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.
If I saw this question posted the first time I visited Lemmy (some months before the Reddit app drama) with “popular” being defined as the current level of activity, my clear answer would be a loud and clear “probably not”.
Current as in today? Or then-current (pre-exodus)?
I meant to say that I would never have believed back then that Lemmy would become as popular as it is today.
My point is that it’s a moving target. Reddit has a billion active users. Instagram has two billion. I don’t think these make sense as targets.
Yeah I’m pretty happy with its current activity level
It’s already popular enough to be a meme scroll substitute for Reddit so I’m good.
sure. it took reddit 20 years to get to its size.
I think people don’t realise how old Reddit is, it was smaller than Lemmy is now when I first started using it.
It also took death of a platform “Digg” to jump start its growth.
And it’s arguably in the process of dying itself right now, in quality if not in user count yet.
haha this is not true… dude i was there, digg came/went and little impact on reddits user base
I was there too i was one of the ones that jumped over. I know its a big internet so maybe we both had different experiences. So maybe you are right and the timing was just a correlation and not causation.
reddit used to release page-views and maybe user info (i forget) annually.
there was a bunch of users that jumped over to digg, but they continued to also use reddit. when digg died there was a small bump of digg users, but i dont recall anything noticable in the big subs
Ah I only used Digg and never heard of reddit till Digg died and never joined most of the big subs. But also reddit was so small back then a small bump is a good kick start. Google trends data correlates with what I saw Digg was more search for in 2008 then by 2011 Digg was dead after the 4.0 debacle in 2010 and reddit took off in 2011.
Digg had a large viewer base and there was a lot of skullduggery going on amongst people who figured out how to game its algorithm, get on the front page, and direct traffic to some URL. But without actual data I would venture to guess that Digg and Reddit had roughly equivalent bases of actually genuinely active community posters and commenters and a lot of people were on both. Once Digg got taken over by the spam posters, it died off and Reddit remained. Reddit definitely inherited its mantle and probably many community members, but not the massive viewer audience.
and no subreddits! i was there too! it really started gaining traction and losing technical users when the ‘image macros’ started… memes took over
Obligatory image macros =/= memes.
I remember back when people were so pedantic over that. Happy people don’t really care anymore
Delusional and wishful thinking. Lemmy will most likely slowly fade out of existance.
One difference though is social media. Reddit was able to gestate and grow without that massive clusterfuck sucking up all the internet’s oxygen. Nowadays with all the social media sites proper plus Facebook groups AND let’s not forget Reddit itself, there’s just massively more competition for attention online. The old 1.0 web forums are still around, many of them, but they’re small and relatively static. That could also be Lemmy’s fate.
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.
“Oh, but there are no journalists!”
Good? I don’t want endless ragebait posted in my feeds.
I don’t think that’s the kind of “journalism” your strawman desires.
I have no strawman. I had a wickerman, but, well, it’s awkward.
Honestly I find it a little weird that Lemmy is so pro-Mastodon. Like a lot of people when the twitter implosion started I went and parked a username on a few potential replacements. And like a lot of people, when I saw that mastodon was all little specific instances, I didn’t bother because the whole point of twitter is that it’s a big public thing with everybody and everything. I haven’t really seen anybody outside of Lemmy mention mastodon in months. Everyone is going to bluesky.
It’s not that weird, given that they’re both examples of Fediverse software that can (in theory, though not well in practice) interact with each other.
As for Masto being separate instances; I’ve never really had a problem with that. Follow a bunch of people from different servers and you’ll soon begin to federate and link up with other people.
It’s just a completely different use case. It may or may not continue to exist on its own but it will never replace twitter because it does not have the core thing that makes twitter special among social media (the fact that it is essentially “public”). “A bunch of small communities of nerds talking about niche topics” is something you can find friggin anywhere on the internet.
Cool, you crack on using Twitter then.
It’s not public; it’s exclusive. I don’t want to have to register just to view posts.
Twitter links are harder to get through than paywalled articles, so they’re about about as worth reading to me as facebook posts.
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.
(thinking of Reddit) God, I hope not."
Nah. But it’s already everything I need it to be.
No. The whole fediverse thing is niche and likely always will be. That might be a good thing though.
Right now, it’s definitely a good thing it’s not popular. We are not in any way shape or form ready for the spam that popular platforms receive.
Yeah I don’t want it to become a cesspit like Reddit, Facebook, and Xitter.
You’d typically think the abuse that happens on a higher level than dumb spam which those platforms succumb to would be even worse, but I feel we’re somehow in a slightly better position to regulate that on Lemmy because of the delegation of moderation to users rather than instance admins.
We “just” need a relatively small amount of the “right” people to effectively counter that.
It’s definitely a good thing. If someone wants to be on the popular platform go back to Reddit or Twitter. That’s what most people want. The Fediverse is the minority that wants something different.
I’d argue plenty of people are simply not aware such alternatives even exist, and don’t bother researching.
Internet could be a different place if more people cared.
With that said, even then we’d probably be in a minority.
I think a lot of people would like the idea of decentralized social media in principle but most of them just want to download an app on their iPhone and get going instead of learning anything.
That can be done with Lemmy too, there are plenty of iOS clients
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
It’s popular with me, which is my only concern.
I clicked the wrong comment section and thought you were replying to this post
Brooklyn woman sues Subway, claims Steak & Cheese sandwich in ad has ‘200% more meat’.
It’s already popular with a good userbase. Popular with idiots? Hopefully not.
We need to make it popular against all corporate forces like meta, X, bluesky etc. By creating more content and interacting with it more.
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 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.
Things need to be really bad at Reddit before most people would consider leaving. On the other hand, Lemmy would need to be amazingly good to produce the same effect. Neither of these have happened yet, so only few people migrated.
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
I mean, noone used reddit 10 years ago. To a 37 year old like myself, that seems like the reddit shit blew up out of nowhere. Youtube is just a matter of time and outcome of future google break up cases before a legitimate competition comes for its industry share. FB will die with the boomers. The only one I see as a really unmovable object is Twitter because of the universal use by all major sports media/reporting/journalists. It’s the only one with end users applying the platform in any comercial sense outside of marketing. I think the question OP is asking will on the reliance of one of the other platforms falling.
Just my opinion tho so take it with a grain of salt.
Everyone looks at mega businesses as immune to decay. They’re not it just takes longer.
I think “x” may actually be the first to topple though. It’s losing money at an insane rate and that’s with a mega election year propping it up. That’s one of the reasons Elon is pushing Trump so hard, is for the government bail out he’ll get.
You are so fuckin high on the anti Elon hivemind smoke it’s clouding your ability to quantify how much money he has and the fact that X is now an entirely private company. You think he is doing all the Trump shit for a bail out from a government who, has only issued a bailout that applied to privately held companies once in its almlst 250 year existence?
Homie, I think he’s an idiot as much as the next but let’s come down from mars and back to reality. Then we will circle back and cover how much money 250 billion dollars is and how the entire presence of Twitter could leave, bankruptcy the company and still be a massive tax write off without any favorable treatment from DC beyond what perks he already qualifies for by being of the .000000001% tax backracket minority.
It’s losing money at an insane rate and that’s with a mega election year propping it up.
We won’t even make a stink about your typo that twitter’s advertisement revenue stream as being driven by the same mechanisms used to figure out a YouTube influencer’s advertivment revenue stream. We will call it an autocorrect oversight that your comment accidentally says the election attention and resulting increase of user activity affect how much companies pay twitter for its advertising spots and not the number of likes or subscriptions or user visits because they would be insane to agree to terms where the amount they’re invoiced is dependent on statistics that can’t decipher between bot accounts and active user accounts.
If ya made it to the end of this and your take away is that I’m a Elon stan, re-read it or tell me why because I cognizantly tried to make sure none of my over the top satirical statements made in this reply would tip a hat or give any slight implications that would credit Elon for being a shrewd or competent business owner. I’m just sick of the fuck Elon hivemind ignoring very objective facts about how shit works in lazy replies only intended to get their shot in at beating the dead horse named Elon’s and Idiot.
JFC, that is a lot of uneducated nonsense. “X” is losing 400-500 million a year, we know this from companies that lent him money and are public. I never said Elon would go bankrupt just “X”. Trump has constantly done anything he wants without care to precedence and has shown that he’ll do anything for a dollar. He also is a dementia laden fool that can be led around like a puppy right now.
I never said Elon was an idiot, that’s why I think he’ll get Trump to bail “X” out. Specifically because you don’t get that rich by losing money or passing up a chance to earn the kind of money he can off of Trump.
