I think the idea of a federation: websites being able to talk to each other, could be mainstream. I don't think lemmy will be mainstream, but I do think lemmy will be able to talk to mainstream websites on the federation.

What if you could use your lemmy account to buy stuff online, book a flight, pay bills, sign up for streaming services, etc.? The federation isn't seeing its full potential.

Eventually, yes.

No. But this is not important for me. Where is the crowd? Shit is there.

mainstream's not all it's cracked up to be..

I’m hopeful but it will take a while. I want to see where we are in 6 months from now. Apps need to be pushed to the stores (at least on iOS).

That being said, it needs protocols for migrating instances when an instance is dead or about to die. Then there are some privacy concerns and such. It’s also not clear how it all can sustain monetarily except via donations.

But seeing the recent growth spurts and increase in new posts, I am still hopeful that this place has staying power.

I mean... Reddit itself is already very niche

Lemmy probably won't every be mainstream. Mastodon, probably, not confident about it.

I think Lemmy is coming along nicely. There is lots of content for me to consume. I am on lemmy.ca so I haven't seen any of the bugs other people are talking about, it just works except for subscribing to places on the busy instances which shows pending for a while.

People will get used to how this works and I think it snowballs from here.

I'm already there, and acknowledge my sample size is low. :)

It doesn't need to replace anything, that's a sports mentality applied to the free flow of information. What this decade has taught us is that the doomscroll is all there is. Reddit, Tiktok, Twitter, etc. all have constant scrolling through content as their main feature. It's a feature that's extremely reproducible. What the fediverse does is take power away from the corporations that want to make money off of the flow of user-created content. By the fediverse's existence, whenever some company wants to rate-limit or ban 3rd party apps, the people can now just say: "Nah."

Only if a site like join-Lemmy.org can be promoted on every instance and actually direct you to a server that isn’t overloaded and is fully federated.

Right now, it directs you to sadly overloaded servers that are terrible choices.

If that doesn’t happen, then some big instance needs to scale up with its popularity and be well funded by someone for some reason.

I remember reading old science fiction stories where a freer,more bottom up kind of internet existed. Maybe, maybe, maybe we can get a kind of thing like that? We have the technology. Why not?

I'd like to think so but it will take a lot to lower the bar in terms of general confusion with the different instances and federation

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.

Replace? Absolutely not. But it will definitely be a viable product alongside.

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 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.

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

There is a path but a lot of work needs to happen and a established community directory needs to be established so people can find what they are looking for.

I doubt it, it's not complicated to use, but also not an out of the box experience like other platforms