or even be a top result when you search google? like reddit posts
God, I really hope it never does.
I wanna stay isolated on a social platform man.
A small bunch of stupid wankers is more than enough. The majority can fuck off to la-la land.No, and that’s a good thing.
To quote John Water: “If 8 milion people like it, then it’s probabbly not good”.
If reddit keeps banning people at the present rate then it’s a real possibility.
Banning people is not the worst thing about Reddit. It became too company friendly, too cheesy.
it already has niche communities but they’re on topics that most people try to avoid; namely leftist politics and open source technology.
if you don’t like either, then i image lemmy is fairly dull for you.
if reddit is any indication, that can change quickly with more people.
No it is to complcated to join here. The application, the servers?! To find good communitys. Does it even have an algorithm?!
Perhaps. But both Lemmy and PieFed needs to mature more.
No
Honestly no, but I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong.
No, and doubly so on the second. SEO = search engine optimization. Big corps pay people to manipulate themselves into the top hits of searches; I don’t see Lemmy ever doing that.
The top hits will be from companies that scrape the Fediverse for content then poop AI-generated slop into “top hit” positions they paid Google for.
Every second usefull search result is reddit.
I do like that Kagi has a fediverse search option.
do you think lemmy will ever have millions of users
It’s not infeasible. It won’t likely happen tomorrow, and to manage it will take massive server resources or many more instances, but as disillusionment grows with corporate social media I hope to see more people here eventually.
and niche topics or subs like reddit?
There’s plenty of niche communities already across the fediverse, and I’m sure they’d love whatever you’d like to contribute to them.
or even be a top result when you search google? like reddit posts
Possibly, but probably not. The incentive structure for something like Google is built around profit, and the fediverse isn’t really built to profit, mostly just financially tread water at best.
If enough people join then Google would be shooting themselves in the foot financially to not return lemmy in its searches if for nothing else than its own relevance, but as a general rule they’ll follow the craven flow of capital every time.
Google is perversely incentivized to send traffic to sites using their ad placement services creating demand for what they are supplying.
Sending someone searching for information to sites without ads enshitifying the experience breaks the business model Google depands on.
Now scraping the content to use in “AI summaries” without attribution? That seems likely.
Sending someone searching for information to sites without ads enshitifying the experience breaks the business model Google depands on.
Forma what is worth, Kagi has a feature to search in the Fediverse, on top of their usual search rules.
Not until the crossposting double comment section problem ever gets fixed.
i mean, reddit has the same problem and there it is.
I miss niche feminist communities but overall prefer this and don’t think it will ever be big. I don’t think that’s the goal.
it’s the kind of thing that can be big, but it takes its natural time. and a few more enshitification bro moves from the other side.
Oh good gods I hope not. That kind of popularity is what killed Reddit.
Getting hugely popular --> Higher server costs --> Increased temptation towards profit-seeking
Sure, the whole of Lemmy wouldn’t privatize (at least at first), but what would likely happen is just as what has happened over the last 20 years with email: a few instances gets most of the traffic over the course of a decade or two, meaning small, independent instances won’t be able to compete.
Sure, their hosting ability (“users/dollar”, if you will) would plateau, but as more and more people join the big instances (think lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and so forth), the percentage of the Fediverse going to small, independent instances would increasingly get smaller, until we end up a corporatized federated Web to match our corporatized unitary Web.
Except unlike with Reddit, we can still have the small independent instances. And there will probably be more users on them in the future than there are Lemmy users today.
You don’t need a community for every meme. And I find more comments I want to interact with on Lemmy than on Reddit.
