Compare it to a more well known (but arguably still pretty shitty) alternative Mewe, which has 20 million registered users and 170k active users as of 2023, and I think it paints the picture that there is a real desire for alternatives.
I didn't know about Mewe, but it seems you can't browse the content without an account? Seems like a big difference compared to Reddit/Lemmy
Bluesky, Mastodon
Bluesky is microblogging, not threaded forums like Reddit or Lemmy. Same for Mastodon.
Threaded forums are a very niche type of social media. People around you usually know about Facebook and Twitter, Reddit not so much.
And that's why I'm fine with Lemmy only being able to sustain a slow growth, Reddit is already not as busy as it used to be, especially since quite a few "power posters" left for other places, be it Lemmy or others.
I visit /r/Redditalternatives almost daily to suggest Lemmy to people looking for an alternative.
That sub is very quiet. My conclusion is that most of the people are happy with using current Reddit, be it with revanced mobile clients, or old.reddit on mobile.
Case in hand, Discuit.net, a centralized, easy to sign up website, has less than 200 weekly commenters. Lemmy has 42000 monthly active users.
That's probably how many people are actually interested in using a Reddit alternative. It's similar to the WhatsApp to Signal migration. The vast majority of the population does not care.
Unfortunately there was some miscommunication in this issue and we failed to get to the root cause. In fact the Lemmy backend has an option to delete all content when an account is deleted. This used to be the default behaviour but was changed in 0.19 so you need to set a parameter delete_content. We failed to add a checkbox for this parameter to lemmy-ui.
However the checkbox is added now in #2385 and will be included in the next Lemmy release. Other frontends and clients may also need to adjust the delete_account api call.
jointhefediverse.net - Why was Lemmy removed from the list of fediverse alternatives?
What a silly remark. Yeah, of course (percentage-wise) they slowed down. Do you think that would see 190% growth every month?
You were saying "one million every week". They hit 25 million users on 13 December. We are 4 weeks later, they still haven't reached 27 millions. Not sure why using the actual numbers is considered silly.
You are talking about the symptoms, but you are ignoring the diagnostic. The reason that Bluesky has a superior product at the moment is because they HAVE MONEY. They can go and hire people, they can invest in infrastructure, they can spend on marketing, they can go cut out deals with other service providers.
Bsky having money gives them an advantage, nobody is denying that. But Mastodon had a huge opportunity the first time Musk messed up with Twitter. They were never able to create an easy enough to use solution for people to jump over, especially when microblogging relies on "high profile" posters. If Mastodon had managed to solve the discoverability issue, and convince people that it's as easy to use as Twitter, the outcome could have been different. We'll never know.
The format of “popular social media” may change, but the fact that people will always have an interest in consuming, creating and sharing content will always be there.
How do you plan to host video content at scale in a federated way? And if your answer is "make every teenager pay 5€ per month to get access to the network", you'll never get adoption.
At the end, that's an unfair competition. We are competing with actors who can sell data and ads to make money. Most users don't care. Those platforms make money, get more users thanks to the network effect.
You really think those 3 servers would be enough if all of reddit decided to migrate?
All of Reddit is not going to migrate at the same time, that was June 2023. Nowadays, only a few people are interested enough to leave to have a look at subs like /r/Redditalternatives. Those few people can join those two servers without issue.
Should a massive migration occur, we could reassess, but that would be a "nice problem" to have
My local library has been been run by volunteers for 50 years.
Of course it's not trying to take over Amazon, but that's probably not a realistic goal anyway.
Let’s normalize the idea that admins and moderators should get paid for their work, and you can bet that there will be a lot more people showing up.
Not happening. People are okay to pay a few bucks to support their admins, but expecting a full time salary isn't realistic. This is not Wikipedia, the text-based link aggregators are becoming a thing of the past. Look at the younger generations and ask them how many use Reddit. The new popular format is TikTok and shorts, that's where the userbase and money is now.
jointhefediverse.net - Why was Lemmy removed from the list of fediverse alternatives?
I didn't know about Mewe, but it seems you can't browse the content without an account? Seems like a big difference compared to Reddit/Lemmy
Bluesky is microblogging, not threaded forums like Reddit or Lemmy. Same for Mastodon.
Threaded forums are a very niche type of social media. People around you usually know about Facebook and Twitter, Reddit not so much.
And that's why I'm fine with Lemmy only being able to sustain a slow growth, Reddit is already not as busy as it used to be, especially since quite a few "power posters" left for other places, be it Lemmy or others.