I think it’s all had a bigger impact on Lemmy than it has had on Reddit. The lasting impact might be that Reddit now has viable competition for the first time since Digg, which is a good thing.
Yeah. They do not realize that despite “their traffic being back to normal” they destroyed their monopoly status. It’s a slow rot. But a rot that will kill their value eventually. And I am here for it.
On the bright side for them, they still have a commercial monopoly. The number of ads might go up while the quality of the content goes down.
Inertia will keep a train going for a while, as the engine dies.
The people that are now on lemmy were the heaviest users. The ones that bought 5 different apps to improve their experience and figure out which one they preferred : the mods, the creators, etc.
Have they all left Reddit completely? Probably not, but now they split their time. And stats say the proportion on Lemmy is increasing.
We now have an opportunity not only replace but contribute in the creation of something new - new mechanics, new rules and more.
Reddit is tired and has been for a while, Lemmy developers are building the Reddit they always wanted, and are innovating at breakneck speed.
Simple things like Top by 1, 6, 12 hours which we now have here, was badly needed in Reddit but they were too busy trying to shoehorn video and flairs.
I just dropped Reddit from my phone today, the Firefox moderator protest to change r/firefox to “We are a subreddit about fire foxes aka red pandas” was oddly enough the breaking point for removal from my phone (despite last night’s unfortunate hack).
The protests have just become the new reddit fad. Anyone still there that’s not part of a self-help, resource/info sub, and claiming to be part of the ‘protest’ is just circlejerking.
I’m okay with this. As long as Lemmy is thriving with good content, that’s all I care about.
Yeah. I don’t expect Reddit to necessarily collapse immediately, or Lemmy to replace Reddit for all Reddit users. I’m just happy if Lemmy becomes at least a medium-sized social network. That means that it would have moved from a niche platform into a large enough ecosystem to sustain itself, and become a viable alternative to Reddit, like you said.
With a huge platform like Reddit, the impact of the current events might not be instantly obvious. But with everything going on recently with Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Lemmy, and even Threads, I think it’s clear that there’s some kind of transformation of the social media landscape going on. But how long it will take, and what the end result will look like, is anybody’s guess. Maybe it’s the fall of the old giants and a rise of new, more democratic platforms. Maybe the giants keep standing, but significantly weakened, with a bunch of new, smaller, more open platforms becoming real alternatives. Or maybe it’s something else.
Be it as it may, I’m glad that the status quo is being shaken up a bit.
I’d be happy if Lemmy becomes like what Reddit was when it started and never grew beyond that. I don’t need tons of clickbait outrage trash to doomscroll though every day.
The only thing I really miss from Reddit is a few of the smaller, niche subreddits that had small but active userbases. But that will come with time as the Lemmy userbase grows.
Yeah. I still go to reddit for those, since I don’t have the time or energy to put into moderating anything, and/or don’t want to talk to a void. Sucks, because I want those communities here to be active, but content creation is taxing.
This. Some of the users in my favorite niche communities have migrated over, but overall, it’s still a bit of a ghost town compared to the same niches on Reddit.
Reddit was at its best when you stuck to the smaller subs where people were primarily positive and cheering on newbies, which really makes for active, welcoming communities that I truly miss. Having a bigger user base in those smaller communities is invaluable, because having a place to come and get advice from people who’ve been around the block is way different than the blank canvas you find in the same communities on Lemmy. My personal favorites were subs that specialized in “you like this? Have you tried that?”-type threads, and one of the coolest community norms I ever saw was in r/doommetal, where instead of blacklisting bands that got posted too often, they had the “Green List,” and anyone who posted anything from the Green List was cheered on and inundated by suggestions for more bands similar to the OP.
I found many of my favorite small bands and content creators in subs like r/doommetal, r/OSR, and r/boardgames, and the amount of good advice I got in subs like r/professors, r/luthier, and r/chempros is impossible to overstate.
I’ll miss my reddit niches, and I just hope the Lemmy niches eventually grow up to be a real replacement for those communities.
Now that I think about it, what if someone created a Lemmy instance that just… Mirrors chosen Reddit subreddits 1:1 via a scraping bot? So that if you wanted content from a subreddit, you could just subscribe to it on that instance, or ignore it if bot content isn’t what you want. It could work for smaller more niche subreddits (because I suppose that you would quickly run into a throttling problem or bot detection otherwise), but it may kickstart a few communities.
I feel like having no karma and Thus no rewards for such behaviour helps a bit.
I hate to see the content we created help fund the pockets of spez and his fellow crooks, but at the same time I’d also hate to see tonnes of possibly the most valuable information on the internet going down the drain. I’ll be happier to see Lemmy get to the point where people can say “there’s a community for everything” more than seeing the collapse of Reddit.
I deleted everything. It’s too bad, a lot of searches are going to turn up threads and find blank spaces where the answers should be.
Yeah I’ve already had a few niche searches result in finding [deleted] content.
I can say I’ve noticed. Do you think spez ever will?
*pre-2010 Digg
Digg after that was no longer competition. It was an ad-riddled trash-fire which drove a massive number of its users away to places like reddit… including myself… who just kinda did something similar with reddit.
I went to Reddit from Digg during the great migration and I didn’t look back. The Ads and format change were a huge misstep on their part. I honestly would have left Reddit when they went to New Reddit if we would have had Lemmy back then.
when they went to New Reddit
I never went to New Reddit…
I would have left even if Lemmy didn’t exist.
Same. In fact I tried to find alternatives but there just wasn’t one at the time.
Old reddit still exists
It did indeed, I knew nothing about the fediverse before the reddit protest began, didn’t even know lemmy existed, now I happily migrated here, like me many other people.
Same, joined last week after my app of choice was killed. Already spending more time here than i was at the end of my time on reddit.
Was getting so sick of the rage-bait, low quality comments and general snarky behavior, i might have quit anyway. So much better here.
Dropped Reddit a month ago after 12 years of daily use and while it was tough in the initial days Lemmy/Kbin activity has really picked up and is beginning to absolutely fill the gap. Just need the apps and a bit more stability and think it’s going to be a proper successor.
Same here.
There are a few (very few) communities I am still waiting to become active and useful here but Reddit has been moved to page 4 or my social media folder and I rarely ever scroll to it.
Good riddance too. The move to Lemmy/Kbin also pushed me back onto Mastodon and I could not be happier.
Is there a 101 for dummies about lemmy/kbin/mastodon? I dont know what any of those words mean
Edit: just realized kbin isnt on there. Kbin is another Lemmy-affiliated site, but it also lets you see mastodon posts. You need a seperate kbin login to use it, but the site looks similar and behaves similarly to any Lemmy instance.
When the protest started I poked around the Fediverse and it was a ghost town and was a little concerned that Reddit might not have any competition. But since the end of June posts and content have been going way up, and the quality of the posts is way better than Reddit, even before spez fucked things up.
I think a big help will be creating a streamlined sign-up process in the apps themselves. Menus to pick a server and create an account. Maybe tell the user which servers are biggest/ask if they wanna browse servers by specific content leanings. That way it’s not intimidating. I’m a tech guy and even I was a bit perplexed in the beginning and that will keep anyone with a non-technical background away: we tech nerds forget that things not “just working” isn’t a feature in the eyes of a majority of people. (For better or for worse.)
I have been using Kbin exclusively while waiting for the Artemis app to be released but I decided to Memmy for Lemmy to see what the hype was all about. Well I’m loving Memmy, it does exactly what you discussed. The app makes it super easy choose an instance and create an account. Does the app need some work? Yes but it’s leaps and bounds better than browsing through a mobile web browser.
I use both Memmy as its based off of Apollo but there’s also wefwef you might want to check out but I like Memmy more
Yeah I spent 2 weeks on Jerboa unable to post, comment, subscribed etc because the instance I joined was not yet a login option on the app. Still have that issue with every other app.
You can tell the devs are working hard on these apps though. It’s a race to get a polished app released before people lose interest in leaving reddit.
Indeed. I’ve seen the rate of app updates pick up recently, and I feel it’s noticeably smoother than a couple weeks ago. Great effort is being done and I’m grateful towards the devs for that.
Just in case you don’t already know: On most apps you can type in your instance instead of selecting one from the drop down menu. Im on a small instance too and it took me a week or so to figure it out last month lol
Liftoff has been pretty good for me. Might be worth exploring.
Same, a little bit of added qol to Memmy as well as some content on some of the more niche communities I used to frequent and Reddit will be solely used for searching obscure problems in the future if even that.
/r/heat was a big loss for me. But /c/nba is actually nice, since everyone has been respectful. I avoided /r/nba since everyone was so hostile to each other and it contributed so much to me hating most fanbases.
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The pending is apparently a bug and still see the feed as though you are subscribed.
Have barely been on there since it started besides to visit subs that havent even attempted to move yet, from what I have heard Reddit is definitely worse now with how many people have left, is that everyone elses perspective as well.
I was under the impression not much had changed because a small minority used 3rd party apps tbh.
Vocal minority though, surely?
I’ve visited a few times on Desktop (old.reddit) since the shutdown and the rate of new content seems to have slowed down quite drastically.Twitter metrics used to point to 90% of the content coming from 10% of the users.
If Reddit is similar, it makes sense to assume that many of the very active users were on 3rd party apps (to improve the basic experience, moderation etc.) so those being unavailable could put them off entirely (I know I’m using Reddit a fraction of what I once was).I believe the rule of thumb is the 90:9:1 ratio:
- 1% of users create original content
- 9% of users interact with that content - voting/commenting on it, sharing it, etc.
- 90% of users are essentially just in read-only mode
Not that I don’t believe you, but do you have a source about that? Quite literally for the sake of my curiosity/further reading
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
Seems like in 2014, a peer-reviewed study confirmed that it’s pretty close to accurate:
A 2014 peer-reviewed paper entitled “The 1% Rule in Four Digital Health Social Networks: An Observational Study” empirically examined the 1% rule in health-oriented online forums. The paper concluded that the 1% rule was consistent across the four support groups, with a handful of “Superusers” generating the vast majority of content.[6] A study later that year, from a separate group of researchers, replicated the 2014 van Mierlo study in an online forum for depression.[7] Results indicated that the distribution frequency of the 1% rule fit followed Zipf’s Law, which is a specific type of power law.
There’s a Wikipedia page about it with all sorts of links to rabbit holes you can go down!
Oh wow thanks for the reply! I’ve never read about this topic at all so this will definitely be fun to tumble down
Indeed. Not many people hopped ship, but those who did were disproportionately power users, mods, and other content generators. Because of that, I’ve heard that Reddit content generation has somewhat slowed.
I hadn’t heard that stag from Twitter, but I really do hope that is how it is on reddit and that the content generating users have begin making the switch. Sadly, I think some of reddit recent rise in popularity attracted some folks there only for views so they’ll probably stay. Hopefully their content isn’t much to miss.
I’ve a feeling you’re not wrong about attracting users who’re solely after notoriety, though I’ve a feeling it’ll only further water down meaningful content and discussion on the platform as that no longer necessarily brings with it much in the way of karma
Traffic impacts will be clearer in coming months. But in my view, the amount of noise is higher.
Looking at the popular posts and even my front page, the quality has subjectively gone down. Small subs are virtually the same, but that’s not where Reddit wants to make their money.
I have found that it is actually the small subs that are the most important. The big subs were very easily replaced as it was easy to build a new community from scratch. It’s the small ones that are difficult, and also the ones that pop up in search engines the most.
So many used the excuse to not participate or reopen with the explanation of we are too small to matter, but it is because the community is small to begin with that it is the ones that has the biggest pull back to reddit. Like for example if you search how to play taiko no tatsujin on pc it’s many hits of reddit that just pop up. Especially if you are looking for how to set up custom songs.
Agreed. The large subs content you can get anywhere. News, memes, made up stories, random questions with the same set of answer. Sure once you are already on reddit you might aswell consume it there for convenience, but that isn’t that special.
The small niche subs are what makes it unique. There is a reason why many people have come to add “reddit” to their google searches to find solutions to their problems.
Yeah, I had already unsubscribed from all the default subs long ago. That starts making me curious what type of subs long time reddit users who ended up leaving had avoided themselves and how long their list of filters blocking subs from showing up on /r/all were.
It’s not just how many left, it’s who left.
some subs are still lively. To be expected, however Lemmy has proven a viable alternative with enough activity to keep me sated, and it’s clearly still growing. Every day a new community pops up that reflects a counterpart on Reddit and the remaining niches are quickly being filled right here.
And those communities haven’t a fraction of the drama and hostility. Mainly because they’re small and new, but that’s why you move to a new site, anyways.
The UFC and MMA subs haven’t moved yet despite there being a few communities on lemmy. I still go to reddit for those.
Lack of care by sports fans is the least surprising. It is after all a group that still pays for cable and puts up with ads after all. They are very addicted to the product.
It’s the gaming and pc subs that I ended up disappointed by, but then those communities ended up having good growth here without need for Reddit mods pushing migration.
Do you know of any Lemmy communities that post gaming clips? I see a ton about gaming discussions and gaming news but none with gameplay.
Game discussions and news was all I followed back on reddit, so hadn’t searched out gameplay clip focused ones. So unaware if that exists on lemmy.
I think the giant default subs are the same but I’ve definitely noticed less activity on my smaller niche interest subs (the whole point of reddit for me) since the apps shut down.
That’s right. There’s been a downward trend with the quality of content, especially on the tech front. What’s seemingly unaffected are location-based subs.
I visit it for a couple of subs that are not active on here. For the most part it feels the same. I never really cared for the karma system, gold, etc. So switching to Lemmy for me was more about just trying to find a place not being bombarded by ads, bots, and corporate policies.
I think reddit will survive the Exodus of users simply because Twitter is so badly managed that reddit may actually supplant it for a while. However, the drive to monetize all aspects of our lives is actually getting some push back from users so Lemmy may continue to grow in the next few years.
The biggest issues facing Lemmy isn’t content though. It’s ease of adoption.
God yes the ads, I just hate how every corner of our existence is being filled with ads. And if it’s not an official ad or “sponsored post” it’s someone trying to sell stickers on their Etsy or a t shirt bot spamming all and every subreddit. I just really hope those sort of things don’t invade here.
If you have been using an adblocker for years and turn it off for a moment, you really see how fucking bad it has become. It’s almost like a dystopian movie.
But if you use an adbwockew then I can’t suwvive…
👉👈 Pwewse disable youw adbwockew…-Adblock off-
DOWNLOAD FREE RAM! RAID SHADOW LEGENDS GET IT TODAY!
SUBSCRIBE TO PREMIUM! CHECK OUT THIS MERCH!
GET YOUR DICK GROWTH PILLS! HE GETS US!
CARS MOTHERFUCKER! DONATE TO POLITICAL PARTY!
VIRUS! VIRUS! VIRUS! VIRUS! VIRUS!
-Adblock on-👉👈 Pwease…
An advertisment filled dystopian movie? That’s the exact opposite of my new movie, “Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.
I use DNS black holes, adblockers, and I host all of my own media content. I rarely, if ever, see ads.
I will just stop viewing content if I have to go back to watching ads, it’s that simple. I can’t do it.
I can’t even watch TV with my parents on the Tivo anymore. Even fast forwarding through the ads is tedious and makes me angry.
Yeah this is what has amazed me since joining Lemmy is the non existence of ADS. It feels weird that I’m not seeing constant ads disguised as posts here.
I have been bouncing between here and the Reddit official app and holy hell the Reddit app is so shockingly bad with ads that I can only manage a few mins on it.
But is ease of adoption a problem, though?
Lemmy as it is now is great. Sure it could have more users, but I wouldn’t want the “average user” here because then it will be Reddit BS all over again.
Yeah as bad as it may sound, I kind of like that it’s not as easy to get into as reddit’s official app or tiktok or whatever. A barrier to entry can help quality. It doesn’t stop all the toxic assholes but it helps slow down the onslaught of braindead echo chambers and circlejerks that reddit has turned.
Yes, it’s a huge problem. New users are confused when they first get introduced. Ive been here for weeks and I still don’t understand everything. The explanations and infographics that have been made are a mess. It’s why there’s a certain kind of user that makes up the bulk of the site right now.
Doesn’t help that the first attempts to explain it were basically denial that there was a problem and insulting people for not understanding.
I’m not saying I want or support that. I actually found it very easy to adopt. I am saying it is a hurdle in regards to adoption in regards to platform growth which is often discussed when comparing it to other social platforms.
Dropped Reddit due the API changes and dumsterfire after that with the CEO. I get they need to make money, but this was simply aimed at taking down third party apps and services.
I really hope this place will grow.
The worst thing about it is that they could have accomplished all their goals if they didn’t shove it on people with a months notice and then Spaz going on a media tour shitting on mods and users
This is what gets me. Christian Selig pointed out in a number of interviews that Reddit could have easily made this work without alienating a huge segment of their user base. I get this vague feeling lately like CEOs are intentionally trying to tank their products, because no one so well paid could actually act so dumb.
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I think he was blinded by the thought of money. When the media reported that ChatGPT trained it’s models using Reddit comments, he flipped out and rushed to slam the gates shut immediately, while telling investors he had potentially billions of dollars worth of data to sell. When he found out that Apollo app and others sell subscriptions, it’s clear from his comments that he got angry and called them all parasites. He wants to be the gatekeeper of Reddit and become a billionaire with it, but his actions fundamentally misunderstand Reddit and will trigger a mass exodus. The content creators are leaving, and while Reddit will still get traffic the content will become stale and it will be another 9gag.
Like, I’m nowhere near this stupid. I’ll run your company better for half what he’s paid
I’m absolutely convinced I could do a better job. He’s a fool
Agreed. I just can’t figure out the reason(s) they’re doing it though.
Borrowing money isn’t cheap any more. The venture capital’s that have been propping up these platforms have decided the risk is now too high, and they’re trying to extract as much of their investment as they can, by any means necessary. I think the venture capitalists see a major recession in or near future, and our battening down the hatches.
Exactly this. Most people would have caved if they had given a 1yr update period and spez had kept his mouth shut. This move screams of a knee jerk reaction to try bd suddenly raise the profit margins, and spez had no idea how the users would revolt.
I think they really expected the 1 month timeline to blow over too
I really like Lemmy better than new reddit because scrolling the front page reminds me of 2010-2016 Reddit. I hated when they added ADS and removed the NSFW subs from the front page. Everything about NEW Reddit sucked.
Lemmy fixed new reddit and I ain’t going back.
Ribbit
You can still delete manually. I sorted my comments by top and edited them to gibberish.
Some people have mentioned their posts being reverted back after those kind of edits.
I think Lemmy will, just give it time.
Ribbit
Is that right? I was under the impression majority opened back up.
Tbh I don’t really care either way, I haven’t been on reddit for 3 weeks now.
Without Apollo on my iPhone and Sync on my android, I’m not using Reddit. Lemmy filled that void. The only thing missing are niche communities. That will come with time.
I cut ties today. I had been a mod in a sub of over 3 million users for years. All reasonable folk on the mod team were gone and a huge fight broke out because I suggested that we “Try to be decent to each other” as if it was the most offensive statement they had ever heard. I have zero regrets leaving that kind of toxicity behind.
What sub was it?
I didn’t plan on naming names, but it was r/games
I’m sure it was hard to step away from being so involved with such an incredibly huge community. Good on you though.
Thanks, sadly it was a lot easier than you may think. Unless they make major changes there I can’t see them lasting.
Same story here. Just waiting on my GDPR right to erasure request to be executed before I kill the account entirely.
I hope the games communities here take off, I’m fiending for news lol
Oh God as long as we can like Harry Potter games again I’m good
I haven’t been terribly active on r/games. I’d there something wrong with Harry Potter games?
Just the usual business of the author being a tosser and people not wanting to support her.
Trueee
Thanks for taking an action and sharing the broad strokes of your experience. Like many, I think Re**it will persist irrespective of the changes – but it will be/is much worse for wear. Welcome to Lemmy!
Haven’t even had the urge to go back. Scroll trolls don’t care. I know a dude that doom scrolls antiwork to feel better about his life. Like, damn. He def makes enough for therapy and the gym.
lol I feel called out.
Fuck, me too. I got a gym membership (I’ve gone once), just need to find a therapist now.
We need Personal Trainers that also moonlight as therapists. Go to get therapy and workout at the same time.
R/ videos got clever, I love it. Thier new rule is
Only text posts describing videos are permitted, and must describe a video in detail. Video links are permitted in the comments only.
That must be interesting haha
As someone who primarily used reddit with accessibility apps (RedReader) this would have been awesome.
Sadly, reddit doesn’t find me valuable enough to even let me try to use the site in a way that is comfortable for me
Didn’t they actually doubled down and accessibility apps are exempt from the API pricing and can be used for free?
Although, if I was developing such app, I’d probably just stop doing it for free after how they’re treating the rest of the userbase, so there’s that…
When a subreddit accidentally does more to help blind redditors than Spez does.
They took my reddit is fun away! Actually disgusting imo.
The decisions that Reddit made allowed Lemmy and Kbin to grow faster.
I’ve been wanting to cut down on social media/Reddit for ages. Reddit making it a huge inconvenience to look at the site on mobile has been great for me honestly
Lemmy is a god send for me. It doesn’t have endless content, so after a few minutes and a few comments, I just close it.
I genuinely enjoy NOT having access to the endless dopamine
If everything is a dopamine fix, then nothing is.
I’m more than happy they have decided to accelerate their progression towards insignificance.
Haven’t been on since I created my Kbin account a few weeks ago. I really just miss my smaller subs like interior and home decorating, houseporn, and the plant subs. at least the houseplant and gardening communities on here are getting some steam. Oh well, I’ll live without for now 🤷♀️.
We are gardeners, we go where the sun is, and we shall plant our seeds!
The nice thing about smaller communities is that it’s more like going to the pub than speed-dating; there’s an increasingly familiar regular crowd that feels like community, rather than a focus on quick content, hoping for a spark of interest.
squabbles.io/s/cozyplaces squabbles.io/s/houseplants l’ve found lemmy/kbin combined with squabbles has covered lot of things. Lemmy has been better for nerdy stuff, and squabbles for more casual memes, gifs, and pics. There’s random stuff like squabbles.io/s/castiron
Edit : squabbles.io/s/gardening for more plant stuff.
I’ve liked squabbles.io/s/dim-lit-aesthetics
I like squabbles because it tends to be simpler, less technical than here. They need more users but the combination of the two sites is scratching the Reddit itch.
Yeah it’s nice seeing the different places making an effort to grow the community despite their size. Both places have been very welcoming and have good vibes.
I’ll give squabbles another look, I didn’t really like it when I was looking for a new place but that was like a month ago, might be a place where I browse a couple places. Thanks for the tip!
browsing in new I have seen a !houseplants but I’m not sure which instance it was on. It would be nice to see cozyplaces or something like it though.
I think houseplants is on mander.xyz
Yeah I’ve subscribed to a couple of the ones I’ve found. I’ll check out that one too, thanks :)
Yeah cozyplaces was another one I enjoyed too, hopefully we can bring it here haha
There one sub I still frequent is r/SFFPC since it doesn’t seem like they’ve really made the switch. For all else I’ve been kicking it here on Lemmy.
Trying to switch fully over to Lemmy, but missing some subs yet and still logging in there to Reddit sometimes :( but Im not producing any content there and will never come back to do so.
