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

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.

Lack of marketing.

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.

!fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com il people want to help

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.

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.

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 !!!

Same reason Mastodon isn’t as popular as Twitter… a lot of people really don’t understand the concept of federation, or why it’s important in order to maintain a robust and healthy discussion. They’re fine with dictatorship as long as it aligns with their sensibilities.

Also, the concept of “one website, one app” is infinitely easier to comprehend than “many instances, many apps, still one protocol”.

It’s somewhat difficult to navigate at first and most users find the most popular platforms and don’t have a reason to move on, simple as that. Ease of access and, unfortunately, advertising would lead to Lemmy being more popular. But who would fund the advertising?

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.

Critical mass does what they do.

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.

I think it may be more popular soon because other platforms are bringing in age verification.

That’s one reason I am here and also Reddit mods are dicks.