It's a nightmare to even sign up.

Nothing else to it.

People will move en-masse to new platforms if the switch is easy. Nothing easy about using this platform.

Obv the people here are techy enough to surmount the initial hurdles, but don't kid yourself, the average person doesn't know a damned thing. Using tech and understanding tech are two vastly different skills. And you actually need to understand tech to even get started here.

I'd say because it's still new and the content is very nerd heavy as you have probably seen from all the Linux posts. Also, most user's here come from the reddit exodus after the removal of third party apps.

One other thing is that when you link content from Lemmy you can just link the image directly instead of sending a link to Lemmy with a login screen. The adoption rate from people linking will be a lot lower since Lemmy is not sacrificing quality to increase numbers.

Either way, I like the size and it suits me, I can "finish" my Lemmy for the day in a reasonable amount of time and I get my fix of Linux news, memes and shitposts so it's just a win for me.

The verification aspect of signing up for an instance. People say they'll leave Reddit but still go back to it. I was one of those until I remembered how they murdered my boy Apollo.

no startup/angel/vc/pe funds to burn in advertising to capture the market.

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

not advertised, not run by a for profit company

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

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.

"Because I fucking hate my privacy, and Lemmy and other FOSS media platforms is like veggies on my dinner plate -- I don't want it.

I want people to know when I get my first boner, when I inevitably kick the bucket, and when i announce I got a new position (while users on the platform give context that I was hard the entire interview process). Because why celebrate with family and friends when I got the whole internets asshole comments to read and respond to."

This is my delusional interpretation of why users don't join Lemmy.

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.

🤔

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.

The UI

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.

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.

network effect. There's fewer people here so there's fewer people here.

That said, I like it just how it is and would caution anyone against wishing for more users.

Don't focus on getting more users. Focus on making the content here the best it can be.

It's inevitable that the quality of the experience here will change with more users. Whether it's a net positive or negative remains to be seen.

To be sure, these are the "good old days" of lemmy.

Whaaaaaat? It has a far better signal to noise ratio than those 'other' platforms. As long as you're into Star Trek memes and Linux.

Because there's still a handful of basic stuff that still hasn't gotten sorted out yet for some reason.

Like if I wanted to share your post with my friends, I'll send them this link: https://piefed.ca/c/nostupidquestions/p/377144/why-isint-lemmy-more-popular. If they're using a mobile app, then it might be fine. But if they're on desktop and want to comment or vote here but aren't already on my instance, they need to go back to their home instance, search up this community, and then search for this post. Why isn't there some sort of native way where I can just click on a button and have it open up in my home instance? Or even better: integrate something like threadiverse.link into Lemmy/PieFed so it immediately redirects me to my home instance's version on this post.

And before someone suggests using a different front-end or using a browser script, I appreciate you trying to help but my issue is why this isn't even natively part of Lemmy. And I'm not even sure if it's in the pipelines for V1.0.

Another issue is that there are still posts that don't federate properly. And it's not because an instance was defederated. What posts I see on this account might never be visible from a separate account. What is even more frustrating is that sometimes, I can't even force my instance to fetch the post. I'll give it the direct link and it still can't find the post on my instance.

As long as these basic issues remain unresolved, Lemmy will not become popular. A site can't be popular if I can't even share a post to my friends properly. Or if I can't even see the post, then I wouldn't be able to share it with anyone!

Edit: added clarification

I don't know a single person that knows it exists other than a few that ive tried to get interested. I have told a few friends that use reddit but they just don't get it.

I started lemmy a few months ago, stopped using reddit completely a few weeks ago and I don't miss it other than all the dog posts...more people need to post pics of their doggos on here !!!!

People stay on mainstream corporate platforms no matter how badly they enshittify because that's where everyone else is. They don't want to jump ship unless everyone else will jump ship with them, and so nobody makes the first move.

Lemmy isn't more popular because Lemmy isn't more popular. Lemmy wants to be an alternative to Reddit, but the best thing Reddit had going for it was all the niche communities for fandoms, hobbies, and other interests. That's something that just can't exist here, because if you take a niche thing and multiply it by a niche platform, I'll bet that I might very well be the only person on this platform who is into some of my hyperfixations. So people who want to talk about topics that have no community here, leave and go back to bigger platforms.

I'm still here to try and push for a better future, but I honestly don't know how we can grow this place to the kind of critical mass it would take to really get the ball rolling.

Lack of marketing.

Reddit has been around for 20 years and Lemmy not near as long. Reddit didn't really hit it big until Digg screwed the pooch driving away users around 2010. I don't see Lemmy hitting Reddit number probably ever, but reddit is one of the highest trafficked sites on the web. Lemmy is steadily growing, but I think to many non users, federation and instances is a confusing prospect, so they never try. As it grows, I would imagine it will get easier or at least clearer for the layman and the velocity of growth will increase due to that and a larger user base as a whole.

most of them are still addicted to reddit thats why, when you have all under one house, its hard to beat, and thier communities there is still large and eclipses lemmy.

plus most niches have been on reddit for decade+, it will be hard to convince like 20k-100k people to move to lemmy.

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.

Many reasons add up. PieFed is a bit better and evolving fast. In my opinion, it is primarily the scale and scope of niche content, and the toxic opinions of many towards genuine people.

A few of the big strikes have been the lack of moderator transparency, and occasional poor moderation. Tribalistic bandwagon behavior, unmitigated negativity by a few individuals, and astroturfing. The inability to block another user from actually seeing and interacting with posts. This place is not privacy oriented. The feed is unmanaged and the effort needed to block and filter the fluff is beyond the curation expectations of many.

Having to choose a server before you know what that means or the differences between the slightly different versions of federated networks makes it more confusing.

Yes, "it doesn't matter which server you choose," because you can see the posts from anywhere, in theory.  Except, it also kind of does matter. Places defederate from each other. If you pick a smaller instance, it may suddenly just go down and then you're back at the start again.

Honestly, I've made... 5? 6? different versions of me on different instances. Kbin went down, didn't get into Mastodon, lemm.ee went down, didn't like Mbin as much as Kbin, tried fedia.io sort of liked it, ended up largely on piefed.social, but also like being on sopuli.xyz because it's defederated from less and has more global content.

It's confusing and niche. I honestly really love it even when I kind of hate it. I end up ahead of the curve in a lot of tech news because of the hardcore enthusiasts on here.

For me I feel like to many instances to sign up to. Like . World. Ml .shit just works .etc...