this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Lemmy has a lot of obstacles that will prevent it from truly going mainstream:
The community browser is complete dog shit for discovering content on different instances, and trying to view another instance's content from your own community is just needlessly complex. Discoverability is still a lot better than Mastodon though, where you'd look at all post and see nothing but hentai reposting bots regurgitating stuff that isn't even allowed on NSFWLemmy...
Due to the nature of federation, you also run the risk of committing to an instance only for them to defederate entirely, or disassociate from content you want to see but they don't agree with. Beehaw is a very good example of this.
As there's no option (yet) to migrate to a different instance, and Lemmy is a FOSS project that cannot be monetized in the same way as a traditional social media site, what happens when instances start shutting down due to being unable to keep up with server hosting costs?
I cannot speak for the iOS option available, but Jerboa is barebones. For example, you can't even tap on a post/comment reply in your inbox to go to that comment's permalink and view the context. This is incredibly basic functionality for any social news aggregator. Even with the fediverse in general surpassing 150,000 users, I don't see Lemmy getting the same level of third-party app support as Reddit had.
A lot of these issues are temporary. Also, this is all happening very fast, it's entirely possible that some other website/service will pop up that'll be a lot better thought out.
Reddit was already well established and functional during the Exodus of Digg, so there wasn't much discussion about where to go. Today we have no solid alternative, so people are trying Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Squabbles and other websites.
Digg is kinda before my time, what did they do to cause the exodus?
They let corporations submit blog posts (company spam, basically) and they'd instantly go to the top, pushing any normal submissions down into oblivion. Management thought that more ads will get them more revenue, but instead everyone just left.
It was a combination of factors.
They redesigned the website, which was a complete wipe of the service. All your submissions, comments, etc. Gone. That upset a lot of people.
They also changed their algorithm to prioritize paid promotional content over user submitted content, and they created a "power user" class whose content and liked articles would be more likely to reach the front page, too.
They changed the look and layout of the site dramatically, and also altered how things eventually ended up on the front page. It was in an effort to make more money via advertising/paid posts, and it literally killed the site overnight.
Reddit is doing their best Digg v4 impression right now. History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure as fuck rhymes.