It’s possible, but I don’t hope for it. There are tradeoffs for everything. The more the population expands, the more content, yes, but the number of negative encounters goes up too.
I’m good with where it’s at now, but do recognize that I’m not necessarily average because I don’t stay on my phone for extended periods.
Realistic? Yes. Especially since Reddit is going far down the fascist rabbit hole gargling those Trump balls while allowing power tripping mods to dictate everything.
Desired? No. As the bigger Lemmy gets, the more likely enshittification will happen.
No, but it is foolish to want such a thing.
More people == More problems.
The best thing about Reddit was the people… Until it got too many of them motherfuckers.
Being the size of current reddit is bad but having more content would be nice
Considering piefed launched a bunch of people went there… No I don’t think so.
Could the fediverse? Yes I hope!
About 5 million people is good. I was on Digg as it grew and became shit. I was on reddit as it grew and then became shit. Once the active user base goes over ten or fifteen million people, things start going down hill. Advertisers and bots and mods that can’t keep up and too much outside press and governments mentioning the platform with unwanted attention.
Right now things are OK for general news and info, but not big enough for more unique communities. Like I can’t go to a community within lemmy to find another thousand+ people all about yo-yo’s, but reddit has r\throwers with over 40k subscribers so I can go this “stout guy” show me how to do a new trick.
Do we want it to grow to the size of traditional social media?
I want people here, not US politicians, the Pringles social media account and three bots.
Don’t put that evil on me Ricky Bobby
I don’t think so. The barrier to entry is pretty low but the average internet user still can’t get over it, so I don’t think it will ever become mainstream.
The barrier is less than most email nowadays
If it becomes like the others, I’ll just move on again.
I like how left Lemmy is and, as a result there’s a lot less dickheads.
…apart from me of course
Lemmy has many heads. Each server can be about anything and with its own rules. So I think yeah. I’ve been on various servers for several years now, maybe 3 or 4?
I don’t know that I’d call it a hope personally: Any place that gets really big starts to get shitty too (see Digg, Reddit, etc.) . Federated stuff might be more resistant to the effects, but it is not completely immune.
That said, I think the Fediverse in general stands a chance to really take off with the general public, it may or may not be Lemmy that is the platform that does it.
Be careful what you wish for.
No. I’m much more technology-literate than the average person, and while I appreciate the advantages of federation it annoys even me a lot of times.
Also, Lemmy is much further left than the average population and even reddit. So either it won’t grow to mainstream size because of that, or it will and the demographic will shift more to the center which will be off-putting to the original users.
Barring the communist instances, Reddit used to be equally left. Look at them now.
But surely if all those people join the Fediverse and see my insightful comments they’ll change their views to align with mine, won’t they?
This, but in a hopeful voice instead of sarcastic 🙂
(Being surrounded by people who think more progressively will tend to shift people’s views)
No more unrealistic than the massive valuations on the stock market of social media corporations that can supposedly back it up somehow (with AI! or something… VR maybe?) despite the fact that fundamentally these social media places are becoming crowded rooms full of bots pretending to be humans all trying to manipulate humans who are long gone.
My point is, we will figure out how to sustainably scale before corporations do because the metabolism of massive tech companies precludes them from giving a shit about that.
At this point, inefficiency is a virtue for these corporations as it degrades the environment around them making future alternatives unlikely to be able to gain a hold in such a broken context.
I think that depends on your time horizon.
In the next 5 years? No, not realistic.
In the next 50? Nearly certain I expect.
15-20 years? Maybe?
