God, I really hope it never does.
I wanna stay isolated on a social platform man.
A small bunch of stupid wankers is more than enough. The majority can fuck off to la-la land.

If reddit keeps banning people at the present rate then it’s a real possibility.

Perhaps. But both Lemmy and PieFed needs to mature more.

No it is to complcated to join here. The application, the servers?! To find good communitys. Does it even have an algorithm?!

No

it already has niche communities but they’re on topics that most people try to avoid; namely leftist politics and open source technology.

if you don’t like either, then i image lemmy is fairly dull for you.

Honestly no, but I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong.

Not until the crossposting double comment section problem ever gets fixed.

Nah

do you think lemmy will ever have millions of users

It’s not infeasible. It won’t likely happen tomorrow, and to manage it will take massive server resources or many more instances, but as disillusionment grows with corporate social media I hope to see more people here eventually.

and niche topics or subs like reddit?

There’s plenty of niche communities already across the fediverse, and I’m sure they’d love whatever you’d like to contribute to them.

or even be a top result when you search google? like reddit posts

Possibly, but probably not. The incentive structure for something like Google is built around profit, and the fediverse isn’t really built to profit, mostly just financially tread water at best.

If enough people join then Google would be shooting themselves in the foot financially to not return lemmy in its searches if for nothing else than its own relevance, but as a general rule they’ll follow the craven flow of capital every time.

Millions of users, no. That only happens with either massive marketing and/or sheer luck to become the popular thing.

Niche communities, yes, if the software is tweaked a little. We already have niche communities. Now it’s just a question of making sure that the people who are interested in those topics and subscribed become more aware of posts in those communities. In other words, just a different algorithm for the main feed. Lemmy and Piefed have already tried adding new algorithms, but they didn’t seem to do the job (at least Lemmy’s new algorithm - I haven’t tried Piefed’s yet). Oh, and those new algorithms that would promote posts in niche communities to have more even standing with posts in large, general communities would need to become the default or at least widely adopted by users in order to have the intended effect.

Oh good gods I hope not. That kind of popularity is what killed Reddit.

Getting hugely popular --> Higher server costs --> Increased temptation towards profit-seeking

Sure, the whole of Lemmy wouldn’t privatize (at least at first), but what would likely happen is just as what has happened over the last 20 years with email: a few instances gets most of the traffic over the course of a decade or two, meaning small, independent instances won’t be able to compete.

Sure, their hosting ability (“users/dollar”, if you will) would plateau, but as more and more people join the big instances (think lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and so forth), the percentage of the Fediverse going to small, independent instances would increasingly get smaller, until we end up a corporatized federated Web to match our corporatized unitary Web.

No, not unless the “choose an instance” problem at sign-up is resolved.

The porn instances already do

But I hope it doesn’t ever get so niche as Reddit became

it’s the kind of thing that can be big, but it takes its natural time. and a few more enshitification bro moves from the other side.