Lemmy doesn’t cover nearly as many broad topics as reddit does. Its built up its userbase over the last 15 years and a lot of people will continue using it for another 15 years even with their stupid fucking new reddit design (that has been around for what, five years? Not really new anymore) Maybe one day they’ll finally nuke old.reddit.com and that will be the final straw for many users. Their userbase is so big that they can go on banning long time users like you and me and it won’t really affect the company’s bottom line.

Also I think Lemmy should allow for video uploads like v.redd.it. I know the devs want to keep vids on peertube but AFAIK there’s really no integration and I have seen very few actual peertube links here. The ability to upload short vids would be a good feature IMO.

Reddit cannabilised internet forums that were awkward to use and you had to sign up for each and every single one. It centralised the internet forum into something more convenient. Convenience tends to beat other things when it comes to internet platforms.

Lemmy is on-par in terms of technical convenience but does not have the convenience of the vast amount of communities and content that exists on reddit. It can not simply cannibalise obviously less-convenient platforms like reddit did.

Lemmy’s best hope for growth as a platform is initially to focus on things that can not and do not exist elsewhere that people have a very clear desire to consume as a community. Many banned reddit communities can’t exist in the liberal centralised social media platforms but can exist in Lemmy’s decentralised state. Piracy is very likely going to get pushed off the mainstream platforms eventually and will move to Lemmy. There are a number of other banned communities that also exist in a space that has been shunned by liberal sensibilities but would could exist on an edgier platform. These are the most likely sources of early adopter growth.

As time goes on and early adoption starts to move into other phases, the quantity of users will enable the existence of communities that compete with more mainstream topics. This will then drive up the convenience level of the platform and bring it into parity with reddit.

At that point it will start to take on an organic direction of its own.

1. Reddit is a private company founded in 2005, valued at $1.8 billion dollars and employing around 350 people. Lemmy was founded two years ago and is run with relatuvely little funding (I would say approximately two paid employees and a dozen or so volunteers, distributed around different instances). That’s not comparable. At all.

2. Most people aren’t banned from reddit. Your personal experience is rare. If someone isn’t banned from the biggest platform, they need a motivation to leave. Why would they leave? I know why YOU would leave, but why would THEY leave?

3. Most people coming here, not all but most, are doing it because they were banned from reddit. As a result, they just try to recreate reddit here, instead of making something better, a better culture or a higher quality of community. Lemmy is treated by the majority as a ‘free speech reddit’ and nothing more.

4. Strong political bias in the popular communities may be distasteful to the majority of people who would use a reddit-like site, who tend to be pro-capitalist liberals.

It’s not really that deep - it’s a combination of network effect and inertia.

Because there’s “nobody” on Lemmy, people don’t join Lemmy. Because nobody is joining Lemmy, there’s “nobody” on Lemmy, and so on and so forth.

Furthermore, Reddit (and other big social medias) already have “everyone” there, so to the vast majority of people they’re just superior platforms as it’s easier to find both people and content. Moving to another platform means giving that up.

I like Lemmy, but Reddit does have a lot of momentum, and unless there’s a huge controversy or a significant portion of the community is displeased enough to seriously look into alternative, I don’t see Lemmy catch up with Reddit. But that can be a good thing too, as a small community is usually more tight-knitted.

unless you are using an app, the user interface is quite terrible. Reddit has good previews, we can see the post, we can see the link and much more. lemmy is basically reddit in it’s infancy and I feel like they are not even trying to make it better. So heck, who cares. I want this website to have more people but it is what it is.

it’s a niche product that doesn’t provide any advantage to the average user compared to reddit and can’t make up for the critical mass reddit has.

It’s just another case of hackerism without a strategy that goes beyond “we make a tool, we hope eventually somebody will use it”

I kind of like Lemmy how it is. My experience is once things get too big then you start getting a large amount of silly people with even sillier opinions that they need to jam down your throat. Lemmy reminds me of the old days of the internet when you needed a certain level of technical “know how” to get on. Once the internet in general became easy for all, then we got groups of village idiots making it suck.

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Porn, hentai, edgy gamers, fascists, China/Russia/communism hate flourishes there. Liberals and conservatives, capitalists, Starbucks and iPhone worshippers are there. Reddit’s userbase is 50% USA, 30% West EU, 10% East and rest of Europe, and the other 10% is rest of world.

Lemmy will never win such a race to the bottom. It should not.

You can already see those hideous racists onto other Lemmy instances like beehaw and sopuli, and onto Lemmy.ml that hate Lemmygrad with a passion.

There is no lack of Western edgy kids on internet that have Twitterati and PornHub type of brains. They just want to sip their CocaCola and munch on their lard burgers and fries and shitpost on the internet, in their dimly lit modern day caves with Marvel or anime women posters.