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!
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.
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.
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 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 miss forums so much. I was part of one for probably 10 years that only had a couple dozen regular posters (with a couple thousand members in total). We all knew each other. I even got invited to one guy’s wedding. Another guy lived semi-close to me and went over to his house a couple times and met his wife and kids. These mega sites we have now don’t have that kind of community.
I’m excited for us all to be real people again
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 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.
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!
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
You’re expecting something like the Digg to Reddit mass emigration. That likely will never happen again, the conditions for that are gone. What’s happening is what i predicted for years, people are moving away from the site but not going to a single “replacement” place as there’s just nothing like it, but to many. Be it the Fediverse, Discord, Facebook and related properties, various chats, even forums and freaking IRC.
And it’s also clear it’s not going to be a single massive exodus, but a slow decay over a long time. The site will still be alive ten years from now, like Livejournal and other relics of the past are still technically alive, but will slowly fade from relevance.
And one important thing: Sites like that depend on a few users, the so-called 90-9-1 rule explains it well, only a tiny, tiny percentage of users of the site produce the content it needs to survive, and they’re precisely the ones the administration pissed off. And not only that, but it depends on the moderators, without them the site would devolve to a sewer in no time, and they too have been shafted by the administration. A good portion of them have left the site for good, and the hit will be perceived in time, as they cannot be replaced easily.
Everything that made the site good is dying or dead, let it die, or just survive as a zombie. It will become a cesspool of reposts, recycled content and garbage, and any user that creates good content that still remains there will eventually leave at seeing what the site will turn into.
Digg to Reddit wasn’t a single mass exodus either. It took years, even after the digg redesign. There were still plenty of people left on digg complaining how reddit’s UI sucked, was super confusing, and people would eventually come crawling back. The redesign was just the beginning of the end, just like this API thing will probably be the beginning of the end for reddit too
I don’t have hard numbers, just loose ones. From what I’ve read Reddit had about 400 million daily active users. From what I know only about one or two million users are on Lemmy. Now that’s a massive jump from where it was just a few months ago, but it’s a drop in the hat.
If my information is even remotely correct that’s less than 1%.
Quality has dropped a lot. Because the users who used and created content the most used 3rd party apps. Their absence has decreased the quality of reddit a lot.
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.
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.
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
I refuse to go back to Reddit. Can’t wait until Boost for Lemmy to come out.
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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)
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Are you on phone or PC, web or app?
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There is a New Community button in the header
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I joined right around the blackout, and the amount of content, especially content I enjoy has increased considerably. Everytime I open the app there are new things to read, which definitely wasn’t the case a month ago.
So mass exodus, nah, even if every new user of Lemmy, Kbin and all the other alternatives left Reddit completely we’re a single digit percentage at most. But mass adoption, definitely. With the smaller user base pre-apiexit its much easier to notice all the new contributing users.
It has been an absolute gift to be part of and watching that/this growth. Seeing posts on a new platform go from something like 10/day to the, now, probably, hundreds, if not thousands per day.
I remember in late May/early June this year (2023, when this place really came alive, for archival sake), seeing the posts on Reddit about the ACTUAL api changes, then that evolving into a bit of vocal protest, which surprisingly evolved into an ACTUAL protest with a lot more information why. It was the last straw for me. Everything the world has shit on me and my generation and lifetime, all of it from selfishness and ignorance and greed. Then musk bought Twitter and immediately drove it face first into the ground at high speed and got support by most of the worst demographics on the face of the planet - and I didn’t even care about Twitter. But, a long-standing media giant, brought down by a billionaire simply because he had the money? It was if all of our intuitive fears about the world being awful just came true in real time, over, and over, and over, and over. The past fifteen years have been so bad, it’s actually insane, and it’s nuts to think that it can still be way way worse.
And then along came this dried out, greedy ass, shameless, two faced, wannabe psychopath who IDOLIZED Musk, Hoffman/spez, and just shits in the faces of everybody on Reddit that ever cared about anything. The very people trying to make the world a better place at least for a little while, pleading with him not to be THAT greedy and shitty. And he just spread open his wonderbread buttcheeks, stared us all in the eyes, looked away, smiled into a mirror, and blasted out what was left of his rotten, liquefied spine. RIP Aaron.
Everybody saw it coming, yet we were still all shocked at how blatantly greedy and manipulative every single event was. Now, he’s just trying to wait it out and let it quiet down.
I’m still convinced this or an evolution of this will be Web3.0. The evolution past megacorps as a result of direct abuse of power, anti-competitive and other dark behaviors, anti privacy, ultra-rich maximizations of profits, and late stage capitalism. Decentralization and a reinvigoration and re-emphasis on integrity and quality, put truly into the hands of the users by stripping abilities of people like musk to literally capitalize on and destroy is hugely paramount in the next step. We all want it, the world needs it, and maybe the Fediverse is it. Maybe, maybe not. It feels like the right direction and I’ve had enough bullshit to know it.
You can see the numbers here: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
