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…
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…
I wouldn’t be surprised if Lemmy got a large bump over the last few weeks, but with how many issues there are on Lemmy in terms of the servers going down and such, I wouldn’t be surprised if the daily number of visitors here levels off and possibly even starts to decrease as users get tired of this.
Heck, just to post this comment took about 2 hours to on and off servers showing as being down. I can understand some growing pains as the site grows, but many users won’t.
Hello,
As a suggestion, you might want to try another instance less popular than lemmy.world. I had the same issues a few weeks ago, and then created a few accounts on other instances, that way I’m always safe.
I don’t know how I would do that. Would I need to start a whole new account? And which instance do you pick? That part of this Lemmy thing is rather confusing as to why or where or who about instances.
That’s okay. I can help. First of all, it’s really fine to stay on LW for now, no need to rush anything. But if at some point you have some time for this, then read the following.
So, to pick your instance, you can have a look at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, filter by “1m” to see what are the most popular ones. As you can see, with a 27433 monthly users, Lemmy.world is by far the most popular, which is why you might experience some issues from time to time.
You should have a look at the next instances on the list. Short story: lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.one, sopuli.xyz and reddthat.com are solid choices.
You are looking at instances with quite a lot of people (the more people help with filling your “All” feed), just not the most populous one (lemmy.world), the original one (lemmy.ml), and instances that are too specific, either due to country or specific focus.
Long story:
spoiler
- lemmy.ml is the original insance, also quite crowded, not really the best choice
- lemm.ee can be nice, you can have a look at it and see how fast it is for you. The admin communicates a lot and is very helpful.
- sh.itjust.works had some rough time in the last few days. You might also not like the name, that’s okay.
- beehaw.org does not federate with the big instances, so if you go there, you will be in their own space. It can a valid choice, but please have a look at their guidelines first, they tend to moderate a lot. Can work for you, or not.
- feddit.de, lemmy.ca, discuss.tchncs.de, feddit.uk, aussie.zone are country specific instances, so probably not interesting to you if you are not from there
- lemmynsfw is a NSFW instance, probably not the one you want to move to
- programming.dev is an instance focused on programming
- lemmy.blahaj.zone is a pro queer instance
.
To migrate your settings (including subscriptions and blocked instances), you can use that script: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
What’s going on with sh.itjust.works lately? I joined a small instance so I’m out of the loop.
They have been down a few times. You can have a look at their main community to see what happened, or [email protected]
I don’t miss reddit, only use it when I need tech advice and cannot find it elsewhere
I really don’t care about reddit anymore. I pretty happy with Lemmy right now.
Still seem like the same amount of people over there. I really haven’t noticed much, other than a lot less dissenting opinions as far as ideology goes. Admittedly, reddit stopped being a regular thing for me, as my political leanings differ from most of the users there. I’d rather walk around dog shit than willfully stepping in it. My work also has picked up and I’ve found other things to occupy my time.
There are small subreddits that are definitively private now. But only very small ones.
People don’t like change, and most have extremely short memories. I doubt Reddit will see any major loss and will back to business as usual very soon if they are not already.
removed by mod
Digg and MySpace were behemoths once too. So was Yahoo.
deleted by creator
Reddit is like World of Warcraft, the only thing that can kill it is itself.
its trying really hard tho
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.
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.
Lemmy has definitely “scratched” 100k https://the-federation.info/platform/73
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.
Generally I agree with you, but let me steelman a different argument. It feels to me like we are in the early stages of another digital renaissance like the one that happened during the rise of Reddit & Facebook. I remember that time well as I was just starting high school, and Reddit opened an entirely new world for me after leaving Digg. It felt like where all the cool kids hung out if you will. There was this wealth of information, discussion, political discourse, and it scratched the itch that ultimately formed a lot of who I am today.
It has always been the visionaries who are then backed by the early adopters that form internet culture. Lemmy is, again, where the cool kids (and technically inclined) are choosing to hang out. There is an exclusivity to it, and that feeling of breaking from the herd. That is an exciting and addicting feeling for content creators and users alike. This is all happening as major players like Meta & Twitter are warring with each other over users, and while Reddit allowed itself to succumb to the narcissistic ambitions of one moron (fuck u/spez) who never cared about the spirit of what used to make Reddit truly great.
I think a lot of us (me included) got complacent, and bogged down in the feeling that there would never be a time where the internet felt new, and alive again. It is a failure of imagination really, and I hope this can be one shot across the bow to the major power structures behind the previous generation of social media that blind corporatism rarely if ever can capture the magic or lightning in a bottle that has been the bedrock of culture in the information age. Only time will tell how this project will evolve and change or if it can become something truly great that stands the test of time. But I, for one, am sincerely hoping that it does…just as much for myself as for all of you!
As long as we don’t let ourselves get complacent again this time. I’m not sure what I’d do if even the Fediverse eventually goes the same way.
So what’s the solution to blow this joint and start a new paradigm? Television killed radio. Blogs and streaming killed television. Current social media killed blogs. If the fediverse isn’t the solution, then what’s going to kill and replace current 2010s era social media? And don’t say short form video, because that was cool for maybe a decade before the big corpos started pushing it and it was no longer cool.
Corpos ruin everything
Decentralized social media seems like the logical next step. And all major platforms seem to either have users going that way (Reddit, Twitter) or are themselves going that way (Mark Fuckerberg’s bullshit)
I sure hope you’re right. Decentralization won’t solve all the issues of course, and will cause its own problems, but it will hopefully be at least a little better the the chain of walled gardens and outrage- and clickbait-driven cesspool that the internet is right now.
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.
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.
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.
God can you imagine the shit show if millions had tried to come at once this last time? We’d accidently ddos the fediverse to the stone age.
Don’t forget the censorship of the power mods. That’s going to be fun here. Already you have swiss cheese in content depending on how tight your mods sphincter is.
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.
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.
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.
It all depends on the quality content that we the users create. More quality content and more people will come.
It hasnt suffered a lot - so far. But it is like Chinese water torture - drip drip drip, bit by bit it is slowly eroding, some subs far worse affected than others. Most niche subs and local subs are still going strong, but I suspect after a while they will start to collapse one by one as moderators leave and users come here, or to discord or other alternatives
As much as I want to see reddit burn, I think we are more likely to see a slow, almost imperceptible crumbling away
