No Stupid Questions

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.

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.

Mainstream? Not a chance. Many people know Twitter and Facebook, but they don't know what Lemmy or Reddit is, for example, and therefore don't use it.

And it usually doesn't matter if solution A is better than solution B. What becomes mainstream and what doesn't usually depends on other things.

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.

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.

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

Probably not. And if it ever gets too big, they will find a way to fuck it up 😉

I'm less worried about Lemmy becoming mainstream, and more worried about if it's good enough for me. Right now, it seems more than good enough, and I love the fact that it's not relying on corporate backing or ad revenue.

Mastodon seems like it's approaching an inflection point, especially with the upcoming arrival of Threads. It sounds like Threads won't support ActivityPub on day one, but with that support presumably arriving in the near future, I think a lot of what's happening on the fediverse could be legitimized. I just hope Facebook doesn't do the same thing they did with XMPP ten years ago.

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

Yes, will it? No.

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.

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.