Yes, will it? No.

I don't think they will be the services that do it but maybe the next round will. We are basically waiting for boomers to die off and the portion of GenX that never took to understanding technology. After that we have a society that has basically always had the internet and then its just a matter of education.

Also i think the biggest obstacle is the naming and management of instances. Stop giving your instances stupid names. Midwest.social makes sense as its a social network for people who live in the Midwest. Fanaticus.social could be slightly better but still, made for sports fans. Lem.ee and lemmy.world and all those makes all non-tech nerds scratch their head as to which one to go to. Yeah its federated and people can access any instances but they wont get that if they never sign up. Pick a topic and have that be the gateway to other instances.

Hmm, I'm mixed about this. If it were going mainstream, some big corp would take notice, join the federation and then eventually enshittify it (see current state of emails where small players have trouble federating with big players such as gmail and outlook). Then we'll have to flee again to a new alternative. But then again, trying to become mainstream is a helpful goal to make fediverse apps actually usable for average people.

No and I hope they don’t. At first that’s what I wanted for mastodon / Lemmy but as I’ve been here I’ve realized that having too many people invariably dilutes the quality of content since popularity means shouting over more voices and content which is generic or manipulative (rage bait) or appeals to the least common denominator bubbles up. There’s a critical mass needed for quality and content variety, but too much and it falls apart.

No and I hope they don’t. At first that’s what I wanted for mastodon / Lemmy but as I’ve been here I’ve realized that having too many people invariably dilutes the quality of content since popularity means shouting over more voices and content which is generic or manipulative (rage bait) or appeals to the least common denominator bubbles up. There’s a critical mass needed for quality and content variety, but too much and it falls apart.

I hope not tbh. But I’m selfish. Let the masses have their garbage if they choose.

It’s inevitable for the federation to dominate. I think it will take a few years though

I hope not. I'd rather it wasnt mainstream, because that attracts morons.

It depends on how many content creators and important community members will be ready to move from centralized social networks to here

Probably not. And if it ever gets too big, they will find a way to fuck it up 😉

oh fuck I hope not.

I honestly think it's unlikely. Not because Lemmy is bad or that the tech couldn't handle it. But Lemmy isn't really profit driven - there's no way to really build a moat without defederating, and therefore no capitalist reason to advertise and grow a server - all that would do is increase infrastructure burden and then leave the server owner trying to figure out how to recoup the cost. And if they start running ads, charging fees or running people nuts with merchandizing, that growth they paid for is likely to scatter to other servers offering the same access to content.

So if growing tall isn't likely, what about growing wide? Well, maybe. I'm still extremely new to Lemmy World, but from what I can tell to run a Lemmy instance you have to have or be willing to learn a basic understanding of Linux, and be willing to charitably donate your hardware/bandwidth to the public. That might work out, or that might be constrained either by freeloaders scaling faster than donors, or the learning curve proving too much a barrier to entry. Wikipedia worked out, but it still has to occasionally prod its users to remind them it needs money to keep afloat.