Ask Lemmy

I don't know if I'd call it a mass exodus, and I don't know that it directly has anything to do with Lemmy, but there's been a noticeable dip in quality. Fewer posts across many of the front page subreddits, fewer votes, more bot posts, more low effort posts, less discussion in comment sections, lots of deleted comments and accounts... overall there just seems to be a dip in quality.

I was going to delete, but decided to stick around for a while first, to see how things pan out, and I've got to say the mobile site is even worse than expected. I get constant pop ups trying to direct me to download the app, then when I say no the website will auto reload, often sending me back to the top of the page. It's difficult to find and respond to anyone who replies to your comments, and sometimes if you sort by top: today it won't even show any posts. Just... blank. Clicking on a post opens it as a tab that is more like a popup, and closing it resets where you were on the page.

I could keep going but I think that pretty much summarizes what I've noticed. Don't know that it's directly related to a Lemmy "exodus," and I'm still finding my way around here so I can't really say, but reddit as we knew it seems pretty dead.

A mass exodus doesn't really happen in the traditional sense unless shit really hits the fan. For that to happen a large majority or even everyone has to be displaced at once and there can be no way to salvage the situation. In this case, there were a lot of short term ways out here for users not directly affected.

But, the whole situation is more akin to a war of attrition. The ones not convinced by the big things, will be convinced by the smaller things that accumulate over time. Goodwill for reddit is at an all time low, which hampers their ability to grow since word of mouth is effectively dead. People that provided effective labour for reddit in the form of moderation or content aggregation lost their morale to continue. Not all of them for sure, but it might very well be a critical mass (even if they didn't move to lemmy).

It's like a line of dominos increasing in size, if the ones that fell now were big enough to topple the next, eventually there will be a ripple effect. Eventually the quality of content goes down, the discourse turns stale and antagonistic, and communities fall apart. Only once the users who took the easy way out now realize that will they finally start the process of moving. And if reddit was doing so bad they had to make this move, I can only assume their future will be very grim indeed. The seed of destruction has been planted. (And if you want an example of that future, look at Twitter)

Whether or not that all actually happens, I'm not sure. I'd like to believe it will, but some people revel in their unreasonableness, and they're often the easiest to exploit for financial gain. I think the best thing is to stop looking back, and focus on what we have here and now. I think what lemmy has achieved so far is already more valuable than reddit had.

Some of the larger subreddits shut down or turned into a John Oliver meme, one niche one I enjoyed is gone, the rest seem to be back to business as usual. At the moment? I'd say not much has changed.

Who cares, though? This isn't reddit, let's stop focusing on that and focus on Lemmy.

Have they suffered at all? I think the answer is fairly obvious. You’re here, right? Would you be here if they hadn’t fucked around? I wouldn’t be here.

This didn't happen quickly with Digg either. This won't be as substantially decimating to the platform as the Digg exodus was, because reddit is WAY bigger than Digg was.

I'd say it took me about 3-4 years to fully migrate away from Digg to reddit, and that process was very similar to today, where there were a ton of platforms gaining steam (even while it was pretty clear that reddit was where the party went).

I think reddit's quality of content will deteriorate over time, and the moderation will suffer. It is going to die a death of 1000 paper cuts. The API change was just reddit saying "Hey, come stab us with your paper knives!"

idk. Reddit in 15 years will probably look a lot like newspapers do today. Kind of a joke, but somehow still standing.

Im working on a case study for a publishing firm about the whole API announcement and subsequent fallout so I've been watching all this really closely. The thing I'm most anxious for is the data on web traffic to reddit and it's competitors, which I can only get on a monthly basis. It dropped a lot from May to June, which you could attribute to the protest or even the summer. However, Discords traffic increased during that time, and it was the only major social platform to change in either direction. I'm hoping to get some clarity once July data comes out but I don't think we well know for sure about long term impact for a while. Reddit I'm sure knows more but definitely won't share it publicly unless necessary, like if they do go public, but I'm not sure that kind of data would be included in a filing.

(I tracked traffic on similarweb and Semrush. Lemmy is on there too, but is tracked per server, and most were tracked starting in may or June so data is pretty limited and can't really be compared.)

The content on Reddit has gotten noticeably worse - but less as a result of Lemmy's existence and more of a reaction to killing 3rd Party Apps.

Unfortunately for me, some of my favorite communities haven't migrated over to Lemmy. So I'm still using Old Reddit Desktop to access them.

The subreddits I watched seem to be as busy as they always were, and the corresponding communities on Lemmy are mostly devoid of activity. Frustratingly, I'm still getting reddit links from my friend, which I leave unopened. Maybe Reddit took a hit in terms of users and post quality, but I'm growing increasingly skeptical that a mass migration is going to happen.

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.

I found a large amount of the developer / programming reddits died, so I noticed a large difference but a lot of other subs there has been no change so it depends on what you are in.

Reddit is like World of Warcraft, the only thing that can kill it is itself.

Steve Huffman has helped me cut down on my time on social media, and even screentime in general. Because I left the platform that I used so much because of one stupid decision he made.

I can now start my sand grain collection thanks to him.

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.

I don't think any platform collapses overnight. What you have to do is do is make something "better" and engage in a campaign of attrition to get people to move over. Produce content that other visitors see and like. Submit links to that content to aggregators (e.g. Slashdot / Fark etc.). Even start submitting links on Reddit that lead over to Lemmy and so on.

Make Lemmy feel as normal as Reddit. People will get used to the interface, the quirks and perhaps stay. Every person who stays is one less for Reddit. Now "better" is doing some heavy lifting since Lemmy has some advantages (ad free, federated) and some disadvantages (inline media & limits, sign up confusion, app). The disadvantages need to be addressed and the advantages need to be made stronger.

I believe that most of the people, including myself, are still waiting for proper 3rd party apps. I still use Boost for Reddit untill the developer releases Boost for Lemmy, then I switch completely. The app I'm used to is more important to me than the platform I'm using. But.. Needs to be said that Reddit's behaviour is horrendous and therefore I don't want to be using it. The future is decentralised..

Personally I could have lived with the ads but the quality of the subs I followed dipped massively after the mods left or were forced out. The people who left may have been fewer than expected they were the ones creating the decent content and most importantly keeping the worst of the bots at bay.

I deleted my account. That probably showed 'em.

only thing i cant stand about lemmy is trying to understand what the fuck it is and how it works.

some top post about a “sub”? “lemmy place”? idk what to call it, “defederating from us”. does that mean from all lemmy things, that lemmy thing? what does it mean to defederate? is there an easy way to browse for subs like reddit?

No, and I (honestly) don't care either. A nice sum of users is better than a bunch of users that are (at most) "rotten apples" willing to denigrate everything and everyone.

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.

Yes, because it has lost some of its most passionate users. The only effect will be a subtle drop in quality to the site, though, which will be completely unnoticeable to the average user.