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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”.
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.
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
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 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.
“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 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.
Nah. But it’s already everything I need it to be.
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.
We need to make it popular against all corporate forces like meta, X, bluesky etc. By creating more content and interacting with it more.
Oh, of course. We’ll easily be just as popular as Matrix and Mastodon.
sigh
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 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
Don’t really care either way, i like it here.
I’m gonna say yes, for the exercise.
Four assumptions:
- Reddit will keep getting worse, due to the nature of enshittification and venture capital. Eventually enshittification reaches a breaking point where people leave or stop arriving.
- Lemmy (in a broad sense - et al!) will keep getting better, due to.the nature of open source software.
- Non-free alternatives to Reddit will eventually enshittify, law of enshittification.
- Free alternatives will use ActivityPub for the obvious advantages.
If these assumptions are met, given infinite rounds of enshittification and unhappy users, eventually a federated and free alternative will be the most lucrative option for the majority of users. Eventually Reddit will Digg itself a hole. Maybe Lemmy won’t take over then, but it’ll stick around.
The most unrealistic assumption is of course that the federated solutions will keep getting better indefinitely. Maybe they won’t. But as long as people keep developing and contributing to the Fediverse, it’s alive and improving in a way commercial alternatives cannot in the long run compete with.
If the API fiasco hasn’t really deterred enough Reddit users to convert, then almost nothing will. Except maybe when Spez gets around to monetizing NSFW subreddits and subreddits in general that are very large. But even then, I still say it won’t be a giant deal. They’ll come here but they’ll want the Fediverse to strongly appeal to NSFW content and really the Fediverse is fine without it poisoning itself with that filth.
Does it currently make a profit? If not they will find ways to make it worse. And even if they do make a profit chances are they’ll want to increase their margins.
Maybe stuff like the Google deal could keep money pouring in while keeping usability at a respectable level though.
Can’t say I agree with NSFW content being “filth”, but I would agree that generally it’s harder for NSFW content to find a home over here due to the increased moderation costs it brings.
We don’t need the coomers here. We just don’t.
Wait until they kill old.reddit
