this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Technology
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The reddit exodus is comparatively very small. Tens of thousands of users, many of which will not stick around. Reddit has millions of users (hundreds of millions?). They barely notice.
true enough, but I don't think i'm going to care that much as long as the community stays big enough to stay somewhat active. I feel much more engaged in the community here than I ever did on reddit.
To me, day 1 here, it feels like a niche subreddit about something you enjoy but that's the whole platform. The federation and the ability to have multiple of the same communities moderated differently is intriguing idea to me. I think reddit's troubles began ultimately with it's popularity. More content, less quality, more of an inclination of reddit for monetization. This is going to be an interesting month that will test the capabilities of this idea we are participating in. I feel like it is entirely possible but I hope that not too much strain is placed on each instance operator and their mod team. I want to be somewhere to anonymously socialize without being the commodity. I do have some concerns about Lemmy, primarily, it's lack of a privacy policy and a tos. Really my concern is, if I delete my account for example does it and my content also get deleted? What's the data retention policy? We are seeing this federation could easily be made into a archive like what pushshift for reddit l became which was a major frightening idea that everything you ever posted or commented was archived without your consent or knowledge. This truly is the wild west right now. It's exciting and I'm glad to be here. Just want some understanding of what we are signing up for. Lemmy's dev did say there is no logging of your IP address anywhere except web server logs which is to be expected.
I have some similar concerns, although reddit does hang on to deleted comments and posts for themselves/their monetization and tracking purposes. That's why those reddit account deletion scripts edit all comments before deletion, and people are (were?) advised to let the edited comments sit for 24 hours before finally deleting them. I don't know if that actually works anymore to delete the comment from reddit's servers, though; somebody said they started keeping the pre-edited versions of comments to get around it.
At least with Lemmy you also have the option of hosting your own instance, which I would think could get around some of these concerns? I haven't looked into it much.
If you post on multiple communities, too, I think your info is spread around multiple servers. And there's no monetary incentive for people to be trying to track us, except perhaps on instances hosted by companies.
But the only company I know of that currently has an instance (I think) is Mozilla, and since I use Firefox, they'd have a heck of a lot of other options if they wanted to invade my privacy.
Edit: I dislike that when I delete a comment, it just deletes the text and leaves my username there above the deleted comment marker. I can kind of see why it might be desired for accountability purposes, but also, ehhh.
For sure, reddit became less transparent with the data retention the further their success increased. In the past they claimed that ip addresses on your account would be removed after 100 days except for the signup IP. I did the GDPR requests for all my old accounts. I have one remaining that I deleted all the content off of until I was permenantly done (which looks soon now).
I just really dislike being targeted for ads and tracked for companies purposes to "advertise" to you. I run a dns sink hole, VPN, ublock on all my devices and I know it's still impossible to be truly anonymous online without being a weirdo and unable to live modern life.
I'm the sameway. I use firefox exclusively and have for years, love it, began using their password manager for a few years now and I'm thinking about an alternative to that I manage. I've already been a part of huge databreaches. I would sure hate for my passwords to be out there. I mean, it's dangerous AF.
You could submit that as a bug report. If the devs don't think that it's a bug, they'd probably explain why.
Yeah, I unsubscribed from almost all the default subs and have endless block list of subs, since I stopped enjoying most of the content and lot of the communities got way too big to follow the rules of why certain subs were created in the first place. Upvotes and downvoting just don't work effectively once communities get past a certain size to curate content.
Although, there are subs where really large userbases are needed and useful like /r/gamedeals and /r/buildapcsales. But, lot of the discussion based ones don't need to be that big.
I wonder if we're big enough to have a hive like "PC Builders" or just "PC Gaming", so we at least have somewhere to discuss parts / ask for parts advice, offer build help, and so on. But then, I suppose "Technology" or "Gaming" would both be suitable spots for that at present.
I have to wonder just how many genuine users reddit actually has based on the amount of account harvesting that utilizes reposting content.
Wait for after 1 Juli if they don't reverse the decision they made. Right now the mods and users believe they can change this madness, but when the go through with it, many more will leave, especially mods and the og users that contribute most content.
There is no way that the Lemmy network can handle millions of users. The big instances are struggling with tens of thousands. I believe many will leave and reddit will become worse because of it, but it's not going to die, it's going to turn into facebook.
It IS Facebook right now, but for zoomers. Nothing but emoji replies, copy-pasting the same tired meme for the millionth time, and so on. The reddit I joined back in 2012 died a long time ago.
I'd argue the 2012 version of reddit was much the same. The narwhal bacons at midnight. First rule of reddit. So many lolcats. I think I was just younger back then, everything was new.
Reddit was definitely immature and edgy at the time (generic 2010s memes plus dark and shock humor like fatpeoplehate and spacedicks), but it was real people dicking around instead of corporate and bots curating content for maximum engagement, you know?
Yeah I think you're right. A year or so back I just ditched all big subreddits and joined random small ones for a few months at a time, got some of that feeling back. But really reddit has become just another big social media platform and now people visit out of habit instead of out of a feeling of community.
Gotta convince some of the tech guys coming over from Reddit to spin up their own Lemmy instances so we can properly be distributed and share the load.
There are 150+ instances listed on the lemmy site. If we somehow managed to get all those instances running on hardware that could handle thousands of users, then we managed to find enough new techie people to get 10x as many instances, then we worked out some way of getting the load shared evenly so the new users didn't all congregate on one instance and you manage to do this without confusing non-techie people about how it works, if all that goes to plan and you get each instance to support 10,000 users - you've now managed to support 15 million reddit users.
Reddit has over 430 million active monthly users. It's just not feasible to do by 1 July, we need to let the community grow organically.
Easy mode button, chooses an instance for you based on load. Non tech people can use that, tech people can do what they want. Though I guess for that you'd need some group to decide which instances are included in that distribution.
Yeah, in theory. In practice you need to explain to users why they are being sent to a seemingly random site, which all have different rules that don't necessarily align with what they are looking for. Plus some have open registrations and some you need to apply.
And then there's Beehaw, actively turning down registrations because they want to foster a certain community (which is their right).
This all leads to a lot of user confusion.
That's why you'd need a group to decide which instances would be included, and they'd ideally have more of a ganeral focus and with similar rules. As far as confusing the user, have the easy mode button tell you in a nice fancy slideshow or something that Lemmy is decentralized, lemmy used instances and this is the site yours is at. You're not completely getting rid of the confusion from non techies, but a quick explanation would probably go a decent ways.
Yeah perhaps have a requirement that to be in the list you need to use the lemmy code of conduct rather than your own, you must have open registrations, and probably some level of no NSFW content or that sort of thing.
I actually had to pay 0.01 monero to join my server. There was a way to join for free too but it would have taken longer
Instance hosts will be understandably wary of investing $$$ in a huge influx that may or may not stick around, too. A more gradual influx is good since it lets people scale up slowly, work out donation streams, and such.
I'm fine even with just the current size of this place, though. Even just beehaw alone. It feels cozy. :)
A lot of those 430 million monthly users on reddit aren't posting or commenting anything I care to see. Most aren't posting or comment at all, just voting. And r/all has never not been a trashfire, so, it can keep being a trashfire somewhere over there where I'm not, at least.
No without mods reddit is basically dead. Thats their own system and fault...
And i think the instances need more capacity to support the traffic, but its not impossible. i also hope that at least some of the people coming here start new instances.
Reddit has slowly replaced mods in large subs with employees. And you vastly overestimate the willingness of the average user to put up with quirks of new platforms like Lemmy.
For Lemmy to support the 430 million monthly active users that reddit has - this is currently, in my opinion, impossible. The largest lemmy server has tens of thousands of users, and is running on the most powerful server that VPS provider OVH offers. The lead developer knows that there are big performance improvements needed in the code and has been working on it for some time, but it will be years before the lemmy network can handle even a few million active users, in my opinion.
They can replace who they want in general, but they never cover the thousands of niche and middle sized subs and thats a money issue, they can't suddenly materialize thousand employees to moderate some subs. And the medium and small subs actually draw most non bot traffic. Also its estimated that reddit massively inflates user numbers, especially on their "default subs"
Current lemmy supporting hundred millions is absolutely utopian, but its in active development, there would be a way, but i would be very surprised when more than 5% of reddit users would suddenly end up here, lemmy needs to grow healthy and not from one day to the next by a Exponent, that's a fact. But i don't think it would take years, more users draw more attention, wich leads to more devs helping to improve the quality.
(oh and i kinda don't care about the "average users" i care about the top 5% of reddit that contribute 50% of the content and 99% of the mod work)
I guess we just have to hope that Redditors continue to be frustrated with Reddit in the future and keep migrating here over time (as opposed to just forgetting about the idea of moving to alternative platforms after they've gotten over the current controversy)
Yes, and I think as long as people stick around lemmy that will happen.
There are other alternative platforms, as well, even though they're corporate and not as cool.
Tumblr for instance is doing quite well and catching a lot of twitter refugees. I tried migrating there a few months ago, and to be honest I liked it heck of a lot more than I used to. I'm not sure if the site improved, or if I just understood how to curate my feed better this time around, or what, but nonetheless.
The thing with these sites is that only a tiny proportion of users create content. For Reddit it's even worse, since they also need subreddit moderators, essentially employees working for free. So, tens of thousands of users leaving will definitely have an impact since in this case it's old power users who make content, and mods. Will the site "die"? Nope, we'll see it working for a long, long time, but will be a shadow of what it used to be, for example i remember the Obama AMA and many similar high-profile ones, that's not gonna happen anymore or will be reduced greatly.
Exactly. You see a sub with 5 million subscribers and when you sort by new it's essentially empty. A small minority keeps Reddit going. The karma nuts are making Reddit what it is.
I think the AMA stuff has really died already. But I'm not sure the big content creators will leave. They are doing it for the audience and the karma and Lemmy doesn't have either.
I also think that others will rise to fill any gap. Over time this leads to lower quality content, but the peak of reddit is well over so probably people still won't notice.
As long as it is an exodus of enough interesting users. Lemmy needs roughly the number of users appearing now to make posts frequent enough. But still the lack of communities needs more.