Do you believe Lemmy/Mastodon can become mainstream and fully replace their centralized counterparts?
What the title says. I think there is still a long way for that to happen but i've been hopeful. What do you think?
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Lemmy? Maybe. Mastodon? Not a chance.
Lemmy functions perfectly as a Reddit replacement and only adds a mild amount of complexity on top of using Reddit. Mastodon is only similar to Twitter’s use case if you’ve had a few beers and are squinting.
I use twitter to follow content from mostly public people like sports writers, tech writers, some athletes, etc. Effectively, I use it to get breaking news about some things I care about and only rarely interact when I come up with something I think is really funny. Maybe not everyone uses twitter like me but most probably use it to follow famous people and public figures and attempt to interact with them or whatever.
Mastodon can compete with Twitter on a technical capabilities front but its going to struggle to get the mass appeal that Twitter has without the less anonymous clientele.
It seems like your use could be covered by a revived RSS reader-like system, because you want more of a news ticker than social media. That’s fine, but that’s not how a lot of people use Twitter.
Fair but my point was that the point of twitter is following/interacting with public figures while Mastodon does not have any of those mainstream public figures to make it worthwhile to the vast majority of people. The point of reddit is following topics and discussing them with regular people and even on a smaller scale Lemmy can provide that. Mostly I was just agreeing with you.
see that's interesting cause i was gonna say just the opposite. i think lemmy has more of an uphill battle to replace reddit than mastodon has to replace twitter. how do you feel that twitter and mastodon's use cases differ?
On Reddit you post underneath a community. The decentralized abstraction only slightly complicates this. Reddit is just a centralized version of old forums, where you had an account for all your niche interests. Lemmy is the middle ground between those old forums and a central account because you can access all the content from any fediverse account.
On Twitter, you post detached from any community, the only way to be a part of one is purely based on social groups. The average person doesn’t want to have community instances even if they can talk across multiple, they want a social media that can represent themselves and all of their interests on one account. And if you say the solution is for everyone to just join the biggest instance, how is that really any different from a centralized social media anyway? It’s just over complicated for what Twitter is.
Bluesky and Threads will crush Mastodon. And unfortunately, between those two, probably Threads will beat Bluesky.
This is an interesting perspective, and I can see where you're coming from, but I think the solution you come to kind of misses a different benefit to the setup. You have many general interest instances, which is definitely added complication over Twitter, yet this can enable better moderation by comparison to a monolithic site. From those general instances you can easily represent yourself & all of your interests as you like on a single account, and a number of folks more or less do.
Mastodon does get a bit weirder with more subject-focused/community instances, that's true, which is probably why if you look at the server page on join Mastodon, almost half aren't focused on any subject, i.e. General/Regional (128/306, which if I can calculate is about 42% of them?).