this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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I do not think people understand. Lemmy is not going to become a forum guzzling behemoth like Reddit. Nothing will. The userbase will expand over time, as people on Reddit start getting fed up, and at some point there will be a combination of aggressive censorship (if IPO goes through) and privacy intrusive authentication. Many hobbyists do not like it, and are only quiet because they can make unidentifiable accounts, even if it requires official Reddit apps or websites to access.
People do not even understand how platforms work. Lemmy has become a non-mainstream, sane platform with federation that is not a shithole like any other previous alt-right failed Reddit clones. There is plenty activity for what are initial days, as users figure out the signup part and the cultural differences between Lemmy and Big Tech social media like Reddit. As a long term Reddit user, Reddit has been becoming shittier by the day, and is largely used due to decades of valuable posts and comments, and niche hobby communities. Ones that exclusively use frontpage are worthless audience and overlap hugely with Tiktok and Instagram users.
I think this is a fundamental property of social media. It's a basic catch-22 - you need new users to attract new users. Sometimes a seismic shift will occur like the migration from MySpace or Digg, but neither of those websites were as big as any of the big social media sites are now, so the gravity well wasn't nearly as strong.
People will just normalize the new anti-user features and get used to them.
This is the best thing about federation.
If the Fediverse became really popular and I created a new alternative to Lemmy/Kbin that was significantly better than both, it would be way easier to gain the momentum required to become a real player in the field compared to trying to compete with Reddit when most people aren't in the Fediverse yet.
Vine was killed by facebook & its regulatory capture. Otherwise it would've killed facebook and we never would've gotten tik tok (for better or worse).
FB, the gram and now twitter are dying. Just because they still exist doesn't mean they're not on their way out. Anyone with accounts on the first two can tell you that the number of active users on their feeds has been the same people for 5-10 years and are dwindling (and the feed of the third is lmao since boosting paid user content). Their traffic numbers might look fine but that's because they lie about those numbers and they make it impossible to delete accounts.
Most importantly, it's been 15 years since any of these companies couldn't get free financing. Often a focus on profitability results in misplaced user-hostility over short-sighted moves, which is what killed a lot of companies in 99 and again in 2007. We just haven't had a financial climate that requires it since. Hilariously this climate would make it a perfect time to take twitter private to push it past the other two and tik tok but it got bought by the worst failson the world has ever seen.
Don't mistake still existing for not being dead. Digg.com still employs dozens of people, that doesn't mean its been a useful link aggregator for the last 12 years.