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3 of the top 4 results for me are fediverse related when searching for "lemmy".
I don't think its the signing up, its the lack of centralization/community. reddit was a singularity, the community is protesting en-masse because they felt they were all part of the same thing.
to me, the fediverse is a segmented.. oddly connected group of overlapping communities. it lacks cohesion.
I tried signing up on various instances of lemmy for 2 weeks prior to the shut down. it failed over and over, kbin was recommended if I didn't have any particular reason for choosing lemmy instead. I'm grateful. I hope we don't kill Ernest though.
This is a great take on the whole thing. Well said. But maybe the lack of centralization is why is seems so much more welcoming and friendly. Or maybe it’s just new and small. I almost never posted on Reddit in 6 years, but here I feel more part of the conversation because it isn’t one big overwhelming behemoth that I get lost in. Instead of a little fish in a big pond it feels more like a regular fish in a bunch of puddles.
From my own experience as a user, it doesn’t matter whether you choose kbin or Lemmy in terms of what content you see. However, yes the look and feel for new users is much better with kbin (especially on iOS). Lemmy has some amazing front ends in development though that will eclipse kbin very soon. It’s just a matter of time.
Until search engines and LLM companies start crawling the fediverse, this will continue to be a niche of the internet, albeit perhaps large one at that.
It doesn't need to replace Reddit.
And it won't, for many reasons. The biggest being that people don't like change.
But it can give, and has given, people a place to go who are ready to be done with Reddit. People who are ready for something new, not just "Reddit, but with a different name".
Until Reddit's website disappears, Reddit will march on. Those of us here are just those who can no longer tolerate feeding that beast.
You're absolutely right that we have a bit of a terminology issue here, but one slightly advanced and techy thing to understand about the fediverse is that the fediverse itself is the "platform":
Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Calckey, etc., are software projects or processes that are running on some server somewhere, and ActivityPub is the protocol (kind of like a language) that all these processes use (to varying degrees) to speak with each other. As users, we interact with a specific server or service (like beehaw.org or kbin.social) that is running that software and sharing info with other servers through a protocol.
This is totally different to Reddit or Twitter, which are both the names of the service AND (probably, but we don't now) the software that the service is running behind the scenes. Naturally that makes it a bit easier to talk about, because we don't have any access to or knowledge about the software or protocols that they use, and we can just talk about the services.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that Kbin and Lemmy are replacements for Reddit (the software) while servers like kbin.social or beehaw.org are replacements for Reddit.com (the service), except they also talk to each other somewhat seamlessly. I'm logged into the server "kbin.social", which runs a software called "Kbin", which communicates over a protocol called "ActivityPub" to a bunch of users who are on other servers running other software.
In other words, Google searching for "Lemmy" isn't exactly a good metric, not only because Reddit is one of the biggest websites around and Google knows this, but also because "Lemmy" isn't the actual name of the service that we are using right now, just the software. If you tell someone to go over to a specific server (like beehaw.org, kbin.social, etc.) then they'll have a much easier time finding something that they can actually use.
Most of us are guilty of kind of glossing over all this stuff to keep things simple and easy to understand, but there are some layers of nuance to the fediverse here that make this a little bit more complicated than you're making it out to be imo.
If we want the fediverse to replace Reddit then either
We don't want the fediverse to replace reddit. Specially in term of popularity. What made reddit collapse in quality is the amount of people on the platform. The 3rd party app thing was only a trigger for many people. Many others have seen the quality of the content of reddit nosedive with time. The festival of memes and one liners has been described again and again. We didn't have this during those few weeks here. We will have it if the platform becomes too popular. How could it be otherwise? How can you picture a popular platform without the popular content? The platform filtering through some hurdles is a good thing.
Even now you can already see the bad behavior of redditor being reflected in the content. And it's only starting.
People have to come out of interest. Otherwise your platform will be filled with 1-click meme posters, and that's probably not what you want.
I do like a lot of things about Kbin, and visually it's much better than unmodified Lemmy in a browser, but it also has its own share of problems, not least with intuitiveness. I don't understand why communities are called Magazines, and the terminology of "Favorite", "Reduce" and "Boost" are very confusing to me. Trying to make a new thread might lead you down a microblogging path instead since "Post" sounds more like a new thread than "Article" to a newcomer.
There also seems to be much slower sync between Kbin and various Lemmy instances compared to intra-sync between lemmy instances themselves. Kbin also doesn't have an API (yet?), but a more tech savvy individual than me will have to say how big of a deal that is.
Both Sync and Boost have large and loyal userbases and will probably attract plenty of users to Lemmy, and good Third Party Apps might help with first impressions and onboarding for new users.
Ultimately though, content is king. I liked Kbin better when I first made my accounts, but then we had a Race Week in Formula 1 and the community here was dead while discussions were happening on Lemmy, and since the sync was slow so I ended up over there.
If the devs coming from the 3rd party apps killed by Reddit can integrate like they say they're going to then it'll REALLY help with all this. Just have to wait and see.
Fediverse really needs onboarding pages that hides some of the wires.
Join Lemmy for example should highlight the content and UI, and a big "Join the Lemmy Fediverse" button. Click the button and it asks 3 questions and send you directly to account creation for an active instance matching your answers.
Frankly instance choice should be something people think about after they've been involved for a while, at least until we have a few multi-million active user instances to choose from
I don't care if it replaces reddit. I care that it remains free of corporate control.
Agreed, once you're familiar with it and on board, Lemmy is fairly familiar to reddit users, but the onboarding experience for non-technical users is, frankly, horrendous. And that's true of most of the fediverse. Kbin's is the best that I've seen so far - part of why I came here instead - but it's also quite small/niche compared to others at the moment and not getting as much publicity it seems.
The question does need to be asked though: Do we truly WANT something to replace reddit, and not just because we've developped a habit for using it? And how exactly are we defining reddit in this context? Just "Social Network site with millions of active users" or is there a more specific target we're aiming for here? Personally I don't think trying to emulate reddit to the point of it being a "drop in replacement" functionality wise is a good move. Reddit isn't dead, and even if traffic drops by 90% they're still an order of magnitude larger than the fediverse, and a few orders larger than individual instances/services. So if you want something that is essentially the reddit experience, Reddit is still very much the app/service to use for that. Will be interesting to see the long term knock on effects, but if Digg and Yahoo still exist, I don't think Reddit will well and truly die/shrink enough for there to be a market for a truly drop in replacement to succceed. As such, Aiming for parity/full on clone of Reddit seems il-advised.
Part of what has me excited about all of this is what new paradigms, communities, systems, services, experiences, etc we can build and maintain (in or out of the fediverse) now that the walls of some of the social media giants seem to be crumbling. Genuinely haven't felt anything I could attribute as "optimism" regarding social media since like 2015? Not to say there aren't positives about social media, just that I felt the general trend in that space (until now) has not been a good one. Which is kinda nice.