It depends. Instances like Mastodo may start having some weight in future but I don't think that Lemmy will loose his 'niche' status anytime soon. Discord have more users as well, but you never hear of him in the news, people know Discord but is still not mainstream.
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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Asklemmy
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As far as mainstream is concerned. Discord is known as "That platform where moderators groom kids" since that's the only things that ever reach the news
Discord is really rough. Bot armies, tons of trolls, many disturbed individuals posting gore and trauma dumping on others. I have run a couple discord servers and moderated some more. Its not fun, really. Weโll see how matrix pans out in the future but so far, the amount of sickos seems to go down.
Oh I used to moderate a big discord server. I retired when I had to deal with actual god damn child porn being sold there.
Consider me traumatized
Jeez! Thats top of the line disgusting. I cant say I have seen this level of deranged but only moderating a bunch of youth and a couple adults while your fellow mods are part of the problem gets tiring fast. untreated personality disorders seem very prevalent on discord an I both pity the folks having to live with them and despise the fact others get traumatized by those folks behavior.
The moment I realized I never wanted to moderate a Discord server was the first time I heard a Darth Dawkins debate on YouTube.
What is darth dawkins?
The single most insufferable person I have ever had the displeasure of hearing communicate verbally in my three decades of life on this planet.
I'm not sure if you're interested in the atheist debate sphere at all, if you are then you should give him a listen. He's a Catholic apologist and presuppositionalist who debates on Discord.
Be warned though, he is fucking awful. If you listen to him debate for more than 30 minutes in one sitting you're liable to suffer psychological trauma. He's that bad, not kidding.
Kind of intriguing, ngl. But Iโll pass. Thanks for the heads up.
Wow, I didn't know it was "that" fk'd up. Seriously shocking. ๐ฐ
And leaking government secrets in vc (ahem war thunder)
the only thing I hear about it on the news is the occasional War Thunder leak
Discord chats are deeply private (not for the owners), and we are googlable. Where it needs to be something big, like a child abuse case to make some news about Discord, discovered through other means, we have a more open content platform.
It did create a bit of a splash back when Mastodon got together and played a huge part in saving the Texas Observer.
As for being used of a source of what random people are talking about, I think that's further off for three reasons:
- The biggest platform is a better source
- It doesn't go well with decentralisation - you want to report what's going on inside one big, centralised service
- It tends to be pretty worthless lazy journalism. The journalists who have been converted to Mastodon tend to avoid writing sloppy pieces about what people are talking about online - they rejected Twitter for a reason.
It's not a credible source without some form of identity verification.
It wasn't for Reddit too. There were interviews of mods referenced just by their handle. There's just some feeling that that site have weight.
Just because they're only referenced by a handle doesn't mean there isn't a verification process.
It already does. Mastodon is mentioned every now and then. Some journalists know about it, since the twitter exodus happened. But I've searched for famous people on Mastodon and it's still only a handfull. For example Stephen Fry and Greta Thunberg. So it doesn't play a role in most people's daily lives.
Lemmy is just small, niche and has currently too many bugs/issues so it doesn't attract new users. (My oppinion)
George Takei is on Universeodon (on AP fedi) and Bluesky, as well. He or his management seems to be the type to try out new platforms.
something will probably just break out from time to time, like 4chan. although, something breaking out of here is more likely to attract more long-term users than 4chan I assume, this place is a bit more welcoming
I think everybody who's anybody is on Threads but nobody uses it
Honestly, i think if people did videos here and there mentioning lemmy and the info they found in here (similarly like how reddit is shilled sometimes) there would be a bigger growth in user count in the Lemmy instances over time
I hate to say it but it'll basically never happen. The whole reddit uprising ended uo being a big nothing burger and I can't really see anything bringing an equal migration/influx.
A lot of people here seem to actively reject popularity and want the fediverse to stay small, too
Yep, quite true. It's not too bad either, new posts each day and a decent flow of (positive) comments and news sharing. Could be waaay worse.
Not quite - organic growth is welcome. What we don't want is a mass migration of 100 Million Reddit users.
A lot of people's justifications for not liking threads being part of the fediverse was because they didn't like the idea of the fediverse becoming mainstream.
Fair. Though, I think the difference between the two hordes is that the Lemmy user experience feels a lot like Reddit. Reddit's userbase would arrive, take one look at the place and treat it as the same place they came from.
Lemmy is not like either Facebook or Insta - so I don't think their users would be so inclined to simply take over culturally.
I wouldn't say that. If it wasn't for the whole reddit fiasco, I would've never even heard of Lemmy. Now I use it more than reddit.