No Stupid Questions

I honestly think it's unlikely. Not because Lemmy is bad or that the tech couldn't handle it. But Lemmy isn't really profit driven - there's no way to really build a moat without defederating, and therefore no capitalist reason to advertise and grow a server - all that would do is increase infrastructure burden and then leave the server owner trying to figure out how to recoup the cost. And if they start running ads, charging fees or running people nuts with merchandizing, that growth they paid for is likely to scatter to other servers offering the same access to content.

So if growing tall isn't likely, what about growing wide? Well, maybe. I'm still extremely new to Lemmy World, but from what I can tell to run a Lemmy instance you have to have or be willing to learn a basic understanding of Linux, and be willing to charitably donate your hardware/bandwidth to the public. That might work out, or that might be constrained either by freeloaders scaling faster than donors, or the learning curve proving too much a barrier to entry. Wikipedia worked out, but it still has to occasionally prod its users to remind them it needs money to keep afloat.

I think the idea of a federation: websites being able to talk to each other, could be mainstream. I don't think lemmy will be mainstream, but I do think lemmy will be able to talk to mainstream websites on the federation.

What if you could use your lemmy account to buy stuff online, book a flight, pay bills, sign up for streaming services, etc.? The federation isn't seeing its full potential.

It doesn't need to replace anything, that's a sports mentality applied to the free flow of information. What this decade has taught us is that the doomscroll is all there is. Reddit, Tiktok, Twitter, etc. all have constant scrolling through content as their main feature. It's a feature that's extremely reproducible. What the fediverse does is take power away from the corporations that want to make money off of the flow of user-created content. By the fediverse's existence, whenever some company wants to rate-limit or ban 3rd party apps, the people can now just say: "Nah."

It doesn't need to completely replace the current platforms. The beauty of the decentralized internet is that platforms suddenly disappearing/dying wouldn't mean we lose years or decades of information that was contained in that site/forum/corporate entity.

Decentralization would also encourage a lot of people to go back to blogging, which would mean information would come from all over the web again.

No I don't think that it will. It doesn't need to. I'd rather it stay less mainstream and be like reddit was long ago.

I think if we all just leave Reddit behind and commit to Lemmy, things will fall into place. I haven’t logged into reddit since the 30th, and things here have been just fine. I’m regularly getting responses to my comments and there’s good discussion everywhere I look on Lemmy. As far as I can see, it’s only a matter of time before it’s “mainstream”.

I hope not. I'd rather it wasnt mainstream, because that attracts morons.

Yes, and it won't be as wild-westy as people may like to think thanks to common sensibilities.

It will take a lot of time before that happens, if it does at all. The platform just needs more people and right now as much as we like to believe Reddit is dying… it still has a massive user base.

No, I think meta is going to kill it and it'll have been fun while it lasted.