God, I really hope it never does.
I wanna stay isolated on a social platform man.
A small bunch of stupid wankers is more than enough. The majority can fuck off to la-la land.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
48 points (98.0% liked)
Asklemmy
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No, and that's a good thing.
To quote John Water: "If 8 milion people like it, then it's probabbly not good".
If reddit keeps banning people at the present rate then it's a real possibility.
Banning people is not the worst thing about Reddit. It became too company friendly, too cheesy.
it already has niche communities but they're on topics that most people try to avoid; namely leftist politics and open source technology.
if you don't like either, then i image lemmy is fairly dull for you.
if reddit is any indication, that can change quickly with more people.
Perhaps. But both Lemmy and PieFed needs to mature more.
No it is to complcated to join here. The application, the servers?! To find good communitys. Does it even have an algorithm?!
No
Nope. Maybe collectively counting all users on all instances it may reach million users but i highly doubt a single instance ever does. I also don't know if it follows SEO guidelines to be a top result.
Not until the crossposting double comment section problem ever gets fixed.
i mean, reddit has the same problem and there it is.
do you think lemmy will ever have millions of users
It's not infeasible. It won't likely happen tomorrow, and to manage it will take massive server resources or many more instances, but as disillusionment grows with corporate social media I hope to see more people here eventually.
and niche topics or subs like reddit?
There's plenty of niche communities already across the fediverse, and I'm sure they'd love whatever you'd like to contribute to them.
or even be a top result when you search google? like reddit posts
Possibly, but probably not. The incentive structure for something like Google is built around profit, and the fediverse isn't really built to profit, mostly just financially tread water at best.
If enough people join then Google would be shooting themselves in the foot financially to not return lemmy in its searches if for nothing else than its own relevance, but as a general rule they'll follow the craven flow of capital every time.
@anotherspinelessdem@lemmy.ml
@workgood@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Google is perversely incentivized to send traffic to sites using their ad placement services creating demand for what they are supplying.
Sending someone searching for information to sites without ads enshitifying the experience breaks the business model Google depands on.
Now scraping the content to use in "AI summaries" without attribution? That seems likely.
Sending someone searching for information to sites without ads enshitifying the experience breaks the business model Google depands on.
Forma what is worth, Kagi has a feature to search in the Fediverse, on top of their usual search rules.
No, and doubly so on the second. SEO = search engine optimization. Big corps pay people to manipulate themselves into the top hits of searches; I don't see Lemmy ever doing that.
The top hits will be from companies that scrape the Fediverse for content then poop AI-generated slop into "top hit" positions they paid Google for.
Every second usefull search result is reddit.
I do like that Kagi has a fediverse search option.
Honestly no, but I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.
I miss niche feminist communities but overall prefer this and donβt think it will ever be big. I donβt think thatβs the goal.
Nah
You don't need a community for every meme. And I find more comments I want to interact with on Lemmy than on Reddit.
it's the kind of thing that can be big, but it takes its natural time. and a few more enshitification bro moves from the other side.
Oh good gods I hope not. That kind of popularity is what killed Reddit.
Getting hugely popular --> Higher server costs --> Increased temptation towards profit-seeking
Sure, the whole of Lemmy wouldn't privatize (at least at first), but what would likely happen is just as what has happened over the last 20 years with email: a few instances gets most of the traffic over the course of a decade or two, meaning small, independent instances won't be able to compete.
Sure, their hosting ability ("users/dollar", if you will) would plateau, but as more and more people join the big instances (think lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and so forth), the percentage of the Fediverse going to small, independent instances would increasingly get smaller, until we end up a corporatized federated Web to match our corporatized unitary Web.
Except unlike with Reddit, we can still have the small independent instances. And there will probably be more users on them in the future than there are Lemmy users today.
No, not unless the "choose an instance" problem at sign-up is resolved.
Its already solved, you get an automatic instance suggestion here: https://join-lemmy.org/
A roulette wheel of random instances is certainly a solution, but it's not a great one, given that there are substantial differences between instances that could potentially impact a user's fediverse experience, such as who they're defederated from, whether they allow nsfw or downvotes, etc...
That. This is such a barrier to most people. Just make it default to oneβ¦.
Well that would lump all users into one instance. Costs of that instance would be huge, leaving the owner to seek out ways of monetizing the whole thing. Downtime and disruptions would then also impact a large part of the user base. And if the instance goes belly up, those users are shit out of luck. It would also place a lot of power in the hands of that instance.
Basically what you describe are the exact things the fediverse is meant to fix. Otherwise you are just creating a new single large social media, with all the same issues. The whole point is to have people be distributed over lots of instances or even run their own instance.
The point however is valid, this is an issue that deserves some thought. But it's a hard problem to solve.
This is true for more aspects of Lemmy in my opinion. For lots of things it's too similar to other larger social media, where I feel better choices exist. Or it's similar to one kind of social media, where it could use aspects of other kinds of social media. We are seeing some of that being fixed now with Lemmy being able to integrate with other parts of the threadiverse.
Then choose one at random. Or make a register page that lets you search for one using tags.
I genuinely don't think this is hard, it just takes someone putting the time in.
Have a "sorting hat" that will assign people to an instance based on their interests could be good.
Not even interests per se, but rather qualities of the instances like:
- do you want nsfw blocked?
- do you want downvotes enabled?
- do you want more or less defederation from potentially objectionable instances?
- etc
Basically all the features that invalidate the "just pick an instance, bro, it doesn't really matter" argument.
Millions of users, no. That only happens with either massive marketing and/or sheer luck to become the popular thing.
Niche communities, yes, if the software is tweaked a little. We already have niche communities. Now it's just a question of making sure that the people who are interested in those topics and subscribed become more aware of posts in those communities. In other words, just a different algorithm for the main feed. Lemmy and Piefed have already tried adding new algorithms, but they didn't seem to do the job (at least Lemmy's new algorithm - I haven't tried Piefed's yet). Oh, and those new algorithms that would promote posts in niche communities to have more even standing with posts in large, general communities would need to become the default or at least widely adopted by users in order to have the intended effect.
More than likely no