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

Honestly, it just needs to be large enough to have decent activity; social media becomes garbage as soon as it goes ‘mainstream’.

I think the idea of a federation: websites being able to talk to each other, could be mainstream. I don't think lemmy will be mainstream, but I do think lemmy will be able to talk to mainstream websites on the federation.

What if you could use your lemmy account to buy stuff online, book a flight, pay bills, sign up for streaming services, etc.? The federation isn't seeing its full potential.

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.

I mean... Reddit itself is already very niche

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

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 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.

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.

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 believe that, just like RSS feeds did not become mainstream while Reddit did, the current state of the fediverse will not gain mainstream popularity; however, it'll serve as a stepping stone towards a new federated internet that'll be seamless and intuitive for non-technically-inclined individuals and those who are indifferent to the implications for privacy and digital freedom.

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

I'm less worried about Lemmy becoming mainstream, and more worried about if it's good enough for me. Right now, it seems more than good enough, and I love the fact that it's not relying on corporate backing or ad revenue.

Mastodon seems like it's approaching an inflection point, especially with the upcoming arrival of Threads. It sounds like Threads won't support ActivityPub on day one, but with that support presumably arriving in the near future, I think a lot of what's happening on the fediverse could be legitimized. I just hope Facebook doesn't do the same thing they did with XMPP ten years ago.

Probably not. And if it ever gets too big, they will find a way to fuck it up 😉

It depends on how many content creators and important community members will be ready to move from centralized social networks to here

No, but the more pertinent question is why should it? Why do we want that?