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…
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Reddit suffers at the hands of Spez, Lemmy is just existing.
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 storiesFor sure the quantity of posts is the same, but the quality has gone down.
You can just feel it all over. My frontpage has little to no good topics anymore. I used to peruse for at least 30 mins easily losing myself. I barely get 5 now before getting irritated with the low effort material.
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.
Report them? Why? How else is a community supposed to get started? It needs probably only a handful of a type A people posting stuff regularly and then that brings the crowd.
I agree it’s not a great look because we’re in the established age of the internet… but what else is there to do?
I guess we don’t talk about the same kind of scenario.
You describe one where the creator did it in good faith, started posted for a bit, but isn’t that active. That’s completely fine, I agree with you.
I am talking about people who started dozens or even hundreds of communities, just to leave them there without even posting a single thing. Looks like a power trip to me, and I could understand why newcomers might be reluctant in participating in such communities (especially if they come from Reddit)
I see what you mean, I think I agree with you then.
Happy to hear, have a good one!
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.
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.
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.
The point is not an overnight collapse. It’s gradual rot.
Reddit (Twitter, Facebook…) all exist because they created a monopoly around their service. Reddit through their incompetence created a competitor. They will have to work so much harder to make their ends meet now that there are alternatives. Worse yet, the viability of Lemmy will spawn other efforts.
Look at Twitter. Between Mastodon and Bluesky they are eroding. They have to beg advertisers to stick around. At the same time there is a bakers dozen of other efforts underway all creating a new landscape. Twitter was the king and now they are rapidly becoming one in a pool of microblogging services. They will wither.
Reddit just popped it’s monopoly and will also fail.
Just have a look at the content there, it dropped a lot in quality.
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.
The OC to porn ratio has shifted in favor of porn.
Reddit probably got it’s initial boost from porn that got it to where it is today
The real metric is the OC to bot ratio
Is that a problem?
Only if you don’t want to see porn
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
As someone who only ever browsed all, I see no difference.
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I’ve noticed the same. It’s possible that a lot of content creators left. It’s also possible that you and I have gotten used to not having the lowest common denominator stream of consciousness from the Reddit hive mind firehosed in our faces.
I was gonna say. I don’t think r/all has changed much at all, but having actual quality content on Lemmy is really eye-opening as to what a trash heap r/all is.
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.
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I don’t know generally how people have reacted, maybe a lot just quit browsing that type of media altogether. They haven’t all flocked to the Fediverse that’s for sure. It’s grown a lot recently, but before the API mess Reddit had almost a half billion monthly active users. There’s like 150k right now between Lemmy and kbin so pretty insignificant in comparison.
I’m pretty sure the quality of posts on Reddit has fallen noticeably, they lost a a good number of mods and people have said it’s pretty obvious now.
What I find funny is the favorable references Spez has made to how Elon is running Twitter (X), but thing is it’s obvious now Twitter is intentionally being run into the ground. Since Spez is a Elon protégé I guess Reddit is being intentionally run into the ground.
I’m deleting all of my posts and comments on Reddit :). I did find Reddit very useful in many ways. That was when I was a participant in the system. Now Reddit is going to make me a revenue generating serf. So I noped right out of there just like I did with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
I know lots of users are doing them same. Reddit would get lots of exposure from Google searches to useful information that users had posted. They are selling ads on the backs of these users that posted useful information. If I remove my posts (useful or not) they can’t be used for revenue.
So at night I slowly go through my profile and delete posts and comments while I watch a show.
Profit wise, absolutely not. However, they are probably losing their most technical users. Generally the ones that have some sort of tech background or knowledge and see through their BS, and who are also much more likely to support open source alternatives (and third party apps) and have an easier time figuring out the fediverse. Maybe they care about that, maybe they don’t (probably don’t).
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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
