Reddit just faked it all until it made it basically. The creators of it are even on the record talking about it.

Lemmy could do the same if it wanted.

I think the turning point to mainstream appeal will be when major existing websites switch their attached discussion forums to Lemmy, which will inject a huge amount of new users into the ecosystem.

Reddit initially wanted companies to be able to set up their own official subreddit as their official forum and the private subreddit system is designed for that function.

So, say something like cnn or tmz set up their own Lemmy instance where they only post their own content for people to discuss, as having that inbuilt existing userbase mitigates the most painful part of setting up a new social media. The share button might get replaced with "go to our lemmy instance" button, and the snowball will just get bigger and bigger.

The day that gets rolling is the end of web 2.0 social media as we know it.

Real answer: ease of use

If I wanted to find a particular subreddit for whatever, it was as easy as typing in the name of the show or hobby. And it linked to other similar / related subreddits

Or someone would link to another subreddit in a comment.

Here I'm having to sit and learn what an instance is and if the community I was in transfered over, and if they did where did they go. It's turning away alot of the less tech savvy people.

Does it need to be as popular as reddit? I don't think so, anything that grows too big becomes a hassle and a problem. But to grow it would need easier interface or ability to find/interact with other communities.

I imagine these things would make Lemmy explode more:

1. Influencer influencers influencers. Have Mr Beast mention how he will give half a million dollars to whomever makes the best post on a Lemmy board or something and you have it made.

2. Individual users can find a way to profit from it, be it pushing a t-shirt to only fans or whatever and you'll see an influx in ads, er, posts.

Could be as simple as simple word of mouth and then delivering an amazing experience/product. It worked for sriracha.

Nnnnoooooooo! Don't make Lemmy a top website! The more popular something is, the more vapid and full of spewers it becomes.

What lemmy or kbin need is more users, plain and simple.

A huge stepping stone would be to give users a better understanding of how the fediverse actually works. I’m a tech guy and I was pretty confused the first week I joined. I think most people here are tech people.

I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, but I believe it would lead to a much more consistent stream of newcomers.

Reddit grew alot when it got known that they did AMAs with celebrities and world leaders. All the tabloids would report on it. It's difficult for Lemmy or even Reddit to repeat that without having someone in a paid full-time position to arrange and facilitate the interview.

Another thing is the size of the userbase. It got to the point that the sources for specific news were on Reddit, making it the first to have details on the stories, so it was often referenced in actual news outlets.

Make one instance the default one. Then introduce others gradually. Too confusing for first timers. I was scratching my head the first time.

I’d rather not have Lemmy become a top website. I don’t need to see anime porn and onlyfans thots.

Reddit got there slowly but surely. What will help here is just making an attractive product that works, there's still a lot of bugs for developers to fix. As you user you can help by submitting content.

Reddit has so many users. Give Lemmy time.

It doesn't need to. Pray that it doesn't.

Ultimately I think it's sort of like Python and C#. Python got big by being easy to use, with great community management, and it took decades to reach its peak of popularity. C# got big because Microsoft threw a ton of money at people to use it. Of the two, Python's popularity seems to be lasting longer.

I suspect this will be the case for all the new sites and protocols popping up in The Web 2.0 Crash, or whatever the history books call it. We'll see a few sites like TikTok and Threads that "buy their friends", get a ton of overnight popularity and then fade away, and we'll get a few "institutions" that take their time building healthy communities over tens of years. ActivityPub didn't wow me with Mastodon but I'm pleasantly surprised by Lemmy, so maybe the Fediverse will be one of those institutions... but personally I still think there's room in the market for RSS to make a comeback.

I think better integration with peertube would help. Videos are very popular on reddit and they require a lot of resources for an instances to host its own.

I honestly think reddit got way too big and that led to its downfall, but yes growth would be good and it's a good question.