In 12 years, selfhosting will be so cheap and one-push-button easy that everyone will have their own instance and federated with each other. It will be called Neo-Geocities 2.0.
I remember getting a few of my friends to try G+ with me, then getting in and realizing we were the only ones there. Feels like Lemmy already has more people than that ghost town ever did.
Google+ didn't work because they didn't push it hard enough and they made it an invite only beta instead of just allowing everyone to join.
Yes - I'm being serious they didn't push it hard enough. If you had a Gmail or YouTube account it should have just instantly become a Google+ account in some sort of private mode so it doesn't inadvertently leak your info.
If they would have just pushed it out to everyone, day one, mandatory, no opt out, then we'd still have Google+ today.
Like if they made Google Talk the default messaging client on Android we'd still have Google Talk. I don't recall Apple making iMessage an optional messaging app you don't have to use.
I honestly hope lemmy will not die. It will have to become simpler though. For many people, it will be simply way too complicated to wrap their head around the fact of many instances and most of them will worry about not being able to interact with people from other instances.
Also, the main lemmy web app is not necessarily good and alternatives such as wefwef are far easier to use.
I mean this post has 1200 upvotes. Considering most people don't engage with the voting system that makes me think that there's a decent amount of people here. At the very least it means there's a lot of people here who engage with the community. More come every day. If this post were on Reddit, it would be on r/all right now. That's not bad for a community with a fraction of the users.
I think that in 10 years this place will be doing alright. I think the growth that's happened in the last few months won't last, but I think that growth will still steadily happen. The reddexodus doesn't happen every day but with most social media platforms shitting their geriatric pants more and more lately, I think a consistent flow of refugees will come here.
By then I predict the big corp news media will report on Lemmy like it’s the new 4chan. Unmoderated instances that no major instance links to will give them plenty of ammunition. Non technical users will believe it to the frustration of all Lemmy.
Not trying to be a downer when they attack you, you know you’re winning
The cool thing: There will be at least 1 instance left (probably), because there is not central entity that can stop it. If lemmy.workd goes down, all others are still there. If the developers die, someone can fork it and continue developing it..
Geez it's just so incredibly sad to me that facebook has survived this long and even THRIVED while probably being the worst version of what they do, and being the most evil doing it
Please tell me someone remembers Google wave and the insane amount people were paying on eBay for an invitation.
(Sorry, just randomly remember it when I saw Google+)
Hopefully more content and more simplicity. I haven't experienced much of either yet. There's tons of threads about how great Lenny is but I'm just not seeing it yet ¯\(ツ)/¯
Google+ was so weird, for a considerable amount of time it was invite only, you needed some form of connection to get in – turns out this wasn't great as they assumed it would be. I can only assume that is the reason they pulled a massive U-turn and decided to foist it upon anyone and everyone after the fact, which, it would appear, was also a bad idea.
If it's anything like what "All" shows me, it will be mostly furries, sissies, anime, and 196 with just a splash of conservative. Unless you block it, Lemmy got some weird shit yo.
G+ was just one of many. APIs come and go with maps, spreadsheets, forms, fusion tables. Played with some custom map places which were actually useful. after G dropped support for large chunks of code I dropped the idea. Lemmy will stay basically same. Internet will move to texted voicemail recordings with bad transcriptions.