What the title says. I think there is still a long way for that to happen but i’ve been hopeful. What do you think?
We are so used to the idea that a social media network has to dominate the world - ekse it’s a failure. If Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed or your old fishing forum is enjoyed by some people, it’s a success.
No. As long as people keep using it I think it can grow enough that people can use Lemmy as their primary app. But it’ll never become mainstream enough.
We underestimate how technically ignorant the majority of people are, as soon as it hits the point of no official app and which instance to join people give up.
The only way I can see it working is it they prioritised their own official instance, made it default on an ‘official’ app so it’s just as easy as Reddit or Twitter, but in small text allow people to change instance.
If you automate the right parts, its possible to go mainstream. I mean, remember what a hassle it was to get on the internet 20 years ago? You had to get a provider, get a card for your pc…so many roadblocks got removed and it went mainstream
But once that ship has sailed it’s gone. 60 years ago, everybody who wanted to own a car, TV, dishwasher etc. knew or was willing to learn basic maintenance and repairs.
I think that is still happening. The enthusiasts create something, may it be highly technical and for the eggheads: if its good, people will flock to it and make it easier to use and give it a nice shiny frontend. No need for technical expertise from that point on.
I don’t really think that Lemmy or Mastodon will really replace their counterparts. At least not for now. As many have already said, the federation system is too complex for many non-technical people. It would take something like a de facto standard app, that abstracts everything federation related away and make it feel like another centralised solution.
Another point for me is the searchability of federated systems. Say you are searching for a technical problem right now, google will surely bring you to a related subreddit in just seconds. I have yet to see a Lemmy related search result.
I have actually started finding results for things on programming.dev on Google.
It’s less obvious because it doesn’t say lemmy, but I imagine this will be more common as more content is posted here.
Also, the technical issues involving new users is temporary. It may take awhile, but the user experience will gradually get better as time moves on.
The average user on the internet does not really care about the horrible changes or the ads served on the platform. That type of users make up the majority of the internet, so frankly it most likely won’t be mainstream anytime soon. It might get big, it might become popular as an alternative, but as long as the internet is mostly made up of people that aren’t much knowledgeable about certain things that people are in here, it won’t.
Replace? No. Be a valiable second option? Sure. Like in the early 2000 when you had dozens of major forums for certain topics. Something Awful, GameFAQs, Digg, Slashdot, 4chan, NeoGAF… It‘s not a natural law that there has to be one service having 95 % of the discussion market locked up.
