What the title says. I think there is still a long way for that to happen but i’ve been hopeful. What do you think?
It’s possible. I think the biggest obstacle is that the corporations feeding on people’s data are not going to just stand by while it happens.
Another big obstacle is the general UX of these platforms. Major companies have teams of user experience analysis and researchers that, while not always “winning” as compared to product or business driven decisions, absolutely have a (generally positive) impact on the product. Onboarding, retention, etc.
The fediverse has all the standard frictions of most OSS, like talking about itself, it’s technology, etc when the fact is 99% of users dgaf.
I might go so far as to argue the perceived complexity is a bigger barrier than the risk of sabotage from other businesses. I am optimistic the growing list of third party apps will help solve some of these issues, as long as they take things like the sign up process and server selection into their scope.
I don’t think UX will be that big of a problem, in the past the unofficial reddit apps were all better than the official one. Major companies design by committee and the UX is meant too maximize profit and engagement statistics for advertising, rather than be “good”. A lot of open source UIs are better than their paid counterparts. I think PopOS is far nicer than windows 11.
Nah, most open source UIs are really pretty bad. Most devs are horrendous designers.
Your comment about profitability is true when it comes to social media companies specifically but definitely not true for the industry as a whole. UX is a huge selling point for enterprise software and the goal there isn’t to drive clicks or views, because that’s not how those companies make money.
UX won’t be a problem as long as the maintainers are open to feedback and not stubborn about their current approach. And even if they are, an alternate front end could be introduced separate from the default one.
That and the servers are under such stress that it makes for a stuttery beginning for any new usrrs. Even just trying to upvote you and comment was a process. First this page wouldn’t load properly, then then the upvote didn’t show, then the screen jumped around when I tried to reply.
This site and any other will only replace Reddit etc if it’s got people. It only gets people if new users can use the platform. We’re not quite there yet. The people here now are willing to put up with growing pains but if it doesn’t improve soon people will move on
The problem is that everyone has consolidated on one gargantuan server. The whole point of the fediverse is to spread out so no one server is carrying the entire load. I’m currently using lemm.ee and have experienced none of the issues being discussed here.
But yes, I agree that it could be a potential turn off for newcomers.
I’m testing out Mlem on iOS and so far it is a much cleaner experience than even the desktop version of Lemmy’s webapp. Lots of nice QoL features.
Create an account off of lemmy.world and see if you have the same issues. A smaller instance can handle things easier. It have 2 but use the one that was most up-to-date and responsive.
yeah, lemmy’s current web app is very much in the “made for nerds by nerds” category as far as i see. lots of cool tools to express yourself and not many useless limitations, but on the other hand it’s kinda confusing if you’re not that techy. it’s absolutely learnable but it would do very poorly on a hallway usability test.
and it’s understandable why that is so, lemmy itself is being developed by two people who have their hands full putting out a thousand other fires, as well as sorting through the community’s contributions. but there’s still a lot that will have to improve in the future – although I’m completely sure that when it does, it will be way better than what a corporate alternative would be like. those tend to do well with attracting new users but they also tend to be out of touch and suffer from stupid one-off decisions by middle managers trying to get promoted.
And do what? Make a better product? The beauty of Capitalism is that consumers really are the final say on whether your product succeeds. You can make an app with as many addictive hooks as possible, but that doesn’t make those users permanent. And any sabbotage by Reddit will only dig in our heels at this point.
If the fediverse starts gaining traction, you can bet the mega-corps will use every dirty trick they have to co-opt it or, if that fails, undermine it.
Threads is already expected to be that answer. Mindless instagram folks won’t have a clue.
I hear what you’re saying, but Lemmy was created to oppose the capitalist exploitation cycle. With Lemmy, we aren’t consumers or a product. Lemmy is actually firmly rooted in anti-capitalism and arose because capitalism destroys choice.
Capitalism isn’t necessary for innovation. It is just the private ownership of things. Spez didn’t make Reddit great, for example. Other people did. Spez is just a do-nothing owner who is now the mouth piece for bigger do-nothing owners looking to wring out maximum profit from unpaid laborers.
I’d argue that capitalism stifles innovation, which is why everyone agrees that you need competition. A market economy. And broad anti-trust regulations, since capitalism is inherently authoritarian since it is a top-down hierarchical structure. A free-ish market is what allowed us to innovate so quickly.
But Lemmy is outside of that since it isn’t driven by profit.
Capitalism provides an incentive to make money. It allows you to buy things or donthings. However sometimes the thing we want to do is socialise. So people code to make that happen. People run instances to make that happen. The incentive is community instead of money.
Capitalism still provides incentive for innovation. So does our need for interaction. I’m hoping that the decentralised nature and federisariinnmakeanthay possible for other projects. We could all start having our own foss servers in our homes that hold our photos, our social media, email and news. With no ads and no snooping. This could be the next phase of our internet connected lives.
I don’t think you need to have the largest following to have great value, even lemmy as it is right now feels great. I’ll actually want to dive into comment sections compared to the endless scrolling on reddit.
As long as there’s enough people using a platform for a variety of ideas and experience in topics, I think that’s good enough for me.
Personally, I don’t even want Lemmy/kbin to become Reddit 2.0.
Reddit from 10 years ago is the goal for me. Reddit has become far, far too bloated for its own good, and that line was crossed a long time ago IMO. Let’s just enjoy what we have. Let all the normies stay on Reddit, the people I wanna vibe with are here already.
I want it to be Reddit 2.0 in the sense that I can find active communities for specific or niche interests. Before July 1, the smallest subs that I participated in to have similar communities here were ones that had ~400k subscribers on Reddit.
The value of Reddit was never in the 1M+ communities, any content there was usually present elsewhere, and the discussions rapidly became dumpster fires. It was in the smaller dedicated subs for topics that might not have another human-centric discussion forum.
I agree. A vast majority of the userbase don’t mind the countless ads on Reddit or Twitter, on even FB. I think people are leaving FB because it’s not cool anymore, not because the UE has gotten worse.
I’m just glad that there now are smaller, more tailored for my preferences alternatives like Lemmy
Yes I think about Hacker News, which isn’t technically sophisticated nor does it have a massive userbase (a little less than 1 million registered accounts).
It manages to have a steady stream of content and an active commenting base
Not everyone who left Digg went to reddit, and not everyone who left Myspace went to Facebook. “Replacing” reddit should never be the goal, it should be “be better than reddit”.
If this is ever to go mainstream, what we should be concerned about is making good, high quality original content. If people see us having fun and being nice here, they’ll want to join in too.
Quick plug for my own communities:
- !nowlemmyexplain@lemmy.world for my take on ELI5
- !lemmyscareyou@lemmy.world for my take on nosleep
Great point about the high-quality original content. I remember before Reddit was popular, that’s where much of the original content was generated, and it would eventually be reposted on Digg. Reddit had the reputation of being tomorrow’s Digg homepage today.
In their current state, definitely not. There is a real bubble effect browsing on Lemmy because it feels like 1 post out of 3 is just praising the platform, but I think they’re far from ready to become mainstream. I’d say there are for now 2 major problems:
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The global instability (a lot of bugs, many third party apps, but a poor on-boarding with the main website).
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It was made by engineers and marketed by engineers. The federated aspect should IMO be public and known, but seamless. It should be possible to just create an account and start browsing without having to do some research on how the thing works. The technical aspect of the fediverse is great, but it’s also its main drawback, I believe that hiding it for newcomers could be a way of not scaring them.
I agree about the bubble effect. I feel it, too, even though I don’t consider myself in a bubble. I truly am enjoying Lemmy and the conversations more than anything else even somewhat similar to it. The smallish nature of the community probably combined with the slightly elevated bar for joining means the riff raff isn’t here in large numbers yet.
Lemmy, today, honestly reminds me of Reddit 15 years ago.
Perhaps this is the bubble effect, but I have a high confidence level in the major third party devs being able to streamline the sign up process. It is already happening in some apps.
The stability problems are another story. I encourage people to go to the front page of their respective communities and look for donation links. Even $1/mo on Patreon can snowball into large sums as Lemmy.World shows.
Stability would be fixed if people realized they don’t have to all join the biggest two communities, which is part of the education problem we have right now for completely new users.
Although servers have really been scaling nicely regardless of those days right after the privating and then July 1st
I feel like there should be a button of “hey you want me to handle this for you and pick an instance” I managed to figure out the basics and liked the post office example that memmy uses where I can mail a letter to my fellow lemm.ee friends down the street but can also get mail and news from across the country. Helpful admins are also good. I’m not super duper tech literate but I figured it out.
Like I said reducing barriers to entry will be helpful because I didn’t come here till Apollo kicked the bucket
It’s something reddit was actually good at. Tons of people used to find reddit way too confusing because they didn’t understand subreddits, so reddit responded by making a list of default subs for the “don’t know don’t care” crowd that makes up 90% of users in practice.
Sure, it opened a different can of worms in that it tanked the quality of those subs when most users didn’t really get the pount of subs, but it massively lowered the barrier to entry on the platform.
We have a much higher barrier to entry with instances, and I really think something should be put in place to lower it.
Agreed with the second part. I think the federated servers are a neat concept, but at the end of the day what made reddit easier was that everything was on one server. You create an account and that’s it, you can browse every subreddit.
I hope it’ll grow more, but rnow I think they should work on making the whole experience more seamless
Just my opinion but that ease of use will come in time. The more the learning curve exists the more we will get the power users that made Reddit special and the more Lemmy will stay special.
I don’t want the Reddit of today on Lemmy. I want the Reddit 10 years ago when there was a fraction of the users on it.
We are doomed to ultimately have the same struggles that read it ended up with in terms of content and users but we can keep it held off as long as possible.
I disagree with you, yes, ease of use will come for power users, but in the end it’s the diversity of people interacting with the platform that creates communities with valuable content. And to attract more people the platform needs less friction at on-boarding.
Where we disagree is that I believe the level of knowledge needed to form that community is higher than you’re giving credit but time will tell! ;)
Replace? No. Be a valiable second option? Sure. Like in the early 2000 when you had dozens of major forums for certain topics. Something Awful, GameFAQs, Digg, Slashdot, 4chan, NeoGAF… It‘s not a natural law that there has to be one service having 95 % of the discussion market locked up.
Yeah. This makes me think of people who assume Tumblr is dead and unusable when everyone left, whereas in reality it has had a resurgence of creativity instead. Things like Goncharov happen because the people there still have a critical mass.
Platform don’t die. They can flounder a bit, and I’m sure that even Reddit and Lemmy will one day do so too. But they’re there.
