No and I hope they don’t. At first that’s what I wanted for mastodon / Lemmy but as I’ve been here I’ve realized that having too many people invariably dilutes the quality of content since popularity means shouting over more voices and content which is generic or manipulative (rage bait) or appeals to the least common denominator bubbles up. There’s a critical mass needed for quality and content variety, but too much and it falls apart.

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

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.

No... Because unfortunately a lot of the complexity needs to be abstracted away.

I've been here for a few days now, the complexity is nice, but it isn't conducive to users, maybe Sync can abstract away a lot of the complexity.

As it stands, no Lemmy isn't a thing, and you know it too.

No, I don’t think it will grow as big as the other socials. Because for the average Joe Normie it is way too complicated to understand what the fediverse is, and where they should sign up or post. In other words: the entry barrier is substantially higher than the competition.

However with simplified browsers like Wefwef it makes things a bit easier, and I do think it can grow reasonably big. Maybe in the future when there is more information available and the fediverse has matured.

It's like in voting. Everyone lets do their part. Inviting colleagues, friends. And that will make it become such.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.