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'.
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
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.
I sure hope not
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.
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.
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".
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
I don’t care, I just want a nice place to wander, nothing is forever, but the longer, the better, regardless of popularity
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.
Nah. But it’s already everything I need it to be.
It's already popular with a good userbase. Popular with idiots? Hopefully not.
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.
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.
and no subreddits! i was there too! it really started gaining traction and losing technical users when the 'image macros' started... memes took over
It's popular enough for me already. I kind of hope it doesn't become the online site because that will just attract trolls.
I've also been using Trust Café (aka WT.Social) but I like the Lemmy UI a lot better.
I really don't think so. The vast majority of internet users just stick with whatever simple thing that serves their need. Lemmy isn't the most difficult thing, but if reddit already exists and is more popular then people won't be leaving that for this if they haven't already.
The boost in people coming here last year was a "last straw" kind of deal from people using reddit who cared enough about not supporting their shit decisions, but by now that has died down and we've seen from recent articles that reddit "won" and they have a metric fuckton of users.
Things need to be really bad at Reddit before most people would consider leaving. On the other hand, Lemmy would need to be amazingly good to produce the same effect. Neither of these have happened yet, so only few people migrated.
We need to make it popular against all corporate forces like meta, X, bluesky etc. By creating more content and interacting with it more.
The Fediverse is only gonna get better. The other ones will all come and go.
In some number of years after another social media debacle or two, once the Fediverse has had some time to ditch its FOSS clunkiness, it'll be game over for anything else.
Oh, of course. We'll easily be just as popular as Matrix and Mastodon.
sigh
It's more popular than Usenet! Take that, nntp.
very hot take:
regular people will never get rid of twitter or meta, Facebook. YouTube. it's incompatible with their psychology.
they need to use what other people are using, they need to see "content" from their followed users
switching to another platform will kill that for them for weeks and stall their "growth"
to be forward thinking and to give up something you've had is too much for the average person
which is why I'm on Lemmy: there's nothing reddit offers to me that makes me "give" it up, it's always been there but now that there's competition it's worth trying something new out
I honestly think id anything Lemmy will have a slow decrease of users until it comes to a halt
I honestly can't understand why most of the popular social media providers are popular. But, if that's what it takes, could we not?
I think the Fediverse will be popular. It's already being adopted by Meta in the way of Threads.
Popularity comes when major companies, like Meta, push for something to be in the mainstream. Will Lemmy be popular and be pushed for the mainstream? Probably not. The mindset of the majority of the admins is against streamlining it. It's why we have a bunch of instances and why so many of them defederated from Threads (which I agree with). They've even taken steps to stop having so many people default to the .world instance in an attempt to diversify it.
I think we're going to need to start by defining what "popular" means.
According to https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy, there are 462,745 total Lemmy users. (Note: I know nothing about this site or their metrics; I literally just Googled "Lemmy users.")
If 462,745 people showed up to my birthday party, I would feel like the most popular person on the planet.
So, I think we need to consider a less abstract figure to answer this. Will Lemmy ever be as popular as a place like Reddit? I think that's extremely unlikely, at least not anytime soon. But will Lemmy ever be popular enough to sustain an engaged community? I dunno; I kind of think we're already there.
Maybe this is the old head in me, but I remember the decentralized days of the early internet, where communities weren't oceans of people on social media giants, but rather smaller, close-knit forums and message boards. If you spent a few months interacting, you would likely get to know and have specific opinions about individual users that you would regularly engage with, unlike the sort of hit-and-run buzz style of the modern social internet. I think right now, Lemmy is almost treading a special sweet spot between the two eras, and I'm pretty happy with it.
Although I will concede that I'm as addicted to social media as everyone else is these days, and I would certainly welcome the increase in on-the-minute activity that additional users would bring.
462k are the people that have created an account, Lemmy actually has ~40k active users (and even then "active" just means they logged in once this month). I do share the sentiment that not everything has to be super popular but Lemmy really could use more people.
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