Is there any evidence that Reddit has suffered at all from the exodus to Lemmy?
Was there even a mass exodus? I largely avoid Reddit now, but I do kind of doubt that they’ve been hurt in any meaningful way by all the protests and people leaving…
I personally visit Reddit less than I did previously. And from the subs I was part of there does seem to be a drop off in new posts that are not the usual begging for help or complaining about how “x” (not the artist formerly known as Twitter) sucks just to bitch.
So there is still a lot of traffic there and content created, it is just more slanted to the mindless type of content than it was before in my experience.
Profit wise, absolutely not. However, they are probably losing their most technical users. Generally the ones that have some sort of tech background or knowledge and see through their BS, and who are also much more likely to support open source alternatives (and third party apps) and have an easier time figuring out the fediverse. Maybe they care about that, maybe they don’t (probably don’t).
The point is not an overnight collapse. It’s gradual rot.
Reddit (Twitter, Facebook…) all exist because they created a monopoly around their service. Reddit through their incompetence created a competitor. They will have to work so much harder to make their ends meet now that there are alternatives. Worse yet, the viability of Lemmy will spawn other efforts.
Look at Twitter. Between Mastodon and Bluesky they are eroding. They have to beg advertisers to stick around. At the same time there is a bakers dozen of other efforts underway all creating a new landscape. Twitter was the king and now they are rapidly becoming one in a pool of microblogging services. They will wither.
Reddit just popped it’s monopoly and will also fail.
Lemmy right now is too… well not clumsy exactly, but it does feel vague with all these seperate iterations like .world or .ml and they are seperate and require seperate logins etc so that’s not handy at all. People are used to ease of use, this is where (for now) Reddit remains king.
Lemmy does have a problem where people don’t get the idea behind it. But it’s not required to have seperate logins for instances which are federated. This very post I do with my @feddit.de account and when you check other user names you’ll see users from other instances as well.
I can’t login to .ml, that fact is confusing. You say federated and I think I get that, but I think to most people not in the IT world, that’s basically “abracadabra”.
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 doubt there’s been enough people moving to create an impact. I used to visit Reddit multiple times a day but now it’s once a week if at all. When I have looked all my old subs look no different really.
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.
Yeah, I got all my accounts permanently banned and the hacked app I was using was deauthorized. Tried using the mobile website and noticed all those problems also. Only use reddit now when it comes up in searches but I try to avoid it even then.
That’s actually what some of us were predicting would happen. We would expect a metric like “quality posts per user” to follow something like the 80:20 rule - 80% were created by 20% of the users. If those users and mods were skewed in the direction of the strongest detractors/leavers, you’d find the average quality would indeed go down.
The right-wing troll posters have gotten bolder and more prominent in subs I used to visit that’s for sure. They used to get heavily downvoted and people used to rebut their garbage, but much less so now.
The app will continue to work if you are a moderator of any subreddit… I’ve got a few subreddits that I created myself, with only me in it, and because of that I can still use the app.
Sync was the first app that looked nicer AND improved usability for me, after almost a decade of RIF. So I paid for the dev version to support it, and don’t regret it even with what happened.
No, of course not. If you’re using Lemmy as a “protest” instead of thinking that it’s a better platform, it’s totally ineffectual and you’ll go back to using Reddit sooner or later. Personally, I think that the fediverse is a more compelling idea than the traditional internet, so I’m sticking with Lemmy for a bit in one form or another.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to protest by using alternatives, and then going back if there’s real change. (naïve, maybe)
Initially really wanted Reddit to take a hit so that they would be forced to reconsile, but I became disillusioned quite quickly. Compared to the fediverse, it is rotten; Spez is only the mouthpiece for their internal chess game.
He probably spoke the truth, when he claimed to previously having been the only one defending the third party apps.
Agreed, though these aren’t mutually exclusive. Lemmy as it stands is objectively a better platform in terms of mobile user experience now that third party apps were gutted for Reddit. So switching, at least for itself, is a protest using this platform while Reddit either dies a slow, painful death or takes strides to unshittify their stuff. Will probably end up using both if Reddit gets it together but that’s unlikely.
Honestly, yeah, a big part of why I started using Lemmy is that the Sync developer moved to developing a Lemmy app. I’m still active on Reddit, I’m using both, but as soon as Sync for Lemmy comes out and I can uninstall that absolutely cursed official Reddit app I’ll be here WAY more often.
For sure the quantity of posts is the same, but the quality has gone down.
You can just feel it all over. My frontpage has little to no good topics anymore. I used to peruse for at least 30 mins easily losing myself. I barely get 5 now before getting irritated with the low effort material.
I deleted my account and have gone cold turkey. It sucks not googling stuff with “reddit” at the end because honestly a lot of great answers to things are there
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