It’s a war of attrition. Slow and steady will win this race.
Lemmy, just like Mastodon has seen spikes followed by users leaving. But every spike leaves more users on Lemmy/Mastodon than previously.
Truthfully, in the event another Reddit Exodus, which will happen, we need to try and be more of a content-oriented system during that era. Making more posts and focusing on adding to niches.
Reddit is about Niche communities and Content Saturation. Lemmy isn’t really about that, but it can be for moments at a time to pull users in. At some point we’ll reach a critical mass of users that leads to easier justification for new users to join.
We just need a group of extremely disorganized and disagreeable people to organize and and agree on this.
I think Lemmy would either need to find a way to wean Redditors off of their dopamine machine or replace that dopamine machine long-term to sustain an exodus from Reddit. Either that, or Reddit will need to break their dopamine feedback loop. There are some cracks showing, and that might have already killed the platform in the long term, but it’ll keep going from pure momentum for a while. Maybe as long as months or years.
Seems like there’s more sexists and racists than I used to see over there, which is definitely offputting. I’ve found communities that are supportive of thoughtful discussion are more appealing, and Reddit definitely lacks that lately, outside of some small, relatively niche communities.
Another hurdle is getting game devs to treat Lemmy instances for their games as official points of contact, which is definitely something reddit still has that Lemmy doesn’t, unfortunately.
I like your optimism but theres not a lot of great examples of the little guys winning lately. I’m not sure exactly how, but I predict things end badly for Lemmy. Just seems like a more likely outcome in today’s world. Guessing reddit does ok everyone just ends up a bit more miserable than before. Sorry for being a turd, I just think your prediction is statistically unlikely.
Except Lemmy isn’t a single Lemmy.com that will one day run out of money and implode into nothingness.
Lemmy, Mastodon, and other ActivityPub based Fediverse Networks are muliti-node systems.
This is just pure nihilism without a hint of thought put into it. Nothing short of the world exploding and human annihilation will kill Lemmy, And even then, there are bots.
Bonkers. There is a critical mass that keeps people willing to support it. I can run an original Quake server and find a few people to play with, but distrubuted multinode systems don’t mean a damn without a critical mass user base. Lemmy is far from bulletproof.
I’m not suggesting this social media format will die, it’s just likely that a corporate entity will develop a lemmy alternative that becomes more popular and causes fatal atrophy or Reddit will get new leadership and Lemmy hopefuls will cross back over if content development here is slower than the collective patience. I’m pro Lemmy FYI, I just don’t understand the unbridled optimism about it’s future.
Reddit also gets a little bit worse every spike, too. There are few mods remaining on Reddit who are doing anything more interesting for their communities than basic spam removal. Automod does all the work when all the largest subs just repost the same content and fake stories anyway.
It’s not like going to implode or anything anytime soon but the quality (from my perspective at least) has totally flatlined since June because why would anyone in their right mind invest creative energy into cultivating a unique community? I think that eventually a Lemmy community will pop up that simply couldn’t exist on Reddit and will serve to illustrate why I believe this model is better.
There is still some new content (rocket league videos come to mind) that is hard to move to a federated platform, because video streaming is expensive.
Yeah, reddit admins won. Most people don’t care and at this point its hard to see what the admins could do to start a real exodus. Hell, my reddit usage is way down, but I still go there for niche subjects (anime, philosophy) because nowhere else is comparable.
Anime has more broad appeal but the philosophical community on Lemmy seems virtually non-existent. Reddit even had graduate students/professors answering questions on r/askphilosophy. And r/askhistorians had even more success. It’s going to take a while for that to be replicated here.
they may have won this battle but the war is still ongoing. reddit is a public company, and it is a modern website, which means it is going to get shittier and shittier and it is never going to stop. i still go there for sports and news but anything of substance or merit i try to share here instead because fuck them. i think over time it’ll hollow itself out even more.
I don’t think they are public yet, the reason they pulled their little stunt in the first place is to prep for their IPO release. I think the general uproar probably set them back a while, but I’m sure the IPO is coming.
Not yet, don’t think they were expecting the revolt they ended up with. Investors aren’t going to be too excited to buy an IPO whose consumers are that upset when they try to monetize their platform.
I wouldn’t say that it worked, more that it did some damage. They are still going to go public, which means it’s going to eventually be fully monetized. This just did some damage to their quarterly, which is still a win in my book.
IMO reddit won but only by engaging a new audience. It removed the 1 post per subreddit on the front page without an announcement, modified the upvote algorithm to make upvote numbers seem larger than they are, and comments per upvote are lower than 10 years ago. Basically engagement is way down for people who use it like a forum aggregate. But engagement is way up by people who are migrating off of Instagram and similar platforms. I used to feel weird about being on reddit but now I have my wife’s 20 mostly female coworkers asking me about it. Reddit has a new audience it appeals to and it’s creating a weird issue because for some dumbass reason they thought the unpaid engagement generators would stick around after they fucked everything up for a few short term dollars.
I cant say they won all around. As a tech guy, now when i look up tech info and click on a reddit link 90% of the top answers are deleted(including all mine from the last 12 years).
Before the exidus, Reddit was already a painful hassle to use, unable to view many normal subreddits now, 80% of my screen taken up by login and cookie warnings, forcing logins, asking if you want the app multiple times. Slow, clunky, broken UI.
IF i want to give info to the Reddit people, i only post links to topics over on Lemmy.
The only thing that keeps me going back to Reddit is extremely niche subreddits having no mass here. Honestly if the Nuzlocke subreddit had more activity, I’d probably never open Reddit
This is me. I still go there for two or three subs that don’t have critical mass here (thus no conversation). The upcoming weighted sort algo should help a little, drawing people to smaller community content.
But I also moderate a reasonably large sub there, and have stopped attempting to grow anything there – just spam removal, manually.
But I don’t post new content there. Sometimes I’ll reply on a comment chain. Here I post new content and interact a lot more.
I’m using Lemmy Connect as my app (like 98% of it). What’s interesting is, when I use Reddit I refuse to use their app, so I’m using old Reddit, in a browser. But I catch myself attempting to swipe on comments using the Lemmy Connect gestures.
I quit Reddit 2 years ago due to the content becoming more and more toxic (maybe it was always toxic) and I’m just so dang happy that my favorite 3rd party Reddit apps have a Lemmy client. I’m using Sync and it’s like coming home. Functionally identical experience but with a cooler community.
I didn’t notice much degradation after the 2016 election enshittening. I set to work blocking all the power users and was able to to maintain the post-2016 level of quality right up until I largely quit.
There are two subs I use that have no Lemmy equivalent (one of them probably never will) but otherwise Reddit is just a marginally better StackOverflow for me now.
Also I must admit the Excel subreddit is simply too useful to quit. I’m a damn wizard at this point and these people still surprise me.
I went back this week because I noticed narwhal 2 finally came out. I loved narwhal and we waited such a long time for the new app to come out. Outside of using Reddit in search engine results, I looked around with the new app. And people are so mean and rude on Reddit I forgot how toxic it can get there. Made me really appreciate lemmy.
Narwhal 2 will eventually need to start charging. It was nice to finally get a glimpse of it because it goes paid.
I’ve been sort of bothered by the uptick of rudeness and combativeness on lemmy lately. When I first got here, it felt like everyone assumed positive intent from each other most of the time, but recently it feels like that shifted. I hope I just got unlucky and it isn’t a bigger trend overall.
It’s a damn shame if that toxicity is permeating through Lemmy. Once I really feel no difference between here and reddit on that front, I’d rather go back to reddit unfortunately.
I’m afraid we’re all like Frodo after destroying the ring—you can’t go home because it won’t be the same anymore. At least Lemmy doesn’t shove ads down my throat like I’m a baby bird.
Yeah it’s honestly insane. Getting to the point where I think I’m just going to filter out the technology and politics communities despite being interested in the content and in some of the discussions. There are so many over the top toxic people on lemmy. In one of the youtube adblocking threads, there was a guy who said something along the lines of “honestly it’s worth it for me to have youtube premium” and he was downvoted and called a paid google employee. Like it’s so absurd. You can’t say anything that goes against the circlejerk without being dogpiled on. It’s behavior that’s far worse and more consistently worse than anything I’ve ever seen on reddit. It’s not the first time I’ve seen stuff like that. I remember all the backlash when sync came out. I like the app and the dev so I paid for it but all these FOSS bros were acting like the dev is the second coming of Hitler for daring to make money for his work. It’s exhausting. I hate ads and subscriptions but I need to live my life at some point and just begrudgingly accept them. I can’t spend all day seething about it like a lot of people on lemmy do. Again, it’s just kind of exhausting reading a lot of threads now. I thought I was going crazy but it’s nice to see that other people have similar observations.
I’ve returned to reddit a few times, mostly to just get an answer to a question I was trying to look up. But a few days ago I did make a new account, because I was feeling lonely and wanted to try and make new internet friends, and as far as I know, lemmy doesn’t yet have those penpal/chat/make friend communities. I had forgotten how ass the new account experience on reddit is, and how ass reddit itself is. I couldn’t get the verification email (tho that could have been due to trying to use a temporary email), posts got auto deleted due to account age and low karma, and random email and cookie popups that kept coming back. When one post miraculously did get posted (despite automod telling me it was deleted lol) and I got chat requests, I couldn’t even reply to people! I tried accepting the request, but kept getting an error. At this point I’m not sure if it is an actual error, or just reddit restricting new accounts from chatting, even if they are the ones the chat is sent to…
I get that these are used to combat bots, but is it actually working? Mostly it’s just hurting people who legitimately want to join and enjoy the site. The karma requirements also bring in their own problems, like subreddits just focused on farming karma so that users can finally take part in the conversations they came for in the first place.
I think people will get tired of the horrible new account creation and experience on reddit and look for alternatives. Lemmy seems to be more privacy orientated and without silly internet points anybody with a new account can immediately jump in on the action without restrictions, for better or worse.
The quality of reddit has seriously gone downhill. It feels like being on Facebook or something, the comments are cringrworthy and just plain odd and the posts aren’t great either.
I still go on Reddit when I find the answer to a specific problem, or if I have to ask something specific, but I make sure to go on my computer with adblock
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