I was initially optimistic about Lemmy but it doesn’t seem to have caught on much, certainly not enough to truly compete with the likes of Reddit. Also, it doesn’t seem to have caught on except for topics involving technology. Even as someone really proactive trying to branch out into forums, it is next to impossible to find forums analogous to the forums of the 2000s/early 2010s. Has it truly died out? Is there any way to replicate it?
The one thing I can think of is to have a foundation built firmly on open source principles, which works on its UI and marketing to the point where network effects can truly take off. Most open source alternatives really do not focus enough on UI and general appeal to make this work.
I’m happy to be proven wrong; if I’m just not looking in the right places, please do link them!
Reddit didn’t take off overnight either and was full of only technology posts for years.
Lemmy will get there in time, probably faster if they do paid subreddits.
And forums are sadly dead. Killed by FB groups imo.
Lemmy don’t even works on older browsers, and till isn’t fixed i doubt it will take off. A lot of users still user older browsers and won’t update just for lemmy. I know it sounds insane but disabling auto updates has become a need this days, specially with browsers (see what google does with chrome or firefox with their shitty forced changes you can’t disable or switch off and random settings not working anymore in about config). Instead of supporting as much devices and clients as possible, lemmy is ignoring those and then wonders why nobody much uses lemmy. There isn’t even rly a good portion of working apps who don’t kill themself every few weeks or months because there was another lemmy server update which killed apps. It’s just frustrating trying to use lemmy, so i as an example stopped using it actively because of all the technical issues related to it.
We often yell at reddit about what they do, but look at what lemmy does. We can’t even get the basic functionality working without it breaking every few day or weeks for another new reason. Why ANYBODY of the not tech related people ever would want to bear this stress? Most of non tech people can’t even install a driver for a printer and we expect that they use lemmy with all it’s flaws? come on.
I still frequent quite a few fora, though they’re not as active as they used to be, but still offer great discourse on numerous topics.