It doesn't need to replace Reddit.

And it won't, for many reasons. The biggest being that people don't like change.

But it can give, and has given, people a place to go who are ready to be done with Reddit. People who are ready for something new, not just "Reddit, but with a different name".

Until Reddit's website disappears, Reddit will march on. Those of us here are just those who can no longer tolerate feeding that beast.

Until search engines and LLM companies start crawling the fediverse, this will continue to be a niche of the internet, albeit perhaps large one at that.

You're absolutely right that we have a bit of a terminology issue here, but one slightly advanced and techy thing to understand about the fediverse is that the fediverse itself is the "platform":

Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Calckey, etc., are software projects or processes that are running on some server somewhere, and ActivityPub is the protocol (kind of like a language) that all these processes use (to varying degrees) to speak with each other. As users, we interact with a specific server or service (like beehaw.org or kbin.social) that is running that software and sharing info with other servers through a protocol.

This is totally different to Reddit or Twitter, which are both the names of the service AND (probably, but we don't now) the software that the service is running behind the scenes. Naturally that makes it a bit easier to talk about, because we don't have any access to or knowledge about the software or protocols that they use, and we can just talk about the services.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that Kbin and Lemmy are replacements for Reddit (the software) while servers like kbin.social or beehaw.org are replacements for Reddit.com (the service), except they also talk to each other somewhat seamlessly. I'm logged into the server "kbin.social", which runs a software called "Kbin", which communicates over a protocol called "ActivityPub" to a bunch of users who are on other servers running other software.

In other words, Google searching for "Lemmy" isn't exactly a good metric, not only because Reddit is one of the biggest websites around and Google knows this, but also because "Lemmy" isn't the actual name of the service that we are using right now, just the software. If you tell someone to go over to a specific server (like beehaw.org, kbin.social, etc.) then they'll have a much easier time finding something that they can actually use.

Most of us are guilty of kind of glossing over all this stuff to keep things simple and easy to understand, but there are some layers of nuance to the fediverse here that make this a little bit more complicated than you're making it out to be imo.

Fediverse really needs onboarding pages that hides some of the wires.

Join Lemmy for example should highlight the content and UI, and a big "Join the Lemmy Fediverse" button. Click the button and it asks 3 questions and send you directly to account creation for an active instance matching your answers.

Frankly instance choice should be something people think about after they've been involved for a while, at least until we have a few multi-million active user instances to choose from

If the devs coming from the 3rd party apps killed by Reddit can integrate like they say they're going to then it'll REALLY help with all this. Just have to wait and see.

If we want the fediverse to replace Reddit then either

We don't want the fediverse to replace reddit. Specially in term of popularity. What made reddit collapse in quality is the amount of people on the platform. The 3rd party app thing was only a trigger for many people. Many others have seen the quality of the content of reddit nosedive with time. The festival of memes and one liners has been described again and again. We didn't have this during those few weeks here. We will have it if the platform becomes too popular. How could it be otherwise? How can you picture a popular platform without the popular content? The platform filtering through some hurdles is a good thing.

Even now you can already see the bad behavior of redditor being reflected in the content. And it's only starting.

People have to come out of interest. Otherwise your platform will be filled with 1-click meme posters, and that's probably not what you want.

I don't care if it replaces reddit. I care that it remains free of corporate control.