I guess it’s self explanatory but I keep seeing all this stuff about how everyone is moving from Reddit to lemmy and I’m wondering if anyone knows if that’s really what’s happening. If you have numbers that’s even better.
Thanks!
I joined right around the blackout, and the amount of content, especially content I enjoy has increased considerably. Everytime I open the app there are new things to read, which definitely wasn’t the case a month ago.
So mass exodus, nah, even if every new user of Lemmy, Kbin and all the other alternatives left Reddit completely we’re a single digit percentage at most. But mass adoption, definitely. With the smaller user base pre-apiexit its much easier to notice all the new contributing users.
It has been an absolute gift to be part of and watching that/this growth. Seeing posts on a new platform go from something like 10/day to the, now, probably, hundreds, if not thousands per day.
I remember in late May/early June this year (2023, when this place really came alive, for archival sake), seeing the posts on Reddit about the ACTUAL api changes, then that evolving into a bit of vocal protest, which surprisingly evolved into an ACTUAL protest with a lot more information why. It was the last straw for me. Everything the world has shit on me and my generation and lifetime, all of it from selfishness and ignorance and greed. Then musk bought Twitter and immediately drove it face first into the ground at high speed and got support by most of the worst demographics on the face of the planet - and I didn’t even care about Twitter. But, a long-standing media giant, brought down by a billionaire simply because he had the money? It was if all of our intuitive fears about the world being awful just came true in real time, over, and over, and over, and over. The past fifteen years have been so bad, it’s actually insane, and it’s nuts to think that it can still be way way worse.
And then along came this dried out, greedy ass, shameless, two faced, wannabe psychopath who IDOLIZED Musk, Hoffman/spez, and just shits in the faces of everybody on Reddit that ever cared about anything. The very people trying to make the world a better place at least for a little while, pleading with him not to be THAT greedy and shitty. And he just spread open his wonderbread buttcheeks, stared us all in the eyes, looked away, smiled into a mirror, and blasted out what was left of his rotten, liquefied spine. RIP Aaron.
Everybody saw it coming, yet we were still all shocked at how blatantly greedy and manipulative every single event was. Now, he’s just trying to wait it out and let it quiet down.
I’m still convinced this or an evolution of this will be Web3.0. The evolution past megacorps as a result of direct abuse of power, anti-competitive and other dark behaviors, anti privacy, ultra-rich maximizations of profits, and late stage capitalism. Decentralization and a reinvigoration and re-emphasis on integrity and quality, put truly into the hands of the users by stripping abilities of people like musk to literally capitalize on and destroy is hugely paramount in the next step. We all want it, the world needs it, and maybe the Fediverse is it. Maybe, maybe not. It feels like the right direction and I’ve had enough bullshit to know it.
No and no, it’s just hype IMO. But the trickle of new users seems sufficient to make Lemmy a more interesting place to be and a more viable platform long term. That’s already quite good if you ask me.
I seriously doubt reddit has seen any significant drop in traffic or unique visitors. Looking back at some of the subs I frequented, they’re all business as usual. The mods all backed down the second that they had their mod status threatened, as expected. Almost all of the users I saw that said they were leaving on July 1 when their 3rd party app stopped working are still there.
I deleted my account and moved here, as clearly a lot of people did, but it’s a drop in the ocean and that’s not even to say that the people that moved here have stopped using reddit.
I used RedReader which got an exemption, so it still works. So I still use it because I enjoy talking to people on Reddit despite the bad behaviour from the admins, and they don’t make any money off me so who cares. The day I’ll leave is the day they force me to use their unusable app (and when your non-tech buddy tells you he uses Reddit in desktop mode on mobile Firefox, you know it’s bad)
I’ve been using both services as there’s way more news and discussion on Reddit but Lemmy is improving rapidly. I do think Reddit has shot themselves in the foot by restricting NSFW subs to logged in / official app only though. I honestly expected this would result in a ton of content moving to Lemmy but that doesn’t seem to have been the case so far.
I think Lemmy’s biggest issue is community discovery on federated instances. Lots of active communities don’t show up unless explicitly requested on your own instance, and that’s going to confuse a lot of new users.
I said I was gonna delete my account and some jackasses summoned RemindMe bot to keep me honest lol.
But I deleted both my active accounts because I’m a person of my word.
I consider it a win nontheless, people like me or you, who were actively engaged on reddit and did “what felt right” (deleting comments and leaving reddit) are probably the kind of people that might make for good conversation and good content (be it links to cool stuff, art, or just rants).
We might get some “bad apples” (trolls, botters, and such), but all in all, I see it as a far healthier alternative to grow gradually from a core of users that was either here from the start, or that moved to the Fediverse to take back a bit of the “old web” feel, where people come together to share cool stuff and ideas.
RIP Aaron Swartz, we’ll keep the old reddit spirit here on Lemmy.
I can say that since Joey shut down my reddit use has dropped 95% at least. I hardly looked at reddit on the computer unless I was searching for an answer to something. I tried the reddit app, it runs like ass on my phone so I’m pretty much done spending time on that site unless I’ve googled something and the answer is in a reddit thread.
I’m not catholic so technically
Oh and if people are also going elsewhere, where else are people going? (ie not lemmy)
If not lemmy, they are probably going to Mastodon, as it is an open source Twitter alternative.
That makes sense. Thanks!
Some are going to Tildes, although they remain invite only
Oh I hadn’t heard of Tildes. I’ll have to poke around and see what it’s all about. Thanks!
There’s kbin, which is similar to lemmy, but not the same. They’ve picked up a decent number of users.
There’s others too, but none that have really boomed the way lemmy and kbin have.
Fwiw, if you go to most of the more casual subs, particularly the meme/image based ones, probably won’t notice the lost users from reddit because most of those were already swamped with reposts via bots and karma whores. But if you were into the useful side of reddit, there’s a difference in quality and tone. A shit ton of the exodus was not only power users, but mods.
As much shit as mods get, they really are what keeps any forum from devolving into chaos and stupidity. It doesn’t matter how “power mad” people think they are, what matters is that they put the time in to keep a given forum in a reliable state. The reliability is what left with the exodus.
Moderating a forum is a skill, not an inborn talent. It takes time to develop, and by the time the mods lost from there are replaced, and they get up to speed, it’s months at least before they can start rebuilding the culture of a given forum. Even an experienced mod can take weeks to months to adapt to the culture of a given forum, assuming they don’t make the mistake of trying to force a change.
Reddit straight up killed a lot of tools as well. The bot defense bot is essentially dead. That isn’t something that can be replaced in the time the folks running it have given before they pull the plug all the way. Toolbox is alive, but lost the lead developer, and if it goes, moderating there becomes a major pain in the ass. I still keep an eye on a small handful of subs that aren’t duplicated in some form elsewhere, via things like geddit and stealth, that are having major bot issues, and they aren’t really mainstream. I can’t imagine what the big subs are like in that regard now.
Reddit isn’t going to “die”, not soon. But, as often has been said when this comes up, the reddit we knew and loved is already dead. It’s gone, and not coming back.
If people say lemmy, I just mentally include kbin. Because by and large they don’t realise people on kbin are reading and replying to their comments and probably don’t realise it’s not all just lemmy. It’s just see lemmy as threadiverse for most purposes.
There clearly is not. Even people on here, who say they “quit” Reddit, often go on to say “I only go on it now for this one subreddit” or “I only go on it to check news” etc. Spez bet that people would either not care about him shitting all over the Reddit community for profit, or be too addicted to Reddit to actually do anything about it. And he was right.
These predictions that Reddit will collapse because the “power users” have left are ridiculous. It’s not difficult to find recycled trash on the internet to shitpost on Reddit. Hell, bots can do it, and have been. People just want garbage to mindlessly scroll through and leave their dumb comments on (“user name checks out, har har”).
I will personally never use Reddit as long as it’s run my Spez (or any other equivalent asshole), but it’s quite clear that they’ve survived this API debacle just fine.
It’s the same with Facebook. People are so addicted to it that no matter how badly they are treated they just can’t quit. No matter the evidence repeatedly presented with just how evil FB is, I have still never convinced a family member to get off it. At this point I just will have to be satisfied with them never referencing me or having any pictures of me on it. Reddit is the same, but not as extreme.
It’s the same with Facebook. People are so addicted to it that no matter how badly they are treated they just can’t quit.
Facebook is a very different beast. It exists and thrives because it convinced people to engage personally. It’s difficult to leave Facebook because family and friends are there. And Facebook also bought a lot of the competition and branched out: Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. It also has value to businesses, it has a market place, it truly is a monster.
Reddit has nothing. It doesn’t know its users and most of them are really careful to keep anonymous. It has shared interests communities, but not friendships/personal relationships. It’s really easy to quit Reddit if one decides to. It does not affect daily life.
Cutting back your engagement from 30h a week to 30m is a huge shot against Reddit tho.
I kept my account alive but now only follow a handful of subs and am finding alternatives weekly. Discord. Lemmy.
This all results in a huge loss for Reddit because no one’s there for the ads or promoted posts. And that’s all they’ll have left after a while. And that’s not enough to attract a real base. Reddit won’t die overnight but look at what one fatal move did to Tumblr (when they banned porn). It tanked the site so hard that it’s losing money daily now. A stark contrast from when it sold for billions.
Corporations are far too flippant in thinking they are indestructible. And how they handled the API changes tells you that, like Tumblr, they made a serious mistake.
True. But, the power users leaving will likely have a long term impact.
The thing that set Reddit apart from all the other spaces to settle down on the internet was that Reddit’s users made it work, not Reddit.
They had their faults; moderation wasn’t perfect. But, it was good in the places it needed to be. Reddit was also very good at attracting “experts” in niche topics. You could reliably trust askscience, askhistorians, whatisthisbug, etc.
Reddit has plenty of memes, porn and funny cats to attract the masses, but it was the power users that made Reddit what it was.
On top of that, Reddit was so customizable because of all the 3rd party apps that had polish. Apollo, BaconReader, etc., no ads and lots of options to choose from to suit your needs.
Good points, I guess time will tell if enough people with enough significance left (or will leave). I just don’t think so, unfortunately. But hopefully.
It’s not a mass exodus. There was a sizeable influx of people from Reddit to Lemmy/kbin, sure, but that’s measured in the (low) hundreds of thousands. Reddit has hundreds of millions of active users.
The reality is it’s not even close to a mass exodus, not yet.
The Great Digg Migration was way bigger and Digg was never the same after that. If Lemmy gets a couple more big waves from Reddit, it could mean the end for Reddit as it currently is.
I still pop into reddit (with UBO) and r/all has certainly seen a massive shift since the onset of the protest
While true, I would like to point out who is leaving: The vocal community.
When you see a reddit post and it has 1000 Upvotes and 50 comments, than this means that a couple thousand people saw it, over 1000 votes on it (up and down) and 50 made a comment, and some even commented on a comment. Most people are lurker and are just passive and enjoy the contribution by OP posting it, people curating it by voting for it and giving the topic traction by commenting on it (maybe even provoking another thread of the same topic or adding another thought in another post in the next hours/days or turning it into a meme).
The people, who are leaving - as far I as I see it - are the vocal active people. Not the lurker. So it might not be a mass exodus, but those who are active and vocal about their unhappiness and who are actively searching for alternatives and are now here on Lemmy, are the heart of the buzzing culture of reddit. Those are the ones who bring in new posts, vote actively and comment massively. Not the lurker. So who is left behind on reddit is mostly lurker who are now missing a good part of the active community who commented and voted for them. And I think this is visible on reddit and can accelerate reddits decline.
Its not the mass of the people that is important, but the engaging force that is driving the discourse in a community by being active and vocal.
And I think Lemmy got a good heap of those people.
Well said. Even dome Reddit lurkers said they would comment here to help grow the communities more.
Cool, thanks. I had suspected as much, good to have it confirmed.
White the absolute numbers aren’t so huge, it’s more about the kind of people who are leaving Reddit. Many if those are former mods or people who create a lot if content. I do think this will lead to an appreciable lots in overall quality of Reddit. Not that the quality they’re had been anything to write home about. But the downward trajectory continues.
Yeah, but a sizeable increase is still very important. These days, Mastodon, Lemmy and so on have decently sized communities everywhere so that you don’t feel like just talking to yourself and a couple of friends anymore. And that’s kind of a tipping point.
“Mass migrations” happen slowly, anyway. A lot of people are very hesitant to leave big social hubs just because of the value there is in having so many people around. But in the end, you have to. We can’t stay on these proprietary social networks forever. Social networks and communication channels in general need to be non-proprietary, decentralized and open, without the ability of companies manipulating what you see and don’t see. And without risk of losing everything when the one big company falls. It’s a fundamental problem of all proprietary social networks.
I doubt Reddit has hundreds of millions. For ‘big social media’, Reddit was pretty niche until recently. I’d be surprised if they had more than a hundred million.
But that aside, the users that are leaving Reddit are their most important ones. Mods and the people who spent the most time on Reddit. This definitely has the the potential to cause substantial harm to the platform.
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Probably 50 million users and 50 million alt accounts to look at porn.
We could get many users providing useful content thats why I recommend checking out these subs:
Fix problems and errors [email protected]
Find the best products by Lemmy users reviews [email protected]
Find the best software options [email protected]
And more (if you know more I will edit to add them)
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Reddit lost it’s content creators to lemmy so you can expect a sharp decline going forward at reddit.
Not even close is right. As of May, Reddit had 2.02B Monthly views. I don’t think lemmy or mastodon come close to crack the top 10 yet
How many of those only scroll?
It currently feels like a big discord where we might actually get to know the names of some people we interact with - in 12 years on Reddit I don’t think I ever remembered a particular person besides maybe a couple hyper posting mods.
That was the joy of forums back in the day.
If lemmy makes the icons a bit bigger it’ll really be a throwback. It’s easier to remember icons than it is names.
Oh yeah, avatars. That’s what’s missing from Voyager. Man, I want those.
Maybe it’s because I was on RIF that I didn’t make these icon connections
That said it’s going to be like 10000 active users vs reddits millions so people will bump into each other more often.
Also man how disheartening was it when you had a good response to a good AskReddit but you were reply number 75,000 and you knew no one would ever see it?
And yes I think a lot of the reddit refugees might be people were tired of all different kinds of things on reddit. It’s too big and then oddly not busy enough? If you comment on a big thread odds are no one will even read it, but if you post in a small sub it may be days before anyone responds.
I literally just came across your post on Hot and thought hey I recognize that name so maybe names will work.
Not me. I think even on Lemmy, my neurodivergent brain will have forgotten your name by the time I’m done writing this comment. Farewell, @[email protected]: every one of the five seconds I knew you was a goddamn honor.
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I don’t see how Lemmy is any different than Reddit in this situation though. Is it simply hecause it is smaller that you think people will get to know each other more?
I have fond memories of being part of a car forum years back and actually meeting some of the guys from that community. We had garage days where we’d meet up at one of the people’s houses amd work on our cars there. We’d have a c4uise night and then hit up a local restaurant. It really helped foster a community spirit.
That was an impossibility on Reddit.
I unfortunately don’t think that would be feasible on Lemmy either.
You’re probably right but I’m banking on instances providing a more neighbourly experience since Local is still mainly for the people who have accounts with that instance.
I’m excited for us all to be real people again
Just #fuckswithducks and #shittymorph for me
If you have numbers that’s even better.
Here I am. Hope it quells your concerns friend.
I still use Reddit on the computer but most of my mobile use is gone.
Same here, for the most part. I have an app called Stealth (Android) that allows you to browse Reddit without logging in and I use it occasionally to browse some subreddits that do not have a Lemmy equivalent yet.
My opinion is that if you give a shit about how and where you spend your time, you will not support a platform run by and inhabited by dickheads.
Vote with your feet, or thumbs in this case.
Not a mass exodus. Call it a brain drain, if you will. The churn includes those who posted or were moderators. Since those who stayed are directly or indirectly supporting practices that most of us find unacceptable, Reddit will probably forever have that sour taste. It will gradually turn into a pale reminder of what it once was, and it will lose its spark. The sheer volume, quality, and length of posts in the Fediverse is indicative of new user profiles. I am so glad I took the plunge!
Much better choice of words - and as the intelligent conversation and content creation shifts services, eventually there will be a tipping point.
Not a mass exodus. Call it a brain drain, if you will. The churn includes those who posted or were moderators.
That’s key, it’s quality over quantity. Those who put a lot into Reddit were also going to be those disproportionately hit by the API changes. Enough of them make the jump and it degrades the quality of Reddit and his a big effect on Lemmy and the alternatives. By the next time Reddit messes up, and they will, the next batch of escapees will find a much more fleshed out set of alternatives, which will make leaving there and staying here easier. Rinse, wash and repeat.
We’ll never get the absolute numbers Reddit has but that’s the kind of aim of a corporate entity that wants to grab as many eyeballs as possible so they can mine the data and serve ads. That’s not what the Fediverse is about. All it really needs is the critical mass of people to make it viable and I think we’re already there.
By the next time Reddit messes up, and they will, the next batch of escapees will find a much more fleshed out set of alternatives, which will make leaving there and staying here easier. Rinse, wash and repeat.
I don’t think that even matters from a business point of view. Even if people aren’t leaving, the problem is that Reddit is not a place new people see as valuable after all the bad press. If they don’t grow, they fail.
I deleted 14 years of posts and 2 weeks later they banned me for a non-existent TOS violation weeks after the post in question was overwritten with a single letter then deleted.
So, ya, People are going to be looking for a replacement. reddit can go suck a failed ipo.
Reddit has been dying for a while.
Subreddits like AskScience, that it was famous for, are now shells of what they were because the real scientists who put serious time into that subreddit decided they were done wasting that time. This situation is at least a year old, it predates the protest.
You can see this same dynamic across the site. Places that were once vibrant are slowing down, the flood of posts becoming a trickle. Bots are making most of the posts on big subs. Smaller subs that used to hop with human posts are where you can see the truth. It’s not normal for a sub with 500k subscribers to see 10 posts in a week. You see that more often, now.
The truth is that Reddit was always small potatoes. It feels like a big deal when you’re there, but it’s not. The real user numbers are on TikTok, and Instagram, who each have up to a billion users depending on where you get a number. Reddit is barely there, as social media rankings go. There are people with more views on a YouTube video than Reddit has users. Reddit is an also-ran social media site. It’s really not a competitor. It’s just easy to steal from, because text.
Reddit has long had a bad reputation as a shitty, toxic place. Habitual Redditors don’t know this, not really, you have to talk to outsiders. People aren’t that interested in coming to Reddit, they just want answers to their Google searches. It’s not a recipe for growth.
Now the true power users, who provide those answers, are moving away from both Reddit and Google, speaking of a company who best watch its step. A lot of people are starting to talk about Google search the way they talked about Reddit search, which never did get good.
Reddit doesn’t have that far to fall, is what I’m saying. There isn’t a mass exodus, though. You’re seeing a late spasm from a steady tide that has been going out for years. 10 years is a looooong fuckin time for a social platform to be around, they start to rot after the first or second year. Reddit has been rotten for some time.
I see a lot of people, here, and elsewhere, trying to act dismissive about the protests, or about how important the moderators were, but the site’s entire business model depended on hundreds, even thousands of people doing a ton of real labor for absolutely free. If they’ve decided to take an “everyone’s replaceable” attitude and treat volunteers like employees, they’ll pay. It’ll be their IPO sagging down to a couple dollars as they limp to bankruptcy, or purchase, but they’ll pay. I swear I’ll have to buy a couple shares as a collectible.
I’m putting it down as yet another well-earned reminder that you have no business building anything that matters to you on a platform that other people own, it is worth the five minutes a day that it takes to post on it, and no more.
Do not make a job of it, ever, unless that job pays you and pays you so well that people think that you’re really a stripper and your job title is just a cover story. “Social Media Manager”, gotta be code for OF, bro.
That’s how much money you should be making doing labor for a multimillion-dollar corporation. It was fuckin Conde Nast for a hot minute. If the boss can just take your mod and your community away, then you only ever worked there, for free. You were never building a community, you were building their property, for free. You have to stop doing that, and you have to stop presenting it as a virtuous act, unless some fundamental things change.
If you’re going to put a lot of work in for your own reasons, then you owe it to yourself to do it under your own control, or not at all.
I see an opportunity on the Fediverse to start from the old model of internetting and jump off to something new that just looks old, where it makes sense to put that work in, but for now it is what it is.
Reddit still lives, like Theoden cobwebbed in his throne, but nobody will come and banish Wormtongue. It’s still gonna take years for that old man to die.
Fuckin Yahoo isn’t anywhere close to dead. Neither is Digg. Well, maybe Digg.
The thing we North Americans are always a bit too arrogant about is if Reddit somehow gets big in India, or Brazil, then they don’t need us, and we’ll never know because we don’t speak the language. So it’s gonna take time for Reddit to fuck that up, they got options.
But don’t be too dismissive about the idea of “mass exodus”. Digg lost most of its userbase, literally overnight, and it was because of shitty ads. If the only app you can use now is the app that sucks and serves lots of shitty ads in your face, that will do it. People aren’t that habitual. It is very, very easy to leave a social site.
I quit TikTok over one shitty post that was my last straw, you just delete the app and forget about it. Yet TikTok is social media heroin. Reddit is a bunch of dudes yelling about shit that isn’t worth yelling about. It is much easier to quit. The phone app era means once you delete, it’s gone, and it helps to break the cycle. It can and probably will happen, 90% of the remaining users will drop it like it’s covered in bedbugs, they just have to stick huge unskippable ads in everyone’s face, and they’re fucked.
I just don’t think that is going to make the splash you’d expect.
But no, no mass exodus, not yet. I’d keep the popcorn bowl close by if I were you, though. I will not put it past them to turn an IPO into a fail state.
Not sure what subs you visit but this is not at all representative of my experience. Subs are as busy as they’ve ever been, so much so I hardly bother commenting to just disappear into the noise.
I think the idea of all the content as their property is what’s fucked up to begin with. Legally, now, that would arguably be the case, but that shouldn’t be the case. It’s a body of knowledge constructed by millions of people and the legal system’s attitude should be that Reddit the company can fuck off if they just want to exploit it. Their role is to facilitate and foster that platform, not to seek the biggest payday that can get out of it. Same as the many people running Lemmy instances now. Law’s basis is in benefit to humanity and what’s happening with these corporate social media platforms does not benefit humanity.
I doubt a “mass exodus”, most people probably stayed and it will take time before there’s a mass exodus from the platform. As apparent as it is to many of us that Reddit has gone to shit, for the vast majority of users, they just saw it as another meme-able moment, just another one of those reddit dramas that flares up and dies down eventually in time fort he next trend to hit.
For them though, maybe it’s died down already and it’s back to business as usual, maybe not, but the casual users aren’t going to see the true effects for some time I think. As a lack of moderation, a lack of content, an increase in bots, spam, and extremism start to take hold on the platform, users will start to realize that something is not quite right, it’s not the same reddit it used to be. They’ll start to get an inkling of what we’ve already seen and maybe at that point they’ll start branching out to Lemmy or some other platform. This may cause Reddit, the company, to start acting out in desperation to try to keep users from leaving and/or protect its potential profits, which may in turn cause a feedback loop wherein more users leave and Reddit gets stupider and stupider (similar to what we’re currently seeing with Twitter). It’ll be awhile before there’s a true mass exodus from the site.
