this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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[–] shapis@lemmy.ml 3 points 59 minutes ago* (last edited 58 minutes ago)

Nah. But it’s already everything I need it to be.

[–] jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world 1 points 44 minutes ago

The Fediverse is only gonna get better. The other ones will all come and go.

In some number of years after another social media debacle or two, once the Fediverse has had some time to ditch its FOSS clunkiness, it'll be game over for anything else.

[–] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 hour ago

We need to make it popular against all corporate forces like meta, X, bluesky etc. By creating more content and interacting with it more.

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 8 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] ktowner15@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

(thinking of Reddit) God, I hope not."

[–] GhiLA@sh.itjust.works 8 points 5 hours ago

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.

[–] LunarVoyager@lemmy.world 10 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] h3mlocke@lemm.ee 7 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Don't really care either way, i like it here.

[–] daggermoon@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

I quite like it too

[–] _____@lemm.ee 9 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

very hot take:

regular people will never get rid of twitter or meta, Facebook. YouTube. it's incompatible with their psychology.

they need to use what other people are using, they need to see "content" from their followed users

switching to another platform will kill that for them for weeks and stall their "growth"

to be forward thinking and to give up something you've had is too much for the average person

which is why I'm on Lemmy: there's nothing reddit offers to me that makes me "give" it up, it's always been there but now that there's competition it's worth trying something new out

I honestly think id anything Lemmy will have a slow decrease of users until it comes to a halt

[–] 11111one11111@lemmy.world 3 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

I mean, noone used reddit 10 years ago. To a 37 year old like myself, that seems like the reddit shit blew up out of nowhere. Youtube is just a matter of time and outcome of future google break up cases before a legitimate competition comes for its industry share. FB will die with the boomers. The only one I see as a really unmovable object is Twitter because of the universal use by all major sports media/reporting/journalists. It's the only one with end users applying the platform in any comercial sense outside of marketing. I think the question OP is asking will on the reliance of one of the other platforms falling.

Just my opinion tho so take it with a grain of salt.

[–] Crashumbc@lemmy.world 1 points 58 minutes ago

Everyone looks at mega businesses as immune to decay. They're not it just takes longer.

I think "x" may actually be the first to topple though. It's losing money at an insane rate and that's with a mega election year propping it up. That's one of the reasons Elon is pushing Trump so hard, is for the government bail out he'll get.

[–] accarezzu@lemmy.ml 2 points 7 hours ago
[–] GhiLA@sh.itjust.works 14 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Oh, of course. We'll easily be just as popular as Matrix and Mastodon.

sigh

[–] AndrewZabar@lemmy.world 5 points 9 hours ago

Hey, I had a conversation on Matrix that one time!

And my Mastodon feed has TONS of content from George Takei.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 75 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] cabbage@piefed.social 21 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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".

[–] NewNewAccount@lemmy.world 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Current as in today? Or then-current (pre-exodus)?

[–] cabbage@piefed.social 5 points 12 hours ago

I meant to say that I would never have believed back then that Lemmy would become as popular as it is today.

My point is that it's a moving target. Reddit has a billion active users. Instagram has two billion. I don't think these make sense as targets.

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 28 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I think it's already popular.

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[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 40 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

sure. it took reddit 20 years to get to its size.

[–] DrDickHandler@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

Delusional and wishful thinking. Lemmy will most likely slowly fade out of existance.

[–] jonathan@lemmy.zip 34 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

I think people don't realise how old Reddit is, it was smaller than Lemmy is now when I first started using it.

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 15 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

It also took death of a platform "Digg" to jump start its growth.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

And it's arguably in the process of dying itself right now, in quality if not in user count yet.

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 12 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

and no subreddits! i was there too! it really started gaining traction and losing technical users when the 'image macros' started... memes took over

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[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Social media in general was also a lot smaller back then too.

Until the iPhone got popular you had to use a computer to access it. And back then we didn’t really trust sleep mode very much so you had to wait 2 minutes for windows to boot when you wanted to go on the net. VS right now I’m standing in from of my clothes not getting ready for work for 45 seconds.

[–] AndrewZabar@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

Wait to boot? Back then I had a dozen machines all running 24/7 lol. But I guess the average user on the consumer side yeah.

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[–] Asafum@feddit.nl 35 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 18 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

I think the only thing that would 100% kill Reddit is a paid subscription, anything other than that I don't see it.

[–] TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 2 points 12 hours ago

TV has proven that people are willing to tolerate an amazing amount of ads too. I wonder if you could crank up the ads to posts ratio to something like 90% and still have enough users.

[–] ohellidk@sh.itjust.works 9 points 18 hours ago

the place is infested with bots, and that's probably "winning" to them.

[–] IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 7 points 14 hours ago

It depends whether the servers can handle the inevitable next Reddit exodus.

[–] wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 14 hours ago

Honestly no, and that's okay?

Early web2 websites like MySpace did become "popular". But IMO one of its layckings was trying out web2 by evolving something from web1's static websites.

Where Facebook is the platform that popularized web2 in a way that worked with what web2 was and fundamentally build something new off of that.

I think Lemmy/mastatdon/most current federated clones that exist today won't last all that long. Something that is built with federation to its core and instead of just being a feature, is central to its offering.

What is that? Not a god damn clue.

But I'm excited to try it out.

Disclaimer: not a historian. Born in the early 90s so a lot of my judgement above is bassed off of foggy memories and are my opinions and only opions.

[–] Sundial@lemm.ee 14 points 18 hours ago

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.

[–] Vespair@lemm.ee 13 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] simple@lemm.ee 14 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] cabbage@piefed.social 8 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

I'm gonna say yes, for the exercise.

Four assumptions:

  1. 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.
  2. Lemmy (in a broad sense - et al!) will keep getting better, due to.the nature of open source software.
  3. Non-free alternatives to Reddit will eventually enshittify, law of enshittification.
  4. 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.

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[–] Nytixus@kbin.melroy.org 4 points 15 hours ago

Truthfully, no.

[–] it_depends_man@lemmy.world 7 points 18 hours ago

Depends, it's been a bit disappointing to see virtually no change since I started using it, particularly in terms of QoL. It is open source, so that's on everyone, including me, but I had hoped for more speed, etc..

Mastodon is way better when it comes to filtering.

Having the option of a reddit clone is pretty good though and I will stick with it. Who knows when and where it will get that critical bit of momentum.

It's already superior to regular forums, in my opinion, so now the question is what kind of format you want to have discussions in, instead of having to default to forums. That choice is a definite upside and I'm glad it exists.

[–] lurch@sh.itjust.works 6 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

I hope not. Imagine all the crazies.

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