workgooddo you think lemmy will ever have millions of users and niche topics or subs like reddit?
VanthNo, and doubly so on the second. SEO = search engine optimization. Big corps pay people to manipulate themselves into the top hits of searches; I don’t see Lemmy ever doing that.
The top hits will be from companies that scrape the Fediverse for content then poop AI-generated slop into “top hit” positions they paid Google for.
CorrectAliasI do like that Kagi has a fediverse search option.
Every second usefull search result is reddit.
Fizz
svelteciderI miss niche feminist communities but overall prefer this and don’t think it will ever be big. I don’t think that’s the goal.
ComradeSharkfuckerMore than likely no
voidsignalit’s the kind of thing that can be big, but it takes its natural time. and a few more enshitification bro moves on the other side.
The porn instances already do
But I hope it doesn’t ever get so niche as Reddit became
You don’t need a community for every meme. And I find more comments I want to interact with on Lemmy than on Reddit.
Well that would lump all user into one instance. Costs of that instance would be huge, leaving the owner to seek out ways of monetizing the whole thing. Downtime and disruptions would then also impact a large part of the user base. And if the instance goes belly up, those users are shit out of luck. It would also place a lot of power in the hands of that instance.
Basically what you describe are the exact things the fediverse is meant to fix. Otherwise you are just creating a new single large social media, with all the same issues. The whole point is to have people be distributed over lots of instances or even run their own instance.
The point however is valid, this is an issue that deserves some thought. But it’s a hard problem to solve.
This is true for more aspects of Lemmy in my opinion. For lots of things it’s too similar to other larger social media, where I feel better choices exist. Or it’s similar to one kind of social media, where it could use aspects of other kinds of social media. We are seeing some of that being fixed now with Lemmy being able to integrate with other parts of the threadiverse.
hoshikarakitaridiaThen choose one at random. Or make a register page that lets you search for one using tags.
I genuinely don’t think this is hard, it just takes someone putting the time in.
Have a “sorting hat” that will assign people to an instance based on their interests could be good.
Not even interests per se, but rather qualities of the instances like:
- do you want nsfw blocked?
- do you want downvotes enabled?
- do you want more or less defederation from potentially objectionable instances?
- etc
Basically all the features that invalidate the “just pick an instance, bro, it doesn’t really matter” argument.
NutomicThere are multiple defaults on join-lemmy.org
Its already solved, you get an automatic instance suggestion here: join-lemmy.org
A roulette wheel of random instances is certainly a solution, but it’s not a great one, given that there are substantial differences between instances that could potentially impact a user’s fediverse experience, such as who they’re defederated from, whether they allow nsfw or downvotes, etc…
Thing is that we dont have any information about someone who visits joinlemmy, other than the IP address which gives the location, and Accept-Language HTTP headers. So it attempts to give useful suggestions with that limited info.
EveryMuffinIsNowEncryptedOh good gods I hope not. That kind of popularity is what killed Reddit.
Getting hugely popular --> Higher server costs --> Increased temptation towards profit-seeking
Sure, the whole of Lemmy wouldn’t privatize (at least at first), but what would likely happen is just as what has happened over the last 20 years with email: a few instances gets most of the traffic over the course of a decade or two, meaning small, independent instances won’t be able to compete.
Sure, their hosting ability (“users/dollar”, if you will) would plateau, but as more and more people join the big instances (think lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and so forth), the percentage of the Fediverse going to small, independent instances would increasingly get smaller, until we end up a corporatized federated Web to match our corporatized unitary Web.
MousePotatoDoesStuffExcept unlike with Reddit, we can still have the small independent instances. And there will probably be more users on them in the future than there are Lemmy users today.
Sure, just as we have small independent email instances. But by and large the vast supermajority belong to a few large players.
I have no doubt the same will happen to the Fediverse.
Capitalism ruins everything in the end.
A few large players and the ability to choose smaller instances, and have them speak to each other, is still a huge upgrade over one player (Reddit) who doesn’t let other social media federate with it.
Not as good as the ideal fediverse, but a step in the right direction.
Oh, of course, I was never denying that.
Millions of users, no. That only happens with either massive marketing and/or sheer luck to become the popular thing.
Niche communities, yes, if the software is tweaked a little. We already have niche communities. Now it’s just a question of making sure that the people who are interested in those topics and subscribed become more aware of posts in those communities. In other words, just a different algorithm for the main feed. Lemmy and Piefed have already tried adding new algorithms, but they didn’t seem to do the job (at least Lemmy’s new algorithm - I haven’t tried Piefed’s yet). Oh, and those new algorithms that would promote posts in niche communities to have more even standing with posts in large, general communities would need to become the default or at least widely adopted by users in order to have the intended effect.
do you think lemmy will ever have millions of users
It’s not infeasible. It won’t likely happen tomorrow, and to manage it will take massive server resources or many more instances, but as disillusionment grows with corporate social media I hope to see more people here eventually.
and niche topics or subs like reddit?
There’s plenty of niche communities already across the fediverse, and I’m sure they’d love whatever you’d like to contribute to them.
or even be a top result when you search google? like reddit posts
Possibly, but probably not. The incentive structure for something like Google is built around profit, and the fediverse isn’t really built to profit, mostly just financially tread water at best.
If enough people join then Google would be shooting themselves in the foot financially to not return lemmy in its searches if for nothing else than its own relevance, but as a general rule they’ll follow the craven flow of capital every time.
Owl
geneva_convenienceNot until the crossposting double comment section problem ever gets fixed.
☂️-it already has niche communities but they’re on topics that most people try to avoid; namely leftist politics and open source technology.
if you don’t like either, then i image lemmy is fairly dull for you.
小莱卡
Joanie ParkerNo it is to complcated to join here. The application, the servers?! To find good communitys. Does it even have an algorithm?!
MeldrikBanning people is not the worst thing about Reddit. It became too company friendly, too cheesy.
Not 1 million but i can see it reaching a few hundred k. The niche topics on reddit came from average people browsing and average people will never browse Lemmy.
In my dream world linux gets massive with gamers and they seek open source alternatives and that boosts users. Gamers are pretty mixed gender and age these days so it’ll be a good batch of people. I hope America gets it shit together and stops fucking up the world because its depressing the dialogue here a lot.