I don’t think it will ever be mainstream. It’s confusing enough for IT literate people with a basic understanding of the concept, I can’t see it ever getting popular with the wider public.
My main concern is the overlap between lemmy instances, meaning me and my mate can be looking at for example a channel named ‘news’ and see different contents because we are on different instances. So you either subscribe to all news channels on all major instances and see lots of duplicated posts, or miss out on some posts.

This is the new "Is $DATETIME_NOW.year the Year of the linux desktop?".

Unlikely. Maybe a few years down the line but the fediverse isn't mature yet. Aside from mastodon and maybe firefish most sites are still in beta and missing features and quality of life. Even Lemmy is missing things like tags and a proper on-boarding experience. Things are slowly trudging along but I think the average person won't take you seriously when you say the fediverse is an alternative that's as good as the social media they're used to.

Yea I'd say its gonna be a while befote the idea of federated social media really takes off. I think one of the bigger reasons is just ease of use.

The federation aspect of this is kinda confusing when your first hear about and most users just want an easy experience.

Now you can say "oh just join lemmy.world and be done with it" but then comes another issue. Which is "wheres my account in this other instance?" Its not there. And it wont be there until porting accounts becomes a more integrated part of Lemmy and other federated socail medias.

I think those are the biggest things holding it back for now. I think it will catch on as more and more folks become more aware of (and care about) corporations like facebook(meta) or reddit don't care what you think and will walk all over you for a quick buck.

The fediverse will never be mainstream, that would mean using addictive algorithms which open source enthusiasts are opposed to.

Maybe from the mastodon (microblogging) side, but I think that from the lemmy side it's still a long journey

I don't want it to be mainstream. I like my small communities full of weirdos.

Why would you want it to? Look at all the "mainstream" social media sites. They're shitholes.

Don't think so there is a learing curve to it against the one click of social media

Haha of course not. Fediverse and mainstream social networks have completely different purposes. One is about creating small communities and the other about pushing viral content to vast amounts of people and generating revenue through ads. There will never be a meaningful interaction between the two.

Depends on what the view of “mainstream” is. With Threads, Tumblr, Discourse looking to join the Fediverse within a years time it’s going to grow by millions. It’s annoying when people use “algorithms” the Fediverse has algorithms. They are simply a tool. Awesome thing is that if any platform becomes hyper aggressive and looking to monetise users data there are ways to cut them off and there are other platforms and clients to use. Showing people interesting posts isn’t harmful, it’s done on the Fedi currently. Anyways, I believe adding millions more is good enough. It doesn’t need to be 100s of millions of active users

Nah, too much extremist propaganda. Most people won't stay if they're every even convinced to try it.

It will never be mainstream for the fact its a confusing mess for most people to figure out, let alone tech literate ones. Facebooks involvement or not.