It’s already popular enough to be a meme scroll substitute for Reddit so I’m good.
It’s popular with me, which is my only concern.
I clicked the wrong comment section and thought you were replying to this post
Brooklyn woman sues Subway, claims Steak & Cheese sandwich in ad has ‘200% more meat’.
I see folks posting on Mastodon, griping that it’s failing, that it’ll never be as popular as Bluesky and Threads because of X and Y, and I’m like, I’m over there chatting to people all day, having a fine time, following new people, picking up new followers, and generally enjoying it more than I ever really enjoyed Twitter.
I don’t really understand why those folks want it to be more than it is.
“Oh, but there are no journalists!”
Good? I don’t want endless ragebait posted in my feeds. I just wanna be chill, share music recommendations, and enjoy more people interacting with my radio show than ever did on Twitter.
“Oh, but there are no journalists!”
Good? I don’t want endless ragebait posted in my feeds.
I don’t think that’s the kind of “journalism” your strawman desires.
I have no strawman. I had a wickerman, but, well, it’s awkward.
Honestly I find it a little weird that Lemmy is so pro-Mastodon. Like a lot of people when the twitter implosion started I went and parked a username on a few potential replacements. And like a lot of people, when I saw that mastodon was all little specific instances, I didn’t bother because the whole point of twitter is that it’s a big public thing with everybody and everything. I haven’t really seen anybody outside of Lemmy mention mastodon in months. Everyone is going to bluesky.
It’s not that weird, given that they’re both examples of Fediverse software that can (in theory, though not well in practice) interact with each other.
As for Masto being separate instances; I’ve never really had a problem with that. Follow a bunch of people from different servers and you’ll soon begin to federate and link up with other people.
It’s just a completely different use case. It may or may not continue to exist on its own but it will never replace twitter because it does not have the core thing that makes twitter special among social media (the fact that it is essentially “public”). “A bunch of small communities of nerds talking about niche topics” is something you can find friggin anywhere on the internet.
It’s not public; it’s exclusive. I don’t want to have to register just to view posts.
Twitter links are harder to get through than paywalled articles, so they’re about about as worth reading to me as facebook posts.
Cool, you crack on using Twitter then.
Satisfactory had more than 1000 users this month. Popular enough in my book.
(I really need intsall Spellcheck on my device)
maybe with more porn
How do you define popular? I think it already is reasonably popular, I see enough activity here that it prompts me to comment at least somewhere on most days. I think it’s going to become more popular over time.
If I saw this question posted the first time I visited Lemmy (some months before the Reddit app drama) with “popular” being defined as the current level of activity, my clear answer would be a loud and clear “probably not”.
Current as in today? Or then-current (pre-exodus)?
I meant to say that I would never have believed back then that Lemmy would become as popular as it is today.
My point is that it’s a moving target. Reddit has a billion active users. Instagram has two billion. I don’t think these make sense as targets.
Yeah I’m pretty happy with its current activity level
No. The whole fediverse thing is niche and likely always will be. That might be a good thing though.
Right now, it’s definitely a good thing it’s not popular. We are not in any way shape or form ready for the spam that popular platforms receive.
Yeah I don’t want it to become a cesspit like Reddit, Facebook, and Xitter.
You’d typically think the abuse that happens on a higher level than dumb spam which those platforms succumb to would be even worse, but I feel we’re somehow in a slightly better position to regulate that on Lemmy because of the delegation of moderation to users rather than instance admins.
We “just” need a relatively small amount of the “right” people to effectively counter that.
The problem is that who and what you consider to be right is extremely subjective.
Their success is relatively easy to measure objectively by their effectiveness at protecting communities from i.e. subtle trolls or troll enablers.
Though one’s opinion on topics can influence the ability to spot such scum in the moment, the “right” people/a good moderator will know how to do that despite their topical (dis)agreements.
It’s definitely a good thing. If someone wants to be on the popular platform go back to Reddit or Twitter. That’s what most people want. The Fediverse is the minority that wants something different.
I think a lot of people would like the idea of decentralized social media in principle but most of them just want to download an app on their iPhone and get going instead of learning anything.
That can be done with Lemmy too, there are plenty of iOS clients
I’d argue plenty of people are simply not aware such alternatives even exist, and don’t bother researching.
Internet could be a different place if more people cared.
With that said, even then we’d probably be in a minority.
I sure hope not
I don’t want it to be popular. I want to have a good conversation, in the communities i choose to participate in, and that’s exactly what I found
Nah. But it’s already everything I need it to be.
sure. it took reddit 20 years to get to its size.
I think people don’t realise how old Reddit is, it was smaller than Lemmy is now when I first started using it.
It also took death of a platform “Digg” to jump start its growth.
And it’s arguably in the process of dying itself right now, in quality if not in user count yet.
haha this is not true… dude i was there, digg came/went and little impact on reddits user base
I was there too i was one of the ones that jumped over. I know its a big internet so maybe we both had different experiences. So maybe you are right and the timing was just a correlation and not causation.
reddit used to release page-views and maybe user info (i forget) annually.
there was a bunch of users that jumped over to digg, but they continued to also use reddit. when digg died there was a small bump of digg users, but i dont recall anything noticable in the big subs
Ah I only used Digg and never heard of reddit till Digg died and never joined most of the big subs. But also reddit was so small back then a small bump is a good kick start. Google trends data correlates with what I saw Digg was more search for in 2008 then by 2011 Digg was dead after the 4.0 debacle in 2010 and reddit took off in 2011.
Digg had a large viewer base and there was a lot of skullduggery going on amongst people who figured out how to game its algorithm, get on the front page, and direct traffic to some URL. But without actual data I would venture to guess that Digg and Reddit had roughly equivalent bases of actually genuinely active community posters and commenters and a lot of people were on both. Once Digg got taken over by the spam posters, it died off and Reddit remained. Reddit definitely inherited its mantle and probably many community members, but not the massive viewer audience.
and no subreddits! i was there too! it really started gaining traction and losing technical users when the ‘image macros’ started… memes took over
Obligatory image macros =/= memes.
I remember back when people were so pedantic over that. Happy people don’t really care anymore
Social media in general was also a lot smaller back then too.
Until the iPhone got popular you had to use a computer to access it. And back then we didn’t really trust sleep mode very much so you had to wait 2 minutes for windows to boot when you wanted to go on the net. VS right now I’m standing in from of my clothes not getting ready for work for 45 seconds.
Wait to boot? Back then I had a dozen machines all running 24/7 lol. But I guess the average user on the consumer side yeah.
it was smaller than Lemmy is now when I first started using it.
so now we know whom to blame for its enshittification
One difference though is social media. Reddit was able to gestate and grow without that massive clusterfuck sucking up all the internet’s oxygen. Nowadays with all the social media sites proper plus Facebook groups AND let’s not forget Reddit itself, there’s just massively more competition for attention online. The old 1.0 web forums are still around, many of them, but they’re small and relatively static. That could also be Lemmy’s fate.
Delusional and wishful thinking. Lemmy will most likely slowly fade out of existance.
I was on Reddit when it was small. So you never know.
I was gonna say I think I liked reddit more before the digg folks came. Maybe Lemmy is right where it should be.
I don’t care, I just want a nice place to wander, nothing is forever, but the longer, the better, regardless of popularity
Lemmy doesn’t have to be Reddit. Lemmy is Lemmy. Keep coming here and giving it content and it will be all it will ever need to be.
It’s already popular with a good userbase. Popular with idiots? Hopefully not.
