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!
Mass exodus?
Nope.
Howevir, Lemmy has reached the critical mass of users and is usable. In parallel some active users left reddit, and many sub reddits relies on a handful of active users who post and comment, even one of them leaving here is impacting the life of these subs
Since I’m forced to use the official app, the subs I mod are going to shit. The hidden tools and cluttered interface impose a real challenge to properly investigate reported posts and users.
So now I just do the bare bare minimum and basically flip a coin when wondering to remove stuff. And boy oh boy it already shows.
Are there any good mod tools for the activitypub based alternatives, or is it equally bad here for now?
The best thing to happen from the exodus regardless of it’s size is that there is now an active, popular, and viable Reddit alternative with better mobile support than Reddit. Reddit will likely never die, but users who get sick of their BS now or in the future have legitimate options with enough active users to keep them busy
Dig never died. We still moved to Reddit. What calls my attention is that most of us left Reddit when they changed the site UI combined with their insistance on banning people posting the Blue ray decoding key. Reddit has been way worst recently so my guess is that Lemmy is maturing enough to lure all those not happy with Reddit.
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.
Just #fuckswithducks and #shittymorph for me
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.
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.
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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, @mayo@lemmy.world: every one of the five seconds I knew you was a goddamn honor.
I’m excited for us all to be real people again
I mostly moved to Lemmy. I still browse reddit, but I stay logged out and no longer contribute and my old account was on the top 1% for comment karma. I’ll bring that energy to lemmy.
It depends on what you mean by “mass exodus”.
There has been a mass exodus, in the sense that a mass of people have exited the site and moved elsewhere in a very short period of time. There has not been one, in the sense that the majority of users have left the site.
I get that the people most affected by changes may want to feel like literally everyone and their dog pulled up stakes to follow them. That they’d want that sense of solidarity, and the feeling that they’re giving a proper “Fuck you” to the people that ruined their good time. And I get that people who are just exploring new spaces want to feel like they’re choosing the “winning” side.
But that isn’t the way these things work.
Habits are sticky. Familiar spaces are sticky. Most people do not like change, and will coats to momentum for as long as that momentum exists. They’re not going to migrate until Reddit is completely crumbling.
And maybe we don’t want them to.
This space is not ready for 50 million people. The moderation tools aren’t there yet. The infrastructure to keep them from just jumping on a single server isn’t there yet. The tools and documentation to help people easily set up new instances are still new and being stress tested.
The goal of killing a billion dollar company, or three of them even, isn’t within reach. That’s not a thing that happens overnight. But this is the ground work for taking on that task.
The first thing people need before they can even consider leaving is a viable alternative, and that’s what we’re making here by being active, and interesting.
I refuse to go back to Reddit. Can’t wait until Boost for Lemmy to come out.
Ditto Sync for Lemmy. Once the API shit started going down and I first started using Lemmy, I would not have dared to hope that any of the third party apps would migrate here too, let alone multiple.
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.
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 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 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 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 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 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.
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!
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.
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.
After 10 years on Reddit I’ve made the jump to Lemmy. There’s the odd Reddit link I click on when doing a Google search
Same, after more than a decade I kinda floated in limbo for a bit after Reddit is Fun was killed, but finally decided to just make the leap to Lemmy. No idea if it’s going to be the place that replaces Reddit, seems a little too messy, but I’m tired of every social media becoming trash after everyone gets comfortable using it and they start start trying to squeeze more money out of everything. Given how Reddit had managed to hit the sweet spot of a company that doesn’t pay for its content, doesn’t pay for its self-regulating communities, and has hundreds of millions of users whose data it sells, it’s honestly shocking that they managed to mess things up so much.
No. But enough came that Lemmy is now a vibrant place.
I think that’s really all we can ask for. I already miss some of the subs back on reddit but I’m sure they’ll start showing up here eventually
Some useful communities:
Fix problems and errors !techsupport@lemmy.world
Find the best products by Lemmy users reviews !recommendations@lemmy.world
Find the best software options !softwareoptions@lemmy.world
And more (if you know more I will edit to add them)
Would you happen to know of a good step-by-step guide on how to create a new community?
There’s a niche sub on Reddit I have not seen yet here and I would not mind having a go at recreating it, I’m just having a hard time figuring out what the steps are because the information is in different places. So if anyone can point me in the right direction I’d truly appreciate it.
Are you on phone or PC, web or app?
Web on PC, plain browser interface, sorry I didn’t state that upfront. And thank you. :)
There is a New Community button in the header
I don’t know how I missed that. Many thanks. :D
Honestly I’m enjoying the people that did leave and lemmy scratches the Reddit itch. I don’t need more than the exodus that happened
If even 1% of the people leave Reddit for lemmy it will be a win and probably enough for it to grow organically in the coming months. If even 10% had come over, lemmy would have probably buckled under 10s of millions of users all at once and the experience would have been awesome with like 3% uptime.
People have become more open to “testing the waters” of other apps. Sure they are still using Reddit and Twitter etc… but many have also started playing with lemmy, mastodon etc… I have no idea where this will end up but there is a shift of willingness to try something else and that is good start.
