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
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
Delusional and wishful thinking. Lemmy will most likely slowly fade out of existance.
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.
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.
I think the only thing that would 100% kill Reddit is a paid subscription, anything other than that I don’t see it.
TV has proven that people are willing to tolerate an amazing amount of ads too. I wonder if you could crank up the ads to posts ratio to something like 90% and still have enough users.
the place is infested with bots, and that’s probably “winning” to them.
I think it’s already popular.
Yeah, I loke ig a lot!
It’s already popular enough to be a meme scroll substitute for Reddit so I’m good.
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.
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.
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.
Cool, you crack on using Twitter then.
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.
“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.
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.
(thinking of Reddit) God, I hope not."
Nah. But it’s already everything I need it to be.
Oh, of course. We’ll easily be just as popular as Matrix and Mastodon.
sigh
Hey, I had a conversation on Matrix that one time!
And my Mastodon feed has TONS of content from George Takei.
I’ve heard, and I haven’t tried myself, that Matrix has tons of utility between other messaging apps, sending messages to and fro or remote controlling other clients, or moderating large amounts of rooms at once.
It’s nice that it isn’t just for drugs and crypto, tho.
Actually some people were trying to help me with a problem on a Linux system. It’s weird but makes sense that most of these fringe tech platforms are used by people using Linux to talk about Linux.
It’s like ham radios… lots of folks talking about their ham radios. And their plans for their ham radios. And asking about ham radios.
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.
I appreciate the clarity, thank you. As I said, I pulled a random googled number and wasn’t trying to use it as the sticking point of my commentary. But also for what it’s worth, it’s not exactly a fair comparison to the larger giants either as lemmy’s smaller scale means it is also less trafficked by bots, fake accounts, secondary novelty accounts, etc. Depending on what source you’re looking at, twitter is claimed to be anywhere between 15-75% bot or fake accounts. In general my point was there are still a large number of people using lemmy on most scales, we are just choosing to view it on the scale of established corporate social media metrics.
Might consider that a lot of people have alts, maybe even 5+ alts, and there are a lot of bots.
40,000 monthly active users is probably a more useful number here.
40,000 monthly active users is probably a more useful number here.
I fully agree. Again, I did not think that the random figure, which I tried to appropriately caveat, was the salient part of my comment.
This right here
No. The whole fediverse thing is niche and likely always will be. That might be a good thing though.
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’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 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
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.
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
It’s already popular with a good userbase. Popular with idiots? Hopefully not.
