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?
What feature could lemmy get that would draw people away from reddit?
I think real, full federation is the only thing that would actually make the fediverse competitive with the centralized platforms, but most fediverse projects aren’t big enough to support that or just don’t have any interest in it.
Other than that, I think only exclusive communities will work, like it did with Mastodon.
I was thinking that. Like if all the reddit clones just became lemmy instances. Some will choose not to federate, but the ones that do will help each other gain critical mass. Then people can escape their filter bubbles onto different instances/cultures.
The other one is proper native support for languages like wikipedia has. So speakers of language X never have to interact with English language content if they don’t want to. There is a huge body of users who IMO would flock to a reddit-like site that has that.
for lemmy: a large diverse community of active commenters.
both mastodon and lemmy are often seen as yet another sprawling commercial platform by ordinary people.
simple signup helps to make it easy for people to join. keeping people interested might need to highlight some impressive quick benefits to be seen instantly.
maybe if you could backup your multireddits to lemmy alternatives. or analyze your comments to suggest similar conversations where the user can contribute.
the speed/responsiveness/weight of both sites are faster than their competitors.
people who are internet people (opposed to normies) will generally join these sites. it just takes time. growth happens linearly not exponentially. but more people will form a bigger base for more potential invites.
i always tell people that if they don’t want to try a site then they can tell a friend who might like to try it.
i didn’t find mastodon signup process very easy at all. lemmy and diaspora were much easier i think.
i would love to see an android app for lemmy if it doesn’t already exist somewhere.
lemmy doesn’t render well on my mobile devicelast time i checked.