I’ve thought about it a bit and the Fediverse has been around for a while now. There are some really cool applications being made to replace the mainstream ones, but they just aren’t taking off.
Why do you guys think that might be? Ease of use? Addiction to the mainstream platforms? Lack of marketing?
Lack of influencers/celebrities on the fediverse is why it’s adoption is low. Someone important would have to make a conscious choice to only use Mastodon/Lemmy/PixelFed, etc. instead of Reddit, Twitter, Instagram. There would be the other challenge that if someone did do that, someone might create a bot to repost their tweets, or set up an instagram account to repost their photos, etc. With the inertia that exists it will be a slow process. I think Lemmy and Mastodon have a good shot just by the communities they are building.
But then you have things like that Star Trek celebrity trying to use Mastodon and being bullied out of the software because of a militant trans community. That could also be problematic for adoption if there are social barriers being put up to entry.
The worst part is that there are tons of actually terrible people on the fediverse, but Wil Wheaton accidentally blocked some trans people that one time and he’s cancelled for life from Mastodon. I actually saw someone bragging about having helped to bully him off of Mastodon the other day.
that’s sad and those people shouldn’t use inclusive services like the fediverse. They should found their own small echochamber and let other people be.
This does absolutely apply to mastodon and pleroma, but maybe doesn’t apply to lemmy (where the focus is on communities so as @kixiQu@lemmy.ml pointed out, small niche communities can grow easily).
I still think it applies to Lemmy. Niche communities are always going to be niche, so their growth potential isn’t that high. There are communities here on lemmy that are also on reddit and the reddit size is way larger. If a community moved from reddit to lemmy, I bet you would see a ton of user growth.
For instance, If I wanna talk about web stuff, I can talk about it here on lemmy, where there are 200 subs and posts get around 5 comments, or I can talk about it on reddit where there are 200k subs and posts get hundreds of comments.
Exclusivity is always going to be a powerful influence for platforms