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

I don't think it will happen until there are enough informed users, unique information and welcoming communities that create a strong reason to come here. Currently it's quite nice and these things do exist to an extent, but due to the relatively small size the communities feel much less bustling than those on Reddit and I don't think most people we see any advantages to use Lemmy over Reddit. Lemmy will gradually grow, but unless Reddit completely implodes I doubt there will be a significant enough migration here that we would be able to call it mainstream.

I doubt it, it's not complicated to use, but also not an out of the box experience like other platforms

I see the internet just going back to the way it was in the early '00s. It's a fresh start to say the least.

Mainstream users value ease of use in a way only a centralised service can offer. Also any social service has the hurdle of being where everyone else is, so every other person in your circles must follow what the simplest and laziest one bothers to use. If you have to resort explaining anything how the platform technically works to use it or to find you, you have already lost.

But I think these platforms are crossing the critical mass (if not already happened) to be useful and fun for those who choose to overcome the tiny hurdles of using the platform. It may be even their strength that not everyone and their mother is active there.

I do actually

I don't think they will be the services that do it but maybe the next round will. We are basically waiting for boomers to die off and the portion of GenX that never took to understanding technology. After that we have a society that has basically always had the internet and then its just a matter of education.

Also i think the biggest obstacle is the naming and management of instances. Stop giving your instances stupid names. Midwest.social makes sense as its a social network for people who live in the Midwest. Fanaticus.social could be slightly better but still, made for sports fans. Lem.ee and lemmy.world and all those makes all non-tech nerds scratch their head as to which one to go to. Yeah its federated and people can access any instances but they wont get that if they never sign up. Pick a topic and have that be the gateway to other instances.

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.

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.

I hope not. I'd rather it wasnt mainstream, because that attracts morons.

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.

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

I hope not tbh. But I’m selfish. Let the masses have their garbage if they choose.

I honestly think it's unlikely. Not because Lemmy is bad or that the tech couldn't handle it. But Lemmy isn't really profit driven - there's no way to really build a moat without defederating, and therefore no capitalist reason to advertise and grow a server - all that would do is increase infrastructure burden and then leave the server owner trying to figure out how to recoup the cost. And if they start running ads, charging fees or running people nuts with merchandizing, that growth they paid for is likely to scatter to other servers offering the same access to content.

So if growing tall isn't likely, what about growing wide? Well, maybe. I'm still extremely new to Lemmy World, but from what I can tell to run a Lemmy instance you have to have or be willing to learn a basic understanding of Linux, and be willing to charitably donate your hardware/bandwidth to the public. That might work out, or that might be constrained either by freeloaders scaling faster than donors, or the learning curve proving too much a barrier to entry. Wikipedia worked out, but it still has to occasionally prod its users to remind them it needs money to keep afloat.

No, but it's a step in the right direction to rolling back Web 2.0 and the utter shitshow it's turned into.

Open protocols and no single company in charge is like IRC, newsgroups and so on, before we traded it all in for a nicer UI and handing all our data to future billionaires.

It needs to be able to evolve though. IRC could have become Discord, but we just abandoned it. Watch that do the same as everyone else over the next few years, as all those venture capitalists start asking for their money back.

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.

See "Threads" from meta it tries to go on the fediverse

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?

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.

replace? no. and that is okay, to be honest and i think part of the appeal is because of the smallness and genuine interactions, deep discussions etc

Yes, and it won't be as wild-westy as people may like to think thanks to common sensibilities.