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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I think it would be pretty difficult for Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin to become bigger than for-profit counterparts. For-profit businesses can raise loads of funding and spend all that money on lots of engineers to refine their platforms.
But I do think the fediverse is pushing big tech to alter their platforms. E.g. Meta planning to support ActivityPub in Threads.
What do you mean by “for profit”? Reddit apparently hasn’t been profitable since its inception.
But the promises of it becoming profitable at some point is what kept investors pouring money into it.
But that was obviously based on nothing factual. If Reddit could grow to that size without turning a profit (and by exploiting free moderation for its labor), why wouldn’t any fediverse site be able to do the same? The truth is that the the content is what drives growth. If the fediverse has the content, people will go to it.
Because the fediverse is made up of instances instead of being a monolithic company. It grows as a whole, not as some specific instances.
And besides that, good luck trying to serve ads to fediverse users. They'll just go somewhere else.