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!
No and no, it’s just hype IMO. But the trickle of new users seems sufficient to make Lemmy a more interesting place to be and a more viable platform long term. That’s already quite good if you ask me.
It’s a small but very specific, active minority of the total reddit pie. This is why Reddit won’t go away. They have enough of a core audience that doesn’t care about how bad the official app or web page may be. It’s just good enough for them, which is all they need to scratch their reddit itch.
Seeing growth across a few Lemmy instances over the past few weeks has been fun.
What’s also fun is the few times I’ve been back to reddit to look at something. Each time I ended up seeing people in the comments with just terrible attitudes. And I thought to myself, “I’m weirdly glad reddit is still around because it gives people like you a place to congregate that I can avoid.”
You have put into words the exact feeling I have been getting while looking at anything on Reddit recently.
Maybe the shift I’m seeing is purely confirmation bias, but it feels like the same thing I’ve seen with Twitter, but to a lesser degree so far
I’ve noticed reddit in general become more and more negative for years now. The majority of comments are complaining or taking a piss on something.
When the app I used to access Reddit, Joey for Reddit, went down yesterday I moved to Lemmy. They were working with Reddit to setup paid API access and Reddit shutdown their access mid negotiation. I already had a Lemmy account but didn’t use it til now. I know a lot of other Joey users that did the same.
So Joey was willing to pay for API access and Reddit still shut them down?
That’s not really surprising or unexpected though. Most businesses won’t just let you access their paid product for free while in negotiations.
Yes, there’s been a mass exodus, but while that term sounds like it means most reddit users have left, it just means a large group of them did. Certainly not most or all.
It’s happening in waves. Evey time a big change happens, a group of users see that as the last straw and leave. This killing of second-party apps was my the last straw for me, while most users probably don’t care enough to do that.
For me as well. Third party app was the reason that made the use enjoyable. I’m curious how it will be when sync for lemmy is online. I think Mastodon and Lemmy will both grow, but it is organic growth so it will likely take years. Anyway I already like the community more here.
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!
Not a mass exodus. Call it a brain drain, if you will. The churn includes those who posted or were moderators.
That’s key, it’s quality over quantity. Those who put a lot into Reddit were also going to be those disproportionately hit by the API changes. Enough of them make the jump and it degrades the quality of Reddit and his a big effect on Lemmy and the alternatives. By the next time Reddit messes up, and they will, the next batch of escapees will find a much more fleshed out set of alternatives, which will make leaving there and staying here easier. Rinse, wash and repeat.
We’ll never get the absolute numbers Reddit has but that’s the kind of aim of a corporate entity that wants to grab as many eyeballs as possible so they can mine the data and serve ads. That’s not what the Fediverse is about. All it really needs is the critical mass of people to make it viable and I think we’re already there.
By the next time Reddit messes up, and they will, the next batch of escapees will find a much more fleshed out set of alternatives, which will make leaving there and staying here easier. Rinse, wash and repeat.
I don’t think that even matters from a business point of view. Even if people aren’t leaving, the problem is that Reddit is not a place new people see as valuable after all the bad press. If they don’t grow, they fail.
Much better choice of words - and as the intelligent conversation and content creation shifts services, eventually there will be a tipping point.
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.
Also a lot of moderators who decide to stop or at least reduce their moderation activity allows for more crap.
In terms of overall users, probably not. In terms of valuable, knowledgeable and hardworking users? Totally.
Take r/AMA for instance. The place was a gigantic draw for Reddit as a space for trustworthy, verified celebrity interactions. The entirety of that work was done by volunteers who have since left that work behind. As such, the place literally can not function as it was.
Another example I saw much closer is r/piracy. Despite what astroturfing bots and Spez Stans would have you believe, Reddit absolutely wanted that sub opened because of what a huge draw it is. Just looking at what they did is enough to prove that. They removed the top mod, manually un-privated the sub, then removed the next top mod for continuing to protest before installing their own. The place is open now and working “normally.” Despite this, there’s really no one knowledgeable left over there. I looked recently, and I found a lot of highly-upvoted, really awful advice. Like, some borderline dangerous stuff.
Yeah, the real r/piracy is now here on the Fediverse:
They’d been preparing for the eventuality they’d have to leave Reddit for a while, foreseeing the day Reddit would throw them to copyright wolves and shut down the sub. Though I doubt they had “Reddit imploding” on their list of possible reasons to leave, all that prep worked out really well.
That was fun, watching Reddit admin twist and squirm and repeatedly fishflop over r/piracy until they got their scabs in permanently. Like you I wouldn’t touch the Reddit sub now, and don’t recommend anyone else trust it either.
Arrrrrrrr, thankee lad
What kind of dangerous stuff? Like holding their sword in their mouth as they climb rigging with the sharp side towards them? Not taking all of their vitamins?
After 10 years on Reddit I’ve made the jump to Lemmy. There’s the odd Reddit link I click on when doing a Google search
Same, after more than a decade I kinda floated in limbo for a bit after Reddit is Fun was killed, but finally decided to just make the leap to Lemmy. No idea if it’s going to be the place that replaces Reddit, seems a little too messy, but I’m tired of every social media becoming trash after everyone gets comfortable using it and they start start trying to squeeze more money out of everything. Given how Reddit had managed to hit the sweet spot of a company that doesn’t pay for its content, doesn’t pay for its self-regulating communities, and has hundreds of millions of users whose data it sells, it’s honestly shocking that they managed to mess things up so much.
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
Since I’m forced to use the official app, the subs I mod are going to shit. The hidden tools and cluttered interface impose a real challenge to properly investigate reported posts and users.
So now I just do the bare bare minimum and basically flip a coin when wondering to remove stuff. And boy oh boy it already shows.
Are there any good mod tools for the activitypub based alternatives, or is it equally bad here for now?
I don’t care I like it here, fuck that place
My sentiment exactly
Reddit has been dying for a while.
Subreddits like AskScience, that it was famous for, are now shells of what they were because the real scientists who put serious time into that subreddit decided they were done wasting that time. This situation is at least a year old, it predates the protest.
You can see this same dynamic across the site. Places that were once vibrant are slowing down, the flood of posts becoming a trickle. Bots are making most of the posts on big subs. Smaller subs that used to hop with human posts are where you can see the truth. It’s not normal for a sub with 500k subscribers to see 10 posts in a week. You see that more often, now.
The truth is that Reddit was always small potatoes. It feels like a big deal when you’re there, but it’s not. The real user numbers are on TikTok, and Instagram, who each have up to a billion users depending on where you get a number. Reddit is barely there, as social media rankings go. There are people with more views on a YouTube video than Reddit has users. Reddit is an also-ran social media site. It’s really not a competitor. It’s just easy to steal from, because text.
Reddit has long had a bad reputation as a shitty, toxic place. Habitual Redditors don’t know this, not really, you have to talk to outsiders. People aren’t that interested in coming to Reddit, they just want answers to their Google searches. It’s not a recipe for growth.
Now the true power users, who provide those answers, are moving away from both Reddit and Google, speaking of a company who best watch its step. A lot of people are starting to talk about Google search the way they talked about Reddit search, which never did get good.
Reddit doesn’t have that far to fall, is what I’m saying. There isn’t a mass exodus, though. You’re seeing a late spasm from a steady tide that has been going out for years. 10 years is a looooong fuckin time for a social platform to be around, they start to rot after the first or second year. Reddit has been rotten for some time.
I see a lot of people, here, and elsewhere, trying to act dismissive about the protests, or about how important the moderators were, but the site’s entire business model depended on hundreds, even thousands of people doing a ton of real labor for absolutely free. If they’ve decided to take an “everyone’s replaceable” attitude and treat volunteers like employees, they’ll pay. It’ll be their IPO sagging down to a couple dollars as they limp to bankruptcy, or purchase, but they’ll pay. I swear I’ll have to buy a couple shares as a collectible.
I’m putting it down as yet another well-earned reminder that you have no business building anything that matters to you on a platform that other people own, it is worth the five minutes a day that it takes to post on it, and no more.
Do not make a job of it, ever, unless that job pays you and pays you so well that people think that you’re really a stripper and your job title is just a cover story. “Social Media Manager”, gotta be code for OF, bro.
That’s how much money you should be making doing labor for a multimillion-dollar corporation. It was fuckin Conde Nast for a hot minute. If the boss can just take your mod and your community away, then you only ever worked there, for free. You were never building a community, you were building their property, for free. You have to stop doing that, and you have to stop presenting it as a virtuous act, unless some fundamental things change.
If you’re going to put a lot of work in for your own reasons, then you owe it to yourself to do it under your own control, or not at all.
I see an opportunity on the Fediverse to start from the old model of internetting and jump off to something new that just looks old, where it makes sense to put that work in, but for now it is what it is.
Reddit still lives, like Theoden cobwebbed in his throne, but nobody will come and banish Wormtongue. It’s still gonna take years for that old man to die.
Fuckin Yahoo isn’t anywhere close to dead. Neither is Digg. Well, maybe Digg.
The thing we North Americans are always a bit too arrogant about is if Reddit somehow gets big in India, or Brazil, then they don’t need us, and we’ll never know because we don’t speak the language. So it’s gonna take time for Reddit to fuck that up, they got options.
But don’t be too dismissive about the idea of “mass exodus”. Digg lost most of its userbase, literally overnight, and it was because of shitty ads. If the only app you can use now is the app that sucks and serves lots of shitty ads in your face, that will do it. People aren’t that habitual. It is very, very easy to leave a social site.
I quit TikTok over one shitty post that was my last straw, you just delete the app and forget about it. Yet TikTok is social media heroin. Reddit is a bunch of dudes yelling about shit that isn’t worth yelling about. It is much easier to quit. The phone app era means once you delete, it’s gone, and it helps to break the cycle. It can and probably will happen, 90% of the remaining users will drop it like it’s covered in bedbugs, they just have to stick huge unskippable ads in everyone’s face, and they’re fucked.
I just don’t think that is going to make the splash you’d expect.
But no, no mass exodus, not yet. I’d keep the popcorn bowl close by if I were you, though. I will not put it past them to turn an IPO into a fail state.
I think the idea of all the content as their property is what’s fucked up to begin with. Legally, now, that would arguably be the case, but that shouldn’t be the case. It’s a body of knowledge constructed by millions of people and the legal system’s attitude should be that Reddit the company can fuck off if they just want to exploit it. Their role is to facilitate and foster that platform, not to seek the biggest payday that can get out of it. Same as the many people running Lemmy instances now. Law’s basis is in benefit to humanity and what’s happening with these corporate social media platforms does not benefit humanity.
Not sure what subs you visit but this is not at all representative of my experience. Subs are as busy as they’ve ever been, so much so I hardly bother commenting to just disappear into the noise.
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.
I seriously doubt reddit has seen any significant drop in traffic or unique visitors. Looking back at some of the subs I frequented, they’re all business as usual. The mods all backed down the second that they had their mod status threatened, as expected. Almost all of the users I saw that said they were leaving on July 1 when their 3rd party app stopped working are still there.
I deleted my account and moved here, as clearly a lot of people did, but it’s a drop in the ocean and that’s not even to say that the people that moved here have stopped using reddit.
I consider it a win nontheless, people like me or you, who were actively engaged on reddit and did “what felt right” (deleting comments and leaving reddit) are probably the kind of people that might make for good conversation and good content (be it links to cool stuff, art, or just rants).
We might get some “bad apples” (trolls, botters, and such), but all in all, I see it as a far healthier alternative to grow gradually from a core of users that was either here from the start, or that moved to the Fediverse to take back a bit of the “old web” feel, where people come together to share cool stuff and ideas.
RIP Aaron Swartz, we’ll keep the old reddit spirit here on Lemmy.
I can say that since Joey shut down my reddit use has dropped 95% at least. I hardly looked at reddit on the computer unless I was searching for an answer to something. I tried the reddit app, it runs like ass on my phone so I’m pretty much done spending time on that site unless I’ve googled something and the answer is in a reddit thread.
It’s not a mass exodus. There was a sizeable influx of people from Reddit to Lemmy/kbin, sure, but that’s measured in the (low) hundreds of thousands. Reddit has hundreds of millions of active users.
The reality is it’s not even close to a mass exodus, not yet.
Yeah, but a sizeable increase is still very important. These days, Mastodon, Lemmy and so on have decently sized communities everywhere so that you don’t feel like just talking to yourself and a couple of friends anymore. And that’s kind of a tipping point.
“Mass migrations” happen slowly, anyway. A lot of people are very hesitant to leave big social hubs just because of the value there is in having so many people around. But in the end, you have to. We can’t stay on these proprietary social networks forever. Social networks and communication channels in general need to be non-proprietary, decentralized and open, without the ability of companies manipulating what you see and don’t see. And without risk of losing everything when the one big company falls. It’s a fundamental problem of all proprietary social networks.
Reddit lost it’s content creators to lemmy so you can expect a sharp decline going forward at reddit.
While true, I would like to point out who is leaving: The vocal community.
When you see a reddit post and it has 1000 Upvotes and 50 comments, than this means that a couple thousand people saw it, over 1000 votes on it (up and down) and 50 made a comment, and some even commented on a comment. Most people are lurker and are just passive and enjoy the contribution by OP posting it, people curating it by voting for it and giving the topic traction by commenting on it (maybe even provoking another thread of the same topic or adding another thought in another post in the next hours/days or turning it into a meme).
The people, who are leaving - as far I as I see it - are the vocal active people. Not the lurker. So it might not be a mass exodus, but those who are active and vocal about their unhappiness and who are actively searching for alternatives and are now here on Lemmy, are the heart of the buzzing culture of reddit. Those are the ones who bring in new posts, vote actively and comment massively. Not the lurker. So who is left behind on reddit is mostly lurker who are now missing a good part of the active community who commented and voted for them. And I think this is visible on reddit and can accelerate reddits decline.
Its not the mass of the people that is important, but the engaging force that is driving the discourse in a community by being active and vocal.
And I think Lemmy got a good heap of those people.
Well said. Even dome Reddit lurkers said they would comment here to help grow the communities more.
I doubt Reddit has hundreds of millions. For ‘big social media’, Reddit was pretty niche until recently. I’d be surprised if they had more than a hundred million.
But that aside, the users that are leaving Reddit are their most important ones. Mods and the people who spent the most time on Reddit. This definitely has the the potential to cause substantial harm to the platform.
i actually assumed the same thing but just looked it up and was very surprised at the number of estimated active daily/monthly users
fully agree w your second paragraph tho
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.
