Don’t like how one community does things? Move to another. The more popular Lemmy is, the more options Users will have.
Key is more people, not more corporations. We don’t want META to connect with the fediverse!
I don’t understand that. If you don’t like corporations joining the fediverse then just join an instance that is defederated from them or better yet just block them. Corporations are going to join the fediverse and that’s ok because one of the major parts of the fediverse is you can choose to affiliate with corporations or not, you’re not subject to them.
You gotta think big picture. Meta joins fediverse -> lots of Facebook users can now interact with fediverse users (yay) -> Meta now builds proprietary code that only works on Facebook for the fediverse -> users en masse joins Facebook fediverse -> Meta declares other fediverse instances sub par and incompatible with Facebook -> Meta cuts off from fediverse completely -> fediverse becomes irrelevant.
That’s giving to much credit to Facebook tho. Not everyone is just going to jump ship and join the Facebook fediverse.
They will if they have a better UX, computational resources, brand recognition, and can sign you up with your current Instagram account. Which seems to be the case.
Will everyone join? No. I’d rather go back to Reddit than to sign up for it.
Will the vast majority of people join? Yes.
The new Threads app had something like 10M users in 7h. The whole of Lemmy is 2M users.
I would for a few reasons. Particularly to show the world that we don’t need corporations to create something good.
Though I am worried about some inconveniences caused by the fundamentally separate instances. Simple things like copying a post, navigating back to your instance, navigating to the search feature, searching for it, waiting for the result, opening the result and then finally able to take action on it.
It can also drive disconnection, despite trying to work against it. It has the ability to put people into silos and build social walls due to intentional and unintentional ignorance. Though you can most certainly argue that is already an emergent property social media algorithms today.
Particularly to show the world that we don’t need corporations to create something good.
The world already knows. Wikipedia, Mozilla, GNU/Linux exist and have thrived brilliantly. If anybody argues for the necessity of corporations for innovation in the internet/IT space, they are simply blind at this point.
I should have specified the context of building something to communicate on. I think my original point is that I’m excited for the properties that come with decentralization but I’m worried about it’s drawbacks. The grass is always greener, they say. Perhaps this decentralization all goes extremely well and we have many types of services that adopt the mentality. How long will it take before we see the disorganization, identify it as causing disconnection and separatism before pulling it all back together again?
I actually typed out a longer response before realizing you and I have the same belief. 😄 Though I haven’t yet determined if I can blanketly state all corporations are good or bad and I think I’m okay with staying on that fence. If anything corporations just reveal the properties of the people who run them when they have been blinded by a common goal–and how blinded (or not) they become.
I want it to become as useful as reddit was in finding concise and correct information for a huge variety of topics.
I think in the future people will care much more about free software and privacy, so it’s inevitabile that federated platforms like Lemmy will be mainstream. Reply: I would like enought people to have more quality contents so that I can drop Reddit. Also more people means more interest and at the end a better software.
Yeah, this is what I’m waiting for on Lemmy and Aether. Just enough activity across just enough topics that I can finally drop Reddit.
Only problem, with some of these federated and P2P protocols, is that, for the time being, the kinds of people who leave mainstream social media tend to be fascists, qanon nuts, or straight up delusional to the point of likely needing medical intervention.
Pretty glad I discovered Lemmy though. Everyone here seems fairly sane.
I’d like it how it is now but a bit more active, like reddit circa 2008 when I first joined. Sure there were memes and shitposts, which are fun and have their place, but even then the discussions on news stories and other serious topics were of unusually good quality. Tildes captures the later quite well, but is also pretty quiet.
Man I have no idea why my post suddenly became active after two years but I have to say in the context of the original post, lemmy is pretty much mainstream now.
I think lemmy is currently tainted by the whole “I just moved from reddit everyone!!” mood right now, it’ll take a few months to develop its own culture. Assuming it can withstand eternal september.
Funny, I didn’t even notice, just came up on the feed :)
The great thing about Lemmy is that there’s no admin, no one site, no single set of rules everyone has to obey. So Lemmy becoming mainstream doesnt necessarily mean everyone tolerating a new culture. Niche communities can continue to exist, instances can isolate themselves if they want and turn off registrations, “eternal September” isn’t really possible on a network like this.
