1. Because people still use Reddit (for some reason).

2. Because it is fragmented and hard to understand how it works for average person.

The UI

not advertised, not run by a for profit company

🤔

Popular platforms have big expensive algorithms that monitor user behavior and present content they’re most likely to interact with when they’re most likely to interact with it. Participation in those platforms isn’t a deliberate act anymore.

Cos we’re all losers and no one wants to sit at our table

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Network effect. Reddit has more users and more discussion, drawing in more people and discussion. I’m not worried because enshittification and bots will run it into the ground

because at the moment Reddit is now mainstream, and reactionaries are taking over (FU spez). Therefore much of the far left and anarchists deemed “violent” by spez and Phony Stark have moved to Lemmy and Bluesky and made it their safe spaces for mostly politically-charged topics.

For an online service to get popular, it has to be either a new, really interesting thing with a lot of advertisement, have the support of some big celebrities (usually through advertisement too), or literally pay people to come en masse to artificially make it popular, so that more people comes organically (so, basically, a large advertisement budget). It also have to be easy because most people can’t read more than a few lines of explanations on why things are different.

No lemmy instance have none of the pre-requisites, and the accessibility is not really there for the general public, due to various things. My main gripe is that federation and local moderation means you’ll have to create multiple account to access content from certain groups of servers, which is a lot to ask to people that can’t be asked to make even one account, but there are other minor things too. The sheer choice of instances and client, seen as an advantage by some, is simply a bothersome annoyance to people used to large platforms doing all the work of deciding what’s good and bad for them.

Comfort mainly. There is a small barrier for entry here, and the vast majority can’t hurdle it.

I’m with you and wish lemmy was the default, but it takes time.

The fediverse can be a confusing concept. It certainly was to me, and I’m in IT. The idea that Lemmy and other federated platforms aren’t a single monolithic site but a group of sites that share content took a bit for me to grasp. I thought it had something to do with single sign on, like you made an account on one instance and any other instance federated to yours could verify your identity with your home instance so you could post on the other instance without making a native account.

People who join the fediverse are also by and large self selecting. That is they’re making a conscious decision to reject the corporate-run social media platforms that the fediverse seeks to replace, so merely having an account on here is making an ideological statement, and I’m including myself here. Anyway, that gives the discourse on the fediverse a more politically charged feel that may turn some people off. When you go to a community like mildlyinteresting expecting to see pics of three-chambered peanuts and yellow stop signs but get things like “French President explains the political consequences of AI” it can be kind of exhausting.

It is more popular.

That probably doesn’t make sense, but when I joined a few years ago, I could read every post across the entire lemmy-verse and be annoyed waiting for new content about anything. At the time, the survival of lemmy at all was in serious doubt.

Now I have my handful of groups that are generally active enough that I get a consistent amount of new stuff coming in. It’s fairly low volume compared to other platforms, but it’s growing fairly steadily and becoming more useful all the time.

The creation of communities happens with time. We’re getting there.

because the interface is archiac, and the majority of topics are extremist.

normal people see the front page of lemmy and they see a bunch of weirdos going on about linux, communism, and trans stuff.

any of the big threads with 100s of comments are full of crazies going off about violence and hate towards mainstream political positions and lifestyles.

i am ‘mainstream’ and i have to block multiple users per day because i get constantly harassed by nutcases telling me how evil i am for using windows/mac, being a socialist democrat, and driving a car to work. if you disagree with the militant doomer wannabe revolutionaries you’re not going to have a good time here.

Reddit was like this in 2009, here’s a random thread from there to illustrate, 35 score, no comment votes. The years prior Reddit was even quieter despite having only one community they had to post to, before subreddits were a thing.

Give it time, promote it on Reddit if you want to !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com, tell your friends. As far as I know we are growing slowly, it will only blast up if Reddit does something extra henious again. Though the knee-high barrier of choosing a server and learning the etiquette will take a little time.

I think it’s okay as is, it doesn’t have to be more popular, but if it does become more popular then I don’t mind that either.