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?
In their current state, definitely not. There is a real bubble effect browsing on Lemmy because it feels like 1 post out of 3 is just praising the platform, but I think they’re far from ready to become mainstream. I’d say there are for now 2 major problems:
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The global instability (a lot of bugs, many third party apps, but a poor on-boarding with the main website).
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It was made by engineers and marketed by engineers. The federated aspect should IMO be public and known, but seamless. It should be possible to just create an account and start browsing without having to do some research on how the thing works. The technical aspect of the fediverse is great, but it’s also its main drawback, I believe that hiding it for newcomers could be a way of not scaring them.
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Not everyone who left Digg went to reddit, and not everyone who left Myspace went to Facebook. “Replacing” reddit should never be the goal, it should be “be better than reddit”.
If this is ever to go mainstream, what we should be concerned about is making good, high quality original content. If people see us having fun and being nice here, they’ll want to join in too.
It doesn’t need to become mainstream. I’ll be happy to be a part of a smaller but vibrant engaged community. I hope there will be a phone app some day through
I’ve been experimenting with WefWef, which is a web app that works really well on iOS and probably works well on Android as well. Reminiscent of Apollo or Sync.
On iOS you can add it to the Home Screen and it acts like an app. I think you can do so on Android as well, but it’s been a couple years since I’ve used Android.
First lemmy post!
Speaking solely wrt Lemmy, I think what’s going to happen is we won’t get the “brand recognition” of the technology like what Reddit has had. But, we’ll probably see instances get closer to that sort of broader familiarity. So someone might not exactly identify as a lemmy user, but maybe as a Beehaw user.
Anecdotally, I had to try a couple of times to fully “get in” to a Lemmy instance because I didn’t know that the hell I was doing. I had tried using gerboa as my client but couldn’t understand why I couldn’t log in or register on an instance. Then I tried again using liftoff, and it kind of clicked more easily.
Maybe email felt like this in the early 00’s? I knew what I could do with an email address (e.g. sign up for MSN and AIM), but I had no idea how to get an email address until I had my siblings walk me through it. I think if any instance can pull off a killer onboarding experience, they’ll become the Bandaid, Jello, Kleenex, etc of Lemmy.
