(Repost) When do you think the Fediverse would have a leverage?
Here and there we see people earning and losing career over Twitter, Facebook posts, even if illusionary, it makes news.
When would Mastodon, Lemmy posts get enough traction to get into news?
Unlike them, Reddit has zero credibility, but still has many articles about it and internal reddit dramas.
Where would we as a fediverse reach the point ArsTech and others would refer to our post and comments as a proof of something?
We have a wet dream of them all relocating from X-itter to free platforms and self-hosting, but the first breaking point would be if they refer to us like we are real. When and how it would be? I don't know.
It depends. Instances like Mastodo may start having some weight in future but I don't think that Lemmy will loose his 'niche' status anytime soon. Discord have more users as well, but you never hear of him in the news, people know Discord but is still not mainstream.
As far as mainstream is concerned. Discord is known as "That platform where moderators groom kids" since that's the only things that ever reach the news
Discord is really rough. Bot armies, tons of trolls, many disturbed individuals posting gore and trauma dumping on others. I have run a couple discord servers and moderated some more. Its not fun, really. Weβll see how matrix pans out in the future but so far, the amount of sickos seems to go down.
Discord chats are deeply private (not for the owners), and we are googlable. Where it needs to be something big, like a child abuse case to make some news about Discord, discovered through other means, we have a more open content platform.
It did create a bit of a splash back when Mastodon got together and played a huge part in saving the Texas Observer.
As for being used of a source of what random people are talking about, I think that's further off for three reasons:
The biggest platform is a better source
It doesn't go well with decentralisation - you want to report what's going on inside one big, centralised service
It tends to be pretty worthless lazy journalism. The journalists who have been converted to Mastodon tend to avoid writing sloppy pieces about what people are talking about online - they rejected Twitter for a reason.
I hate to say it but it'll basically never happen. The whole reddit uprising ended uo being a big nothing burger and I can't really see anything bringing an equal migration/influx.
It already does. Mastodon is mentioned every now and then. Some journalists know about it, since the twitter exodus happened. But I've searched for famous people on Mastodon and it's still only a handfull. For example Stephen Fry and Greta Thunberg. So it doesn't play a role in most people's daily lives.
Lemmy is just small, niche and has currently too many bugs/issues so it doesn't attract new users. (My oppinion)
Honestly, i think if people did videos here and there mentioning lemmy and the info they found in here (similarly like how reddit is shilled sometimes) there would be a bigger growth in user count in the Lemmy instances over time
something will probably just break out from time to time, like 4chan. although, something breaking out of here is more likely to attract more long-term users than 4chan I assume, this place is a bit more welcoming