No, nothing can. But like everything else in life, they’ll just grow and add to what was there before. A direct replacement would be unnatural. Even AOL is still around.

It will take a lot of time before that happens, if it does at all. The platform just needs more people and right now as much as we like to believe Reddit is dying… it still has a massive user base.

It kind of reminds me of the olden mIRC days.

It’s inevitable for the federation to dominate. I think it will take a few years though

Hmm, I'm mixed about this. If it were going mainstream, some big corp would take notice, join the federation and then eventually enshittify it (see current state of emails where small players have trouble federating with big players such as gmail and outlook). Then we'll have to flee again to a new alternative. But then again, trying to become mainstream is a helpful goal to make fediverse apps actually usable for average people.

Possibly, but I kind of don't want to see it happen. I like the smaller communities here. Feels like my people here and I just joined not even a week ago

Not until the tendency for the mainstream to gravitate to centralization is changed. Lemmy will need exponential growth to become large enough in userbase to be a mainstream consideration to use the federated replacement.

Ultimately I see corporations owning all the most popular servers, and attempting to federate with everyone else.

I'm hoping it won't. I've had discussions with my friends from the earlier days of the Internet. The Internet was a much nicer place when you didn't have everyone and their grandma on it. You actually had to be tech literate to use it. This resulted in higher quality interactions and content. You still had undesirable groups and places, but they were sectioned off to their own corner. Now, social media and its algorithms give everyone a soapbox. I'd rather they stay off my fediverse lawn.