This is a really good question, and I suppose the answer is the same as to why Mastodon is not more popular.
I think it is a combination of several factors:
Not many people know about it. Really, reddit is one of the most well known websites on the internet. Very few people know lemmy/mastodon.
UI/UX issues. The more friction there is, the smaller the probability of someone using something. And Lemmy has TONS of friction. And the lemmy devs are not welcome to suggestions. Seriously, every suggestion that is made is probably answered with “I am against this”. If the idea did not come from their heads, they are probably against it. This has been my experience with them, at least.
Lack of content. On reddit, there is tons of content. On lemmy, not so much. And people are generally not very principled. They want to consume, and completely ignore the ethics/morality of whatever it is they are doing.
I think this is not necessarily bad though. Lemmy DOES need more content and more users. But I hope it never becomes the size of reddit. Because reddit fucking sucks. People are stupid as fuck there now. The amount of low effort and low information content on reddit is astonishing.
Hopefully, Lemmy gets the smart, principled, interesting people and reddit keeps the influencers and onlyfaners.
Lemmy currently feels a lot like reddit used to in the beginning, when posts came from real people who just wanted to share ideas about things they cared about. I’d rather keep it as is than see it grow into the bloated bot farm of garbage and advertising that reddit has become.
somewhat. early reddit was a lot more mainstream. it was mostly a link aggregator for news stories in its early days and subreddits were not really a thing until later. i started using it in 2007 and it was much different by 2010.
the dominant ideology was also libertarian and auti-authoritarian, not extreme leftism of various flavors that are pro authoritarian. there was very much a lack of controlling the narrative and language policing… that didn’t take hold until mid 2010s as the reddit ‘scandals’ caused the admins to start cracking down.
This is a really good question, and I suppose the answer is the same as to why Mastodon is not more popular.
I think it is a combination of several factors:
I think this is not necessarily bad though. Lemmy DOES need more content and more users. But I hope it never becomes the size of reddit. Because reddit fucking sucks. People are stupid as fuck there now. The amount of low effort and low information content on reddit is astonishing.
Hopefully, Lemmy gets the smart, principled, interesting people and reddit keeps the influencers and onlyfaners.
Lemmy currently feels a lot like reddit used to in the beginning, when posts came from real people who just wanted to share ideas about things they cared about. I’d rather keep it as is than see it grow into the bloated bot farm of garbage and advertising that reddit has become.
somewhat. early reddit was a lot more mainstream. it was mostly a link aggregator for news stories in its early days and subreddits were not really a thing until later. i started using it in 2007 and it was much different by 2010.
the dominant ideology was also libertarian and auti-authoritarian, not extreme leftism of various flavors that are pro authoritarian. there was very much a lack of controlling the narrative and language policing… that didn’t take hold until mid 2010s as the reddit ‘scandals’ caused the admins to start cracking down.