Yes. I am a typical reddit user and Lemmy is simply a better product.

No. But this is not important for me. Where is the crowd? Shit is there.

No, not by a long shot. They suffer the Linux problem because they are built and maintained by groups with narrow, specific, principled goals. Like Linux, fedi-services offer at best a 95% solution for the average user, and introduce a fair bit of friction to general usability. For some people that’s not a problem, they are willing to jump through some usability hoops because they find value in the concepts of decentralization and federated services. But most users just want to shitpost, troll, collect karma, and be with their friends. That place for better or worse is still mainstream services and it likely will be for as long as they exist.

Linux suffers from “works for me”, and “I don’t need that feature” by a lot of developers and maintainers of various distros. We already see that from Lemmy with the dev being clear that he isn’t going to be working on anything but bug fixes and if you want a feature then you have to build it yourself. But even worse was the removal of captchas in 0.18.0 and it took a fair bit of back and forth with the admins of various large instances pointing out that captchas, while not perfect, are really the only thing holding back giant waves of bot signups.

So while lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. may work fine for the devs and 10%ers, for the masses it’s just too much friction when Reddit, twitter, etc still exist and they aren’t principled in the same ways such that they will put up with the inconveniences for a solution that only meets most of their needs when one that meets all their needs and has none of those inconveniences works fine still.

I’m hopeful but it will take a while. I want to see where we are in 6 months from now. Apps need to be pushed to the stores (at least on iOS).

That being said, it needs protocols for migrating instances when an instance is dead or about to die. Then there are some privacy concerns and such. It’s also not clear how it all can sustain monetarily except via donations.

But seeing the recent growth spurts and increase in new posts, I am still hopeful that this place has staying power.

mainstream's not all it's cracked up to be..

Mainstream yes. Fully replace? Never. However I don't think that traditional counterparts will ever be as big as they were before. I think we're seeing a shift in people's relationship with these platforms.

Eventually, yes.

I'm already there, and acknowledge my sample size is low. :)

I mean... Reddit itself is already very niche

Lemmy probably won't every be mainstream. Mastodon, probably, not confident about it.

I'd like to think so but it will take a lot to lower the bar in terms of general confusion with the different instances and federation

I think Lemmy is coming along nicely. There is lots of content for me to consume. I am on lemmy.ca so I haven't seen any of the bugs other people are talking about, it just works except for subscribing to places on the busy instances which shows pending for a while.

People will get used to how this works and I think it snowballs from here.

I remember reading old science fiction stories where a freer,more bottom up kind of internet existed. Maybe, maybe, maybe we can get a kind of thing like that? We have the technology. Why not?

It doesn't need to replace anything, that's a sports mentality applied to the free flow of information. What this decade has taught us is that the doomscroll is all there is. Reddit, Tiktok, Twitter, etc. all have constant scrolling through content as their main feature. It's a feature that's extremely reproducible. What the fediverse does is take power away from the corporations that want to make money off of the flow of user-created content. By the fediverse's existence, whenever some company wants to rate-limit or ban 3rd party apps, the people can now just say: "Nah."

As others have pointed out, I am content with Lemmy being a niche app with engaged users.

I don't think it'll become mainstream and doesn't have to be. Also, I believe folx are becoming more mindful of their digital privacy. The latter will continue to grow. And that is the new trend.

Technocrats are becoming less irrelevant as well because tech advancements expose their data mining trends and their sole purpose with their "products" is profit no matter the cost (often at our detriments).

Imo, Reddit has no moat. Twitter's only moat is community notes. In principle, community notes could be replicated and scaled to the size of the internet, adding comments to any arbitrary link and run like Wikipedia.

I don't think the fediverse has a realistic shot of breaking into the mainstream. However, I DO believe it has an outside chance of building up enough of a userbase to become a viable reddit alternative for me.

I do actually

Mainstream? Not a chance. Many people know Twitter and Facebook, but they don't know what Lemmy or Reddit is, for example, and therefore don't use it.

And it usually doesn't matter if solution A is better than solution B. What becomes mainstream and what doesn't usually depends on other things.

Replace? Absolutely not. But it will definitely be a viable product alongside.

There is a path but a lot of work needs to happen and a established community directory needs to be established so people can find what they are looking for.