Is there any evidence that Reddit has suffered at all from the exodus to Lemmy?
Was there even a mass exodus? I largely avoid Reddit now, but I do kind of doubt that they've been hurt in any meaningful way by all the protests and people leaving...
Migration goes beyond sheer numbers. The 3.8k users are probably the one that were the most attached to initial Reddit, hence people who would contribute the more. I would rather be with those 3.8k users than the millions of people okay with staying on Reddit despite Spez's decisions.
I hope that once Lemmy is a bit more polished (instance blocking, account migration, hot filtering working etc.), we will gradually see a second wave of arrivals.
Or those 3.8k users were on Apollo, RIF etc that didn’t bring any revenue to Reddit regardless.
They could care less about these users leaving, there are plenty of new angsty teenagers to take their place
Unfortunately, as one of those 3.8k daily users, I'm still using Reddit mostly. Lemmy has a long way to go before I drop Reddit all the way.
The next wave won’t come until Lemmy post are indexed by google and ranking up on the first page. Until then, searching for obscure things will still land on old Reddit posts.
instance blocking
What's that?
The 3.8k users are probably the one that were the most attached to initial Reddit, hence people who would contribute the more.
I had 2 million karma and would hit the frontpage of All almost weekly. I stopped using Reddit once I came here.
Mass migration or not, I'm happier to be here with all of you.
I have to admit, when I came here I was hoping this would be a mass migration, but these days I think Lemmy is already great even without the bulk of Reddit's user base joining. Easier to participate in conversions, less trolling, less aggression, fewer bots...
Not saying I don't want Lemmy to grow more, but it's a fantastic place already.
I agree. And if I’m being honest, I don’t want 100 million people from reddit suddenly appearing here. Same for Mastodon from Twitter. That would be awful.
Please make them stay where they are.
Ditto. This has been great
I'm happier to be here with you. •̀ ͜ﻌ•́
I think the problem is, Lemmy's greatest strength (Fediverse) is also the thing that's going to hold back a mass migration at this point in time. Onboarding with Reddit is a breeze. You make an account, it asks you what your interests are and location based communities and you're off to the races. Every community on reddit is immediately available to interact with.
When I came to lemmy I almost gave up on my initial onboarding and I'm a pretty tech savvy guy. I didn't know where to go to start. There's all these different lemmy sites and I didn't know if they were the same thing or different and if I was signing up to the right one. Account creation failed initially without giving an error message (I'll chalk that one up to just a bug). There didn't seem to be any NSFW communities until I figured out the instance thing. You're told you can use your account across instances but when you go to another instance via it's domain you can't interact with it, you have to get to another instance through your instance which is confusing as a newcomer. Any one of these issues is a falling off point for a less inclined visitor.
I'm not saying the fediverse thing is bad but the unfortunate byproduct of it is a difficult experience for newcomers, especially when you compare it to Reddit. I'm hoping growth in the community will bring in talent to solve for this initial experience or possibly apps which can handle all of this more seamlessly.
I wonder if federated instances are something that can just become cultural knowledge over time, like any other technical piece of software. To a degree using reddit is like that to newcomers with it's unique thread style and "independently" moderated subs. Lemmy just took it to another level.
I had pretty much the same experience migrating from Reddit to Lemmy and I still don't entirely understand how this thing works.
I'm still trying to figure out if I need to make an account on each Lemmy instance to reserve my username, since this is already my second account after fmhy.ml stopped working.
You joined almost a month back, those were rough times. Today is much better.
Today I would just tell people
That's pretty much it.
I wish some of the subs I frequented the most were a bit more active here, but I guess it's a bit chicken and egg. Need to interact more with Lemmy ourselves to motivate others to.
Doesn't matter if there is or isn't a mass mitigation, the %1 who did the modding and content creation were the loudest about the changes and most have started to move to other platforms. It's very obvious now on reddit that the quality of the posts have started to tank.
yeah im sorry but lemmy.world in its ENTIRETY is basically the size of a small niche subreddit.
How many users moved away from Lemmy.world to another instance?
Mind you that an active user is "anyone who makes a post", and not readers nor subscribers, which are the metrics reddit uses.
With that said, yeah, no, there was no migration.
Is it important that Reddit suffers? For me the important thing is that lemmy flourishes and has good oc.
I support this point of view, but at the same time I want the status quo to be disrupted and the internet to change, I'm not a fan of allowing corporations to fall into complacency when they hold so much power.
Right? Ignore them, have fun here. No reason to give any thought to them.
That's the spirit!
This is what I wish more lemmings would grasp. I've commented before how there's this disillusionment that reddit actually died when a bunch of people left. It didn't. The sooner everyone can stop being in denial about that, the better.
The situation is really more akin to an abusive ex and the people that left realizing that they're better off without them. You're in a better place. Stop talking about, focusing on the drama that your ex brought and just embrace your newer better environment.
Millions of people are in that situation and don't leave because they've been manipulated, they're scared, and in this case addicted. My brother in law switched from Apollo to the official app and hates it, complains every day, and says reddit sucks now...but won't leave.
Yeah, but like... I have a gf to have someone to converse with. This new gf of mine basically doesn't speak so I'm just sitting here watching the wallpapers in silence, whereas my ex, while crazy, was very talkative and entertaining.
To use your analogy of the abusive ex... would you want someone to just never talk about the abusive ex? Never process the trauma? That's what a lot of people are doing. Noticing that the abusive ex is imploding into a death spiral is kind of validating of your decision to leave. It's part of the process. There's no need to shame people for it.
It’s petty, but I do hope Reddit suffers. Spez and co has profited off user generated content, free moderation of their communities for a decade plus. Forcing users into the Reddit app that is garbage compared to other 3rd party apps, not to mention the privacy concerns with the app which rivals Facebook.
Quote from Spez in 2016. In May, Steve Huffman said in an interview at the TNW Conference that, unlike Facebook, which "only knows what [its users are] willing to declare publicly", Reddit knows its users' "dark secrets"
If Reddit collapses or at the very least their IPO collapses and we can prevent another sociopath from being a billionaire I’ll be very happy with the situation.
It can be seen as a statistic for lemmy's success
No idea, and I don't care. What matters for me is that there are enough people on Lemmy to keep it interesting.
word
Just wanted to say that's a real cool username
How in the bloody hell are those characters in a username?!
I fucking love it, my guy!
Exactly. We don't need Reddit to fail, we just need Lemmy (or Kbin, I don't discriminate) to succeed.
This is a much healthier mindset, and I completely support this. I don't actually want to see a mass migration to Lemmy because it would just instantly replicate a lot of the same issues that Reddit had. Slower, organic, and well scaled growth is wholly preferable to a massive swarm of users. I also think the general quality of users on Lemmy is currently about 10,000% higher than on Reddit, and I would - selfishly - like to see it stay that way.
Can't speak for anyone else, but as soon as RIF died I was gone. Was on it for over 10 years, and the only way I would view reddit content. Reddit's ui is cancer.
100%, no RIF no Reddit. I still hope for LIF to be a thing, especially after seeing old.lemmy.world
Finally took the plunge and scrubbed and deleted my reddit account. I'm officially all in on fediverse/Lemmy.
Honestly, as attached as I was to the RIF style after using it for a decade like OP, I have to say that I think the design of Connect is really damn good. Especially when you consider how early in the game it is right now for the Fediverse as a whole. The more modern design, features, and generally slick look to everything got me hooked immediately. Honestly, the only thing I don't really like about Connect is the App logo on my phone 🙃
This was me for Boost. Had an account for awhile before I aurally used it because I wasn't aware of third party apps and found the official one or web page a chore to go through. Then went with Boost after trying a few and I was on Reddit daily. Mostly a lurker. Already some of the Lemmy apps are better than the official reddit app and Boost is coming some time as well.
Honestly, I don't really care. I like it here more than reddit and if it stays like it is, awesome.
I have no desire to see reddit succeed or fail, I simply found a place I fit in better.
I agree but I still want Reddit to burn 😂. But I'm an asshole so that's okay.
Hear, hear!
Here, here!
Anyone that expected Lemmy to instantly get as big as reddit overnight were naive. Overall I think only a small fraction went away but reddit is clearly using tactics like mass inviting to group chats and reopening places to boost activity.
But as they do it quality of posts is dropping i've found. Personely i think it will take a long time but reddit is really digging its own grave as competition will appear.
Heh, digging. I see what you did there
If we're perfectly honest - No.
Reddit has over 53 some odd million users. Million with an M. Lemmy has gained, at most, upwards of just thousands. To call it a 'mass exodus' is really overselling it.
It's going to take a fairly long time, for Lemmy to even scratch 100k even. I'm on both Reddit and Lemmy. Lemmy, for a more positive experience. Reddit, because the numbers are just there.
This crisis has given Lemmy enough users to be a vibrant, viable alternative with the software and apps undergoing rapid development. This means the next time that reddit tries to pull some shit, there will be somewhere for people to go, unlike this time. Lemmy just wasn't really ready for prime time.
I think you are correct. Lemmy is really just gearing up at the moment, but can't handle the volume to compete with reddit.
The increase of instances, user guides, communities and third party apps are necessary building stones of a federated reddit alternative of size.
This is it. Reddit will keep pulling dumb shit that drives users away and hurts engagement for short term profits. Having viable and stable alternatives gives people a place to go so they don't feel trapped.
For comparison, Mastodon got 2.5 Million users and then promptly lost all of them. Since then it has been slowly gaining back and last numbers had them at 1.7 Million already.
This X move by Musk might push them back to 2 million and beyond. The platform has matured.
Lemmy needs a lot of work still, but give it time.
Lemmy has almost half a million accounts ( 400k ) with over 1.5 million posts. lemmy.world grew by ~30k new accounts in June.
Others grew by single digit thousands, so the migration seems to be about ~50k new users to Lemmy.
That's not trivial, Reddit had those kind of numbers in like 2007. Give it time.
Want this the case when Reddit was tiny and Digg was huge too?
The landscape was different. Digg was in 2004. Reddit in 2005. They both came in a time where social media was at it's infancy and it was anyone's game to make it big. Whereas today, there are already established social media sites and the best any alternative social media outlet can do anymore, is absorb some numbers and try to prove to be the better alternative. It's a lot about thinking outside the box and figuring what a platform can do that the other can't.
Lemmy has definitely "scratched" 100k https://the-federation.info/platform/73
I didn't leave to make the service worse.
The service got worse, and so I left.
But why not both? 😂
Several major subs have closed, they're forced to campaign to keep mods, a significant amount of content generators have left. Even though it's been only a couple weeks, they've slid on the global index of visited sites. They've lost 3-4% of 1.7 billion views in weeks. That's 10's of millions of ads not delivered. That alone is several million dollars lost on a site trying to be profitable. This doesn't include people on the fence, people currently unaffected because their app didn't die until this week, or people just watching the drama until it's boring again. Also, Reddit depends heavily on free labor to succeed, the bulk of the community that is leaving is their free labor pool. They don't have the cash to pay moderators for their time and they just removed the tools that let those people do their work.
Just have a look at the content there, it dropped a lot in quality.
As someone who only ever browsed all, I see no difference.
As a browser, I notice that Lemmy seems much more dynamic and engaging. It's small, weird and there appear to be all sorts of things going on in the corners which I didn't notice so much on reddit (they were probably there, but got overlooked die to sheer volume of content). I like the experience so far, reminds me of the early days of exploring the web.
I lost all patience with low effort posts. I try to call out anyone asking easily google-able questions or clear karma baiting. It took a couple days of this to realize I needed take a long break from it. I'm debating keeping my account solely to get my karma up a bit more and trying to sell it, not sure yet.
For a bunch of the subs I frequented the mods just left. Some of those died, some are being taken over by right-wing extremists, some are still chugging along.
Interesting
This is some fomo type shit.... forget about your ex, invest in your current!!!
Honestly I like Lemmy more and more everyday. It's quality vs quantity when it comes to posts and the users.
Quanlity sounds like the next Antman movie.
Oops, a typo. But it does sounds like a movie title lol
Their user numbers are available with a web search. Reddit useage dipped towards end of June but has mostly leveled out.
Quite a few mods left, which has had a larger impact than an equal number of general users leaving would. The niche topic sub I was involved in went from four mods to one half-hearted mod. The quality of posts has dropped. Almost every comment thread contains complaints. Reports are piled up.
Most surprising to me when I peeked at the sub this weekend was the amount of borderline-incel desperation and negativity. The sub is for a hobby that while slightly male majority, we had plenty of women contributing with minimal problems. Not anymore. If I were a woman looking at that sub for the first time, I would probably block it. It is so depressing and angry now, I barely recognize it.
I have to wonder how much of Reddit's traffic is bots and lurkers though.
Post quality is a bigger indicator, and that does seem to be dropping. This is why Reddit banning 3rd party apps was such a big deal. It doesn't matter if 99% of your users use the official app if 99% of the content posted to the side is posted by the 1% that don't.
As someone who was around for the digg migration, it didn't drop off overnight (hell digg.com is still around), but they gradually bled content until everyone was on Reddit. Lemmy right now is very reminiscent of early Reddit.
Post quality is a bigger indicator, and that does seem to be dropping
That's the thing - it's hard to track this. If anything it'll be a slow decline
Agreed and not just content creators but active users in general. I bet someone like me who now on average posts 10 messages a day to Lemmy was more valuable to reddit than 10 lurkers.
Do you mind sharing the sub? I'm curious to take a look.
Has the community moved elsewhere, be it Lemmy/Kbin or Discord?
It's disheartening to see this kind of communities collapse
The real question is why anyone cares? Move on and just enjoy Lemmy. Forget about reddit.
I’m torn on this. Because a sort of injustice happened. Do we really just ignore enshitification, try to educate others, reflect and keep an eye on the site while trying to understand what happened and not repeat old mistakes? Or just move on with our lives and hope that the injustices sort themselves out?
I kinda want to watch reddit burn 🙊
If you want justice, then you move on and forget Reddit. Otherwise you're just keeping it afloat and creating free promotion for it.
What injustice? Reddit is "their" website and they can do what they want with it, we have always only been allowed to use it for their enrichment. The farmer is always very nice to his animals until its time to cash out.
Lemmy is hopefully the fix, in that it doesnt need to turn a profit, and we're not locked in.
As the child of immigrants, I can tell you that running off and living your life is absolutely a viable strategy, and I've spent my whole life trying to underssand what happened so that the same thing doesn't happen to my family again.
All that said, it is a website. The planet is broiling around us and the people responsible are not just free, but living like kings.
Honestly, we're better off if all the idiots stay at reddit.
Couldn't agree more.
Personally I came over bc the app I used stopped working (boost). Lemmy seems to have the same content I used reddit for:
I don't plan on going back to reddit unless it's via Boost. Fediverse is better anyway
Poor one out for Boost! I'm on the waiting list for his new Boost for Lemmy. Can't wait.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenmayayo.lemmy
Can't wait for Boost for Lemmy to release.
Only evidence I have is:
any day of week 1 of using Lemmy I had about 1 page of new stories on my subscribed communities
any day of week 2 of using Lemmy I had about 2 pages of new stories on my communities
any day of week 3 (this week) I'm at least 4 pages in and still haven't hit on the old stories
I'm just happy to be here. I care less and less about reddit. Using lemmy and mastodon for a while, it's gotten more and more important to me to just build a great, fun, healthy community and less important (emotionally) to bring down the giants. I still care about it politically and theoretically, I just don't feel it as much.
Fuck Reddit. I’m here now and it’s great.
Ya, I'm less about screwing spez and more about enjoying my niche communities. I just couldn't enjoy it on Reddit Mobile - it's painful, the whole ux. Then since Lemmy works great and I still have my niche groups which I enjoy interacting with. Just makes sense. Reddit made a bunch of awful decisions impacting ux and it's unusable in my eyes.
There is a bit of me that still wants to use my old Joey app still. Hope that dev comes up with something, it was a great tool.
I feel all those posts about reddit looking for mods for various communities is a good indicator. They might not have lost quantity all that much, but a very small portion of quality kept a lot of reddit interesting and running smoothly. A lot of that has either just dropped entirely engaging or migrated.
I doubt everyone would move. Some people simply take it as a sign to move on and do other things with their limited time on this little planet.
I see it as a signs of problems to come. Being a Mod sucks, the only reason most hung around was that they were passionate for the subs they moderated. Replacing moderators at first might be easy but I believe, with time, the turnover rate will increase linearly thus causing a massive drop in quality content as time progress. Thus causing a feed back loop of less good users, less good content and more shit users, more shit content, culminating in the slow and painful death Reddit.
I think the damage done to Reddit is not from protests but the bad management decisions -- enshittification as Corey Doctorow put it -- in order to hasten Reddit's IPO. The attitude by upper management, taking user content for granted, is going to continue to serve to chase users away, or drive them to deprioritize engagement with Reddit.
I'm missing only a couple of communities here on Lemmy but otherwise it serves me as a daily feed. And reddit still can be searched for troubleshooting.
Yeah, 90% of the users don't care about the drama but also they don't make most the content. The people starting subreddits and doing the work to get them popular do care and they're coming over here, same with the bot coders and app makers.
Going forward a lot of interesting stuff is going to be here rather than Reddit, the more that continues the more likely it is average uses will have an account on both which will grow into them getting more involved here and eventually forgetting about Reddit.
Reddit hasn't been killed instantly but it's shot in the leg and bleeding out...
The timing of /r/place nullified any possibility evidence of an effect, as a ton of streamer featured this event, creating traffic. I wouldn't be surprised if they got a huge net profit this month.
That's their plan, keep drumming up drama for views untill IPO to keep the platform "interesting"
They themselves are the embodiment of a karma whore.
I'm surprised they haven't sold company ads space on place already. lol
it was about hurting the reddit ? i thought it was about finding a good alternative
For me it's both. I loved Reddit but it turned into a dumpster fire. I've always been a huge fan of openness, open source, freedom to the people. The fediverse is much better this time around, which I figure is more awareness of it.
I run Arch btw.
Basically the next time they fuck something up, this will be an even better alternative for those leaving - I’m done with reddit
I really don't care about reddit anymore. I pretty happy with Lemmy right now.
¯(ツ)/¯
What I do know is that I'm happier having left.
This, it's really a testament to some really well run instances and the inertia of the platform itself that the people here can be so indifferent to Reddit.
I hope so, but I don't care. The same with the bird site. I chose to delete my barely-used bird account when that idiot bought it, and to explore mastadon and lemmy when I could no longer use Apollo to view reddit. Two or 3 times I've popped over to reddit to see what's going on, and check on any other subreddits that have moved to lemmy, and using the official reddit browser or app just reinforces why I left. It's shit, and getting shittier.
Basically I like the mantra "not my circus, not my monkeys."
This has been my experience. I was still using Reddit on my computer and lemmy on my phone until last week. I'm at the point on my computer now that I was at with my phone four weeks ago where it's pretty much split between them. I really need to figure out a search engine that captures lemmys since I still have to end most my searches with "reddit" to get useful answers.
Edit: I know I can use "site:lemmy.world" but that only searches the one instance
I had finally joined Twitter to see if there was anymore political people to find out about. Something like a week later Musk bought it and I deleted it.
I'm not even this huge like omg I hate musk. I don't think I even have musk related comments. I just don't trust big loud billionaires. Especially ones that made big deals about being too broke to help out with internt for Ukraine much longer while flying to moons and buying soapboxes and just generally being shitty
Have you seen the content lately? It's all trash now. Most contributors have altered their posting habits or left?
it feels way less informative, more clickbaity and buzzfeed like. But, I am not sure if I am biased or not, I just feel more constructive on this site for some reason. and it feels like my mind is confused/calibrating to the concept that online forums can be constructive
The effect is going to be long term. The most active users (usually 10% posters, 1% content creators and mods) were the most affected by the changes. Those are also the most vocal. And, probably the first ones to move here. Once those move reddit content will get worse over time which will make the other users move (89%) too. So yea, don't expect short term impact. It's the long run that matters
The short-term is that reddit is scrambling to try to maintain the appearance of normality. Calling for volunteer moderators (Always Were.meme), and talking about their decreased financial stream show this. The rest is gonna be longer term knock-on type effects.
Ultimately though, as many others have said, I'm here and I'm not going back, so while the bad news is a little cathartic, I mostly don't care. Will they completely die, probably not, but they are dead to me.
I don't see Reddit scrambling to do fucking aaaanythiiing. It's impressive how goddamned daft they are being.
I suspect their July user metrics will see a hit, but even if all Lemmy activity came directly out of Reddits numbers they would still be a top 10 website in the US by traffic.
You can't have "the downfall of reddit" as a goal, you can only hope for the proliferation of a better experience, hopefully here. Lemmy not dying is preferred over reddit dying.
I don't know if I'd call it a mass exodus, and I don't know that it directly has anything to do with Lemmy, but there's been a noticeable dip in quality. Fewer posts across many of the front page subreddits, fewer votes, more bot posts, more low effort posts, less discussion in comment sections, lots of deleted comments and accounts... overall there just seems to be a dip in quality.
I was going to delete, but decided to stick around for a while first, to see how things pan out, and I've got to say the mobile site is even worse than expected. I get constant pop ups trying to direct me to download the app, then when I say no the website will auto reload, often sending me back to the top of the page. It's difficult to find and respond to anyone who replies to your comments, and sometimes if you sort by top: today it won't even show any posts. Just... blank. Clicking on a post opens it as a tab that is more like a popup, and closing it resets where you were on the page.
I could keep going but I think that pretty much summarizes what I've noticed. Don't know that it's directly related to a Lemmy "exodus," and I'm still finding my way around here so I can't really say, but reddit as we knew it seems pretty dead.
That’s actually what some of us were predicting would happen. We would expect a metric like “quality posts per user” to follow something like the 80:20 rule - 80% were created by 20% of the users. If those users and mods were skewed in the direction of the strongest detractors/leavers, you’d find the average quality would indeed go down.
Yeah, I got all my accounts permanently banned and the hacked app I was using was deauthorized. Tried using the mobile website and noticed all those problems also. Only use reddit now when it comes up in searches but I try to avoid it even then.
It may be my imagination but I think the quality of Reddit posts has severely gone down. There's also noticeably more nazi propaganda.
And bots.
Again, as long as we're being thoughtful and having fun here, people will come naturally.
Total agreement. I couldn't care less what happens to reddit; I didn't leave to try to "hurt it".
I just want somewhere with good discussion that lets me access it how I want and reddit isn't that anymore.
And Lemmy clearly has the potential to be that, so here I am.
I left and deleted my baconreader app. Haven't gone back since. And I used to spend about an hour a day on there.
read fourth word in title then google "anecdote"
No, of course not. If you're using Lemmy as a "protest" instead of thinking that it's a better platform, it's totally ineffectual and you'll go back to using Reddit sooner or later. Personally, I think that the fediverse is a more compelling idea than the traditional internet, so I'm sticking with Lemmy for a bit in one form or another.
I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to protest by using alternatives, and then going back if there's real change. (naïve, maybe)
Initially really wanted Reddit to take a hit so that they would be forced to reconsile, but I became disillusioned quite quickly. Compared to the fediverse, it is rotten; Spez is only the mouthpiece for their internal chess game.
He probably spoke the truth, when he claimed to previously having been the only one defending the third party apps.
Agreed, though these aren't mutually exclusive. Lemmy as it stands is objectively a better platform in terms of mobile user experience now that third party apps were gutted for Reddit. So switching, at least for itself, is a protest using this platform while Reddit either dies a slow, painful death or takes strides to unshittify their stuff. Will probably end up using both if Reddit gets it together but that's unlikely.
Honestly, yeah, a big part of why I started using Lemmy is that the Sync developer moved to developing a Lemmy app. I'm still active on Reddit, I'm using both, but as soon as Sync for Lemmy comes out and I can uninstall that absolutely cursed official Reddit app I'll be here WAY more often.
100%. Fediverse is my jam.
A mass exodus doesn't really happen in the traditional sense unless shit really hits the fan. For that to happen a large majority or even everyone has to be displaced at once and there can be no way to salvage the situation. In this case, there were a lot of short term ways out here for users not directly affected.
But, the whole situation is more akin to a war of attrition. The ones not convinced by the big things, will be convinced by the smaller things that accumulate over time. Goodwill for reddit is at an all time low, which hampers their ability to grow since word of mouth is effectively dead. People that provided effective labour for reddit in the form of moderation or content aggregation lost their morale to continue. Not all of them for sure, but it might very well be a critical mass (even if they didn't move to lemmy).
It's like a line of dominos increasing in size, if the ones that fell now were big enough to topple the next, eventually there will be a ripple effect. Eventually the quality of content goes down, the discourse turns stale and antagonistic, and communities fall apart. Only once the users who took the easy way out now realize that will they finally start the process of moving. And if reddit was doing so bad they had to make this move, I can only assume their future will be very grim indeed. The seed of destruction has been planted. (And if you want an example of that future, look at Twitter)
Whether or not that all actually happens, I'm not sure. I'd like to believe it will, but some people revel in their unreasonableness, and they're often the easiest to exploit for financial gain. I think the best thing is to stop looking back, and focus on what we have here and now. I think what lemmy has achieved so far is already more valuable than reddit had.
I think my only interest in Reddit now comes from a place of schadenfreude rather than any desire to go back there.
And every has now left twitter.
Long live X!
We came to Lemmy for our own benefit, not just to fuck with reddit. Who cares if it hurt them or not? We're better off without reddit, and that is all that matters.
This didn't happen quickly with Digg either. This won't be as substantially decimating to the platform as the Digg exodus was, because reddit is WAY bigger than Digg was.
I'd say it took me about 3-4 years to fully migrate away from Digg to reddit, and that process was very similar to today, where there were a ton of platforms gaining steam (even while it was pretty clear that reddit was where the party went).
I think reddit's quality of content will deteriorate over time, and the moderation will suffer. It is going to die a death of 1000 paper cuts. The API change was just reddit saying "Hey, come stab us with your paper knives!"
idk. Reddit in 15 years will probably look a lot like newspapers do today. Kind of a joke, but somehow still standing.
I think you are 100% right. This is a slow burn not something that will happen overnight.
And on top of that, it's good that it takes time. The fediverse is still maturing. The slow changeover gives the new people time to contribute and make the place beter, and build capability for when serious numbers start to migrate.
People can contribute ideas, feedback, code, money for server costs and obviously content so when there is a bigger exodus there's something here for new people to absorb.
This seems to me similar to what building dual power looks like, it's just this is the digital version. A single cataclysmic moment of rupture isn't a good thing unless there are structures in place strong enough to pick up the pieces.
Im working on a case study for a publishing firm about the whole API announcement and subsequent fallout so I've been watching all this really closely. The thing I'm most anxious for is the data on web traffic to reddit and it's competitors, which I can only get on a monthly basis. It dropped a lot from May to June, which you could attribute to the protest or even the summer. However, Discords traffic increased during that time, and it was the only major social platform to change in either direction. I'm hoping to get some clarity once July data comes out but I don't think we well know for sure about long term impact for a while. Reddit I'm sure knows more but definitely won't share it publicly unless necessary, like if they do go public, but I'm not sure that kind of data would be included in a filing.
(I tracked traffic on similarweb and Semrush. Lemmy is on there too, but is tracked per server, and most were tracked starting in may or June so data is pretty limited and can't really be compared.)
Is it possible thats it's because Discord spawned a lot of servers related to the protest? I'm currently in 4 different discords which are related to the protests one way or another (iirc i joined eaither end of May or early June) - i have never used discord this much. Or is there a different reason for the uptick?
Have they suffered at all? I think the answer is fairly obvious. You’re here, right? Would you be here if they hadn’t fucked around? I wouldn’t be here.
You know I haven't really thought of it that way. A huge problem with the way people are thinking is that we want to see the other side fail or be worse off. It doesn't really have to be like that, we can just make what we have better.
Although I gotta say, it is nice to have a service that your real life friends might use that you can discuss things with them. I find it kind of annoying sometimes that I have to explain everything that I use like the Fediverse or Matrix, or other services that I self host. But I guess that's a price you gotta pay for freedom.
The issue with that line of thinking is that it is either ignorant of or deliberately ignores the fact that Reddit actively undermines your ability to build community as you see fit. They don't view subreddits as communities, they view them as commodities, and their users are unpaid content producers that they are happy to steamroll over the moment your "contributions" don't exceed any impediments to monetization you may be causing.
Reddit is no longer an actually communal space. It's a virtual sweatshop for online content so Reddit Inc can monetize ads ads ads all over.
That means we need to build the communities we want to see somewhere else, like here. Which is what that poster was saying. Don't worry about what Reddit is doing, just build something new.
10% based on what?
Is there nowhere to see traffic to the site?
The people who don't care how it works and just wanted it to be a doomscroll content feed for them are a ton of the ones who got mad about the protest and are still there. It's noticably more repost bot content now. I decided to dip out cuz the content kept getting further and further from what I wanted to see anyway and then it was a sudden noticable decline.
Some of the larger subreddits shut down or turned into a John Oliver meme, one niche one I enjoyed is gone, the rest seem to be back to business as usual. At the moment? I'd say not much has changed.
Who cares, though? This isn't reddit, let's stop focusing on that and focus on Lemmy.
My most visited subreddits are dead because the mods basically went fuck off to the sunset. The rest has shown visible decline in the quality of the posts and discussion.
The only kind of subreddit that I didn't see a downturn in the quality is the parenting subreddits. However there's also been an uptick of negative kind of posting there too.
The content on Reddit has gotten noticeably worse - but less as a result of Lemmy's existence and more of a reaction to killing 3rd Party Apps.
Unfortunately for me, some of my favorite communities haven't migrated over to Lemmy. So I'm still using Old Reddit Desktop to access them.
The first two things I noticed were that the quality of content tanked (which was already the lowest I’d ever seen before that), and unvetted racism shot up. I still access Reddit on occasion for some small communities, but I use Dystopia so I don’t provide ad revenue and I just don’t interact anymore. It’s like the active/reasonable adults left and it’s mostly kids and bots left posting and commenting.
Yeah, the comments went from jokes and memes to super aggressive threads almost instantly. Kinda crazy to see it exposed like that.
I got a lot of people from the r/place Fuck Spez movement to switch over. I also got really enlightening advice from one of our supporters. They told me that people will come over once we become easy to use and well established, which we're nearing but not there yet.
With all the third party apps we have gotten like Liftoff and Voyager, things have been a lot more accessible. However, we still have lots of work to do.
Until we become easy enough to use that you feel comfortable telling your family members to sign up and they use it without assistance, we will primarily be a community of tech savvy individuals.
As long as it doesn't end up with a bunch of bad actors leaving reddit for here and bringing their shit with them, making this place as bad as reddit has become.
It will. I think it's inevitable, unless Lemmy development starts focusing on automated mod tools as soon as possible. You don't want to deal with hundreds of thousand of users without a good content filter, it's basically impossible. And it will be even harder due to the federated nature, since it's easier to sneak unmoderated content into the network.
We'll be fine as long as there isn't corporate or financial interests. More humans of all kinds is fine. Making Mastadon and Lemmy unfriendly place for "profit", (marketing and advertising) means that greed won't drive people's behaviour. Greed for clout is still greed.
I hope more center and right wing people will come so conversations become more interesting.
There are some UI issues like clicking see context brings you to an actual foreign Lemmy where you aren't logged in, that for example is a problem. What's nice though is that Lemmy seems to do great with pulling federated content from other servers unlike mastodon.
I hope to donate some time to the web apps/phone apps/servers for both lemmy and mastodon in the months coming to fix these things. It should squash a lot of problems I'm running into.
The subreddits I watched seem to be as busy as they always were, and the corresponding communities on Lemmy are mostly devoid of activity. Frustratingly, I'm still getting reddit links from my friend, which I leave unopened. Maybe Reddit took a hit in terms of users and post quality, but I'm growing increasingly skeptical that a mass migration is going to happen.
The confusing nature of the fediverse isn't going to help either.
I don't even know what it is! I just like that it's less toxic than Reddit
I found a large amount of the developer / programming reddits died, so I noticed a large difference but a lot of other subs there has been no change so it depends on what you are in.
Reddit is like World of Warcraft, the only thing that can kill it is itself.
its trying really hard tho
Steve Huffman has helped me cut down on my time on social media, and even screentime in general. Because I left the platform that I used so much because of one stupid decision he made.
I can now start my sand grain collection thanks to him.
Start with construction sand. The cartels are already moving in on that stuff. ;)
I don't think any platform collapses overnight. What you have to do is do is make something "better" and engage in a campaign of attrition to get people to move over. Produce content that other visitors see and like. Submit links to that content to aggregators (e.g. Slashdot / Fark etc.). Even start submitting links on Reddit that lead over to Lemmy and so on.
Make Lemmy feel as normal as Reddit. People will get used to the interface, the quirks and perhaps stay. Every person who stays is one less for Reddit. Now "better" is doing some heavy lifting since Lemmy has some advantages (ad free, federated) and some disadvantages (inline media & limits, sign up confusion, app). The disadvantages need to be addressed and the advantages need to be made stronger.
Maybe some are waiting for Boost or other 3rd party apps but there will likely not be a super big number coming over. Apparently doom scrolling is preferred for a large swath of Gen Zers
Need to focus on improving these communities and being active/creative especially in building niche communities on Lemmy.
I see so many communities created with just a link or two posted weekly by community creator. That kind of activity gives Lemmy a bad look.
Definitely agree on your last point. When I see a community like this, I try to report it to the admins, because indeed, it gives a bad look.
Personally I could have lived with the ads but the quality of the subs I followed dipped massively after the mods left or were forced out. The people who left may have been fewer than expected they were the ones creating the decent content and most importantly keeping the worst of the bots at bay.
Hell, I would even have accepted a subscription to be able to use Boost; and I hate subscription based services.
They had opportunity to earn a lot of money and not alienate their users. With profit from 3party apps and companies using reddit for AI data. With realistic pricing.
But Spez (Fuck u), acted like a spoiled vendictive little brat and burned everything down, because of his fragile ego.
Just take a look at the mail and phone conversation, and subsequent lies about what was said; between Spez and the Apollo developer. To see I'm not making this up.
I deleted my account. That probably showed 'em.
I wiped my history and got banned from half my subs for using a script to do it. I keep it for local use only, all those bans just make it easier to stay strong and not leave my local shiz 😂
only thing i cant stand about lemmy is trying to understand what the fuck it is and how it works.
some top post about a “sub”? “lemmy place”? idk what to call it, “defederating from us”. does that mean from all lemmy things, that lemmy thing? what does it mean to defederate? is there an easy way to browse for subs like reddit?
All the Lemmy (and Kbin) servers (instances) can theoretically talk to each other. You can follow communities on other instances and comment and post like you are used to.
You could think of each server as an independent city-state, each with it's own leaders, customs and citizens.
If two instances have a feud that can't be resolved, they will "defederate" and then their users will no longer be able to contact each other.
There are Nazi instances here in the Fediverse (for example), but they get blocked on sight so you almost never see their garbage in the feeds.
Does that help?
Yes thank you very much
Gonna give it a shot, so you know how there is reddit and it has communities and those communities have posts which have comments etc. Now imagine there are 2 reddits, Addit and Bddit both are exactly same in infrastructure/software stuff but obviously different users, communities and content but since the infrastructure is the same, both Addit and Bddit decided that it would be cool if user@addit could interact and do reddit stuff on Bddit and vice versa. The software that does this is lemmy, anyone can make a reddit like website with this and all users of that website will be able to interact with every other lemmy website. So lemmy is a group pf reddit. Now as you can imagine, website owner can decide which other website can interact with their website, this interaction is called "federating" so defederation means that blocking a certain website (also reffered as lemmy instance), as an example, addit could block bddit or vice versa so users of addit can not interact with bddit.
Now the concept of fediverse is also similar, in that case fediverse is a goup of fedi services, think a group of lemmy like services where each service has a group of websites/instances. This is possible because most of these services have similar things inside them, like each will have users, posts, comments etc so user@lemmy_instance@lemmy can interact with user@mastodon_instance@mastodon. All this is govern by ActivityProtocol. Honestly i don't know to what extent these interactions are possible.
Sooooo in short lemmy= network/group of reddit like websites Fediverse= network/group of lemmy like services
You should consider your account as a passport. The instance/country delivering you the passport is important, since it gives you permissions/visas. If everyone in your instance is behaving like shit, your instance will be defederated and you'll loose permissions/visas to be able to browse other instances.
is there an easy way to browse for subs like reddit?
The whole obcession with Reddit is getting a little too much and continuing it is maybe a bit immature.
I mean, I get it: I've left a couple of jobs during my career (now spanning over 2 decades) because they did some pretty asshole things and I had a choice to move to better pastures, yet after leaving I still had a strong want for them to somehow be screwed for being assholes, kept wanting to know how things were back there and would've been happy if I found out they did go somehow screwed.
So it is understandable, IMHO.
However there comes a point when you gotta mentally go "I'm in a better situation now and they don't matter to it, so there's no point in wasting any energy on them" and stop looking back.
Sure, feel free to tell others about Lemmy (for said others rather than because of Reddit), but stop wondering about Reddit.
PS: I wrote "immature" because as I grew older it just became easier to turn another leaf and getting over the "old place", so I reckon it's maturity, but maybe it's just me.
The reason it matters what's happening with reddit is the network effect. Social media is a natural monopoly, and it seems to me that in general there is only one major platform for each type of content at any given time. Recently sites like reddit for link aggregation, facebook for I guess interpersonal groups, and twitter for microblogging have been those major platforms.
They are taking huge hits lately, and if users migrate to the fediverse in enough volume, then they can be displaced permanently. Prople shifted from digg to reddit in a similar scandal years ago.
Now, whether the fediverse will reach that critical mass remains to be seen, but I hope it does because it represents a more open and stable alternative that fundamentally can't be toppled by a single bad actor, unlike literally every centralised corporate platform out there. It has the potential to become an actual public town square like the internet seemed to promise decades ago. It might actually be in a position to topple the corporate monopolisation of our information ecosystem, and that's a huge deal.
And the capacity for federation between the different types of social media offers the possibility that once the fediverse gets big enough it can extend that network effect across the different types and displace all corporate social media. Like at the moment peertube isn't huge partly because the server costs to grow to rival youtube are enormous. But if the fediverse becomes big enough, who knows? Maybe it will be in a position to take over as the main video sharing platform on the internet. We could say goodbye to all the youtube drama that impacts video creators today.
So that's why it matters. Reddit isn't just a bad boss or an ex, they are a mafia controlling a large piece of territory, and whether we can push them out impacts our network and a lot more besides.
The unwinding of network effects in Reddit or starting of a networking effects positive feedback cycle in Lemmy is only important if you believe that having a massive number of user (not just tens or hundreds of thousands of people, rather tens of millions or more) like Reddit is a good thing.
I'm not so sure of that.
Was it really so great when your voice was drowned in an ocean on voices, you would never see the vast majority of stuff written by others because there was just so much stuff there and you spent most of your time wading through mud to find a few gems here and there?
Personally, I'm fine with the size the Fediverse has and it having a more natural growth rate.
Lemmy feels a lot like the old days in places like Usenet rather than the cacophony of modern for-profit social media (except perhaps the politics forums here, which are often tribalist rage-wars) and personally I like it.
I didnt even move over because of the Reddit API changes per-se (which didn't affect me at all) - I just tried Lemmy out when the demonstration took of in Reddit, tought "this is nice" and simply stayed and didn't went back to Reddit (it was a surprisingly clean cut, so I suspect I didn't feel satisfied there).
So far my experience on lemmy has been users talking about how much they hate reddit and how awesome lemmy is, and shitty awful lemmy users being shitty and awful to me. I'm pretty unimpressed so far.
I am sorry to hear that
Yeah, it's happening to me too now sadly. Also I saw your post that was downvoted and I honestly do not get why it was, it couldn't have been more positive a message
Well, I'm glad you're here. I don't see the same level of shitty users that you have on here but that's really because I don't participate very much because of how I was treated on Reddit, so for me it's like a social conditioning based on always having the "wrong opinion" relative to the hivemind.
I wish they weren't shitty and awful to you, when I read your comments and saw the downvotes, it looks like you fell into a case of not following the community's populist opinion. You got downvoted the hell out of, but nobody wanted to really engage or talk to you about it. I'm so glad there's no karma here at least.
Just the fact that you can browse Lemmy without seeing advertisements is really nice.
Still, the systems depends on the will of individuals to maintain servers and it’s a bit scary to know that an instance could be gone in an instant if the maintainer doesn’t want to pay for electricity anymore.