No Stupid Questions

No, I don't believe it can and I'm thankful for that. We don't need another Reddit.

No and I hope they don’t. At first that’s what I wanted for mastodon / Lemmy but as I’ve been here I’ve realized that having too many people invariably dilutes the quality of content since popularity means shouting over more voices and content which is generic or manipulative (rage bait) or appeals to the least common denominator bubbles up. There’s a critical mass needed for quality and content variety, but too much and it falls apart.

Maybe, I am an exodus from reddit. I got into it with a scammer. They were doing Cashapp doubling a clear scam. I reported them and was perma banned for harassment. I think they are plagued with bots on reddit. I'm looking for more fashion based and hip hop type stuff over here but it seems like its more of the hard internet stuff like politics and open source drone engineering. If you know what I mean.

Let go of that thought. Reddit is (probably) here to stay. Lemmy will have less users, less communities, and tbh, probably less quality content. That's okay. Grow your seeds.

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).

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 don't want lemmy and mastodon specifically traced their centralized counterparts. I only want the average person to have access to and knowledge of their options.

Imo we don't need to replace anything, this is really nice the way it is. Yes some users for more interactions and content definitely of course would be nice for more people to use it.

I believe it can, at least Lemmy. Not saying it will or won't, just that it can. I don't use Mastodon (or Twitter) enough to have an opinion on that.

No, there a lots of tiny bits of things that just make it a difficult experience compared to reddit.

Lemmy: yes

Mastodon: ONLY IF IT CHANGES ITS SHITTY, CLUMSY, UGLY, UNINTUITIVE NAME to something with more of the following features:

1. Two syllables with the accent on the first (trochee)
2. Bright, sharp consonant and sibilant phonemes that pop (instead of dull, wooden, sonorous ones that flop)
3. Has a v or r sound in it to make it sound powerful
4. Bouncy and fun to say, therefore memorable

For example, it might catch on with a name like "Trunky" - I'm sure people who are more creative than me might come up with even better names.

I can only hope so. People understand that email is decentralized and that an @gmail can talk to @aol. They also understand that someone using an iPhone with Verizon can text someone using an Android phone in AT&T. But, they need incentive to leave. I was perfectly aware of reddit, but didn't join until digg updated to V4. Ive know about fediverse, but didn't bother joining until recently. Most people won't leave platforms they are used to.

It might get a huge boost in usage now that Meta released Threads. In the main page, it said that the app will be able to connect to the fediverse and specifically mentioned Mastodon as an example. Maybe someday I’ll be able to stop using reddit altogether. But that day is not today.

Only if a site like join-Lemmy.org can be promoted on every instance and actually direct you to a server that isn’t overloaded and is fully federated.

Right now, it directs you to sadly overloaded servers that are terrible choices.

If that doesn’t happen, then some big instance needs to scale up with its popularity and be well funded by someone for some reason.