It can go one of a few ways.
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Apart from the few subs that remain offline, it’ll basically be back to normal. Those that do remain offline indefinitely just get forcibly reopened or recreated by admins, especially huge subreddits like /r/videos. Smaller ones just get redicted to /r/topicnew or some other creative name.
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A lot of subreddits and more importantly moderators and users leave the site permanently. In order for this to happen however, there’d have to be a consensus alternative, which there isn’t ATM. Otherwise, these communities are pretty much lost forever unless the mods put a message to go to X alternative service in the “subreddit is private” banner. Tbh, I don’t think people are gonna stomach losing years of their lives in an instant so they’ll just re create subreddits unless the mods provide an alternative.
No matter what though, they’re not backing down on the effective removal of the API (still leaving the sneaky clause “you can pay us if you want but it’ll be a king’s ransom” for AI, even though they can just trawl the web manually lol). They’ll probably announce some crappy customization features to hoodwink those who don’t know what an API is and lie to them and say it’s “API v2” or whatever.
I just honestly don’t know how it’s going to shake out and I’m scared im going to lose these communities. I don’t give a single solitary fuck about Reddit the company anymore, and I never did really. I just hope all of the subreddits find a new home and don’t just shrug their shoulders and say “welp, guess that’s it guys”.
Squabbles seems to have not hit user critical mass. Tildes looks like it’s doing well.
The Lemmy + Kbin fediverse seems to be taking off like a rocket and has the best overall chance IMO of becoming the home for the best parts of Reddit’s community.
Squabbles
Isn’t this developed by one person, isn’t open source and forbids NSFW in general? That is never going to go well.
Tildes
No mobile app and no
ActivityPubso it’s a very specialised. Additionally I don’t like the UI at all and I’ve read this in multiple threads here as well.Lemmy + Kbin
Both are show the same content as they are federated so it’s up to who prefers what really. I prefer Lemmy, but anything is fine.
re Squabbles: yes, hard agree.
re Tildes: yes, also hard agree. The invitation-only method of growing the community also is draconian and it’s going to hit all the scaling problems a traditional site does.
These and others are why you’re finding me with you here in the fediverse. I am with you mi beratna.
These and others are why you’re finding me with you here in the fediverse.
I’ve been here for a week and it already feels like home!
I think people underestimate how much people are unlikely to go back to an abusive relationship when they’ve found one that isn’t. Reddit was a bad habit. I am actually going to be contributing to communities here once I figure it all out. The worst that could happen here so far is not getting any comments or votes which is fine by me. On reddit I could post a picture of my cat and someone could comment “insert random derogatory term” for no reason lol! So far so good here.
It really depends on how you interacted with Reddit. A lot of my engagement was with smaller subreddits that sometimes had user bases that weren’t necessarily the most tech savvy. I’m not sure how long it took some of the older people on r/quilting to find it, but I’m sure it will take them longer to find the Lemmy version.
Obligatory random derogatory term!
Your mother…she’s older than you!
I feel this and I’m in the same camp
I’ve been here for a week and it already feels like home!
Two days and same!
Yeah. It really reminds me of reddit a decade ago. I hadn’t really realized how much it’d changed before now. Reddit slowly went from a feeling of community to me just sitting isolated and scrolling numbing content. This feels so much more alive.
Yeah, seriously looked at Reddit alternatives when I saw a post from a big sub about going dark and how they were considering moving to tildes - but then found it was invite only. Seems silly for a million+ sub to migrate somewhere invite only
I reckon a lot of the platforms popping up with closed ecosystems will stagnate after a while. ActivityPub is brilliant and I hope more platforms adopt it!
and forbids NSFW in general?
Funny enough, I’ve seen people assume Lemmy also forbids NSFW. I think they just never found lemmynsfw.com, which is basically the access point to the porniverse (you’re welcome btw if you found it here).
There was also the thing with Beehaw banning that one other instance with Loli, which might have been seen by some who hadn’t even thought of NSFW content at all as “oh, porn not okay then”.
The main problem with NSFW content in Lemmy is that it’s almost exclusively in some media format which effectively tends to put a huge strain on the system, be it technical difficulties or storage space in general.
If the lemmy platform wants to survive, NSFW content needs to be allowed but the technical difficulties will probably take a while to be fully resolved.
That’s not the only instance that allows nsfw even. The one I’m on seems to allow it if marked as such, though it’s not really for that in particular, and there’s a second furry instance that I’ve seen pop up recently with a pretty big user overlap with the one I joined that’s explicitly for nsfw.
I’ve been fairly active both on Squabbles and here. I think Squabbles looks pretty nice and it’s easy to use. I can see myself using it at work to keep up with news, light banter, etc. precisely because of the lack of NSFW, or sharing content from there with my parents or teenage kids without worrying that they may land somewhere that’s going to make them think I’m a degenerate.
I want to add, that my wife has been a “scab” throughout all this and has been active on reddit, trying to show me memes and such.
The content she’s been showing me has been stale, old stuff I saw back in 2020. Same recycled jokes, same memes. Reddit is in a mode of hard cope right now and I doubt it gets better if we don’t return.
My wife was on Reddit for about 9 years when she got hooked on TikTok about a year ago. In her words, Reddit had become boring. She still checks the local community sub, but that is about it. Just worth pointing out that Reddit is facing pressure from two ends. A lot of the more casual users, and the popular content creators, are on TikTok and other video centric platforms. Reddit can’t compete there, as much as they try. The dedicated users they did have, those interested in community and discussion, well Reddit just angered much of that group.
Prior to the blackout, I was angry with Reddit. Since the blackout I’ve taken a step back and realized how much garbage Reddit is filled with (ads, shitposts, promoted content, etc), and how much I want to find something better. Before the blackout I was planning to quit Reddit out of anger. Now I plan to quit because, as my wife said, Reddit is boring and I’m excited to explore what comes next.
On the 3rd meme recycle people wil get bored already. It probably takes less than a month to happen, as long as the “community strike” continues.
I want to add, that my wife has been a “scab” throughout all this and has been active on reddit, trying to show me memes and such.
Seems like grounds for a divorce.
I kid of course! My girlfriend is staying off Reddit, but she’s definitely missing it and hasn’t found a good substitute for her mix of subreddits yet. It’s especially rough since twitter’s gone downhill, and that was her other main scrollable content.
My husband deleted his account in solidarity even though I think he doesn’t fully understand the nuances of the issue
NTA divorce immediately
For the first 12 hrs or so it was just a bunch of as reddit posts. Like 20 pages of it and a few political
While I’m enjoying my time here and I’m honestly shocked with the amount of engagement so far, I just don’t see the “fedaverse” ever gaining any mainstream traction. It’s unintuitive and the barrier of entry is way too high. Even googling “Lemmy” doesn’t bring up useful results.
Something like squabbles has a better chance for mainstream appeal, but it would need a miracle as it’s only one duder
That being said, I’ll still be here!
Honestly, the lack of mainstream appeal is part of why I like it.
Just remember - as content is generated SEO is naturally going to improve, which will start to bring people into kbin/lemmy via Google.
As people spend time here marketing types will start to notice. Shortly thereafter we will see bots. To me, how we as a community handle those bots will be the real “does this experiment survive” test.
Absolutely. It’s only a matter of time before someone sees the value in the information/data that is here and begin indexing the entire fediverse/site and working on SEO for it.
There are countless examples of indexers for GitHub for example, if you do any searching for questions related to coding. Pretty much every issue and repo has been indexed.
When reddit first popped up, posts from it came up in search results very rarely, now it’s pretty much at the top of many searches, since it’s a bastion of knowledge and community groups.
It’s really only a matter of time if things do go well here.
Me too. No large corporations guiding the communities and more open discussions can be had without fear of being banned.
more open discussions can be had without fear of being banned.
Not sure about that. I saw a post today about lemmy.ml’s admin, who’s also one of the main lemmy developers, banning people who said something bad about China for “orientalism”, then doubling down in it in the comments. Apparently mod logs for any instance can be accessed by any mod of any other instance. Otherwise I wouldn’t have even known. Not sure how I feel about using a service developed by someone so toxic, who’s also in charge of a big chunk of user accounts.
If you dont like the moderation here you can use a different instances. Thats the main reason why Lemmy has federation. And our job is to build this software, not be perfect moderators who somehow make everyone happy.
And if I want to participate in a community that’s hosted on lemmy.ml I’m still under his jurisdiction. Besides, someone this banhappy being in charge of the development doesn’t fill me with much confidence. Nothing stops them from implementing some hidden change that prevents sharing something they don’t like.
Not sure about that. I saw a post today about lemmy.ml’s admin, who’s also one of the main lemmy developers, banning people who said something bad about China for “orientalism”, then doubling down in it in the comments.
yeah when you get used to reddit sinophobia (which is a product of their “policy” department that’s aligned with the atlantic council and other quasi-government think tanks) anything else feels like oppression.
Even googling “Lemmy” doesn’t bring up useful results.
It’s not helped by the fact that it has the same name as a famous musician. Googling for Lemmy just brings him up — the Fediverse doesn’t show up unless you scroll down a ways, if it even shows on the front page at all. Same with Tildes and Squabbles, both being already existing words. Branding is important for recognizability, and “Reddit” has the advantage of being a unique name.
I’d rather it not have a big mainstream appeal… feels like every time I start to get into something the normies show up and start ruining it. So far I’ve been enjoying what I see here and am interested to see what happens.
This isn’t going to be a great migration. More of a great fragmentation.
Which is what should happen in my opinion.
Let small communities be small, let them govern themselves.
As long as they aren’t too small. There’s a critical mass below which they’re too empty.
Fragmentation / Federation is honestly the right path.
agreed. definitely looking forward to different flavours across the instances.
Ends? Its already over. You, me, and many who have replied here have moved on. Reddit isn’t going anywhere but its just another site many of us will slowly see as irrelevant or uninteresting as the weeks and months tick by. For a short while in my past, DeviantArt was crazy cool. Reddit had a good run. Is Lemmy the crazy cool thing now? I dunno but I’m certainly enjoying it for the moment.
Personally, I will only be going back to Reddit if I need help with some specific thing and I can’t find it in Lemmy anywhere. And only for that thread.
I think it’s a matter of communities. People would stay on Reddit because of top communities and top quality content made on those communities. As long we have some form of aggregations of users making great content here on Lemmy as well, we’re good imho.
It would not crash and burn but rather be messy and decrease in quality gradually over time. Sort of like Twitter.
Digg still exists, so I have no doubt that reddit will continue to have its rotting corpse propped up and picked at, even after a lot of its biggest contributors have left the site
Digg doesn’t even look like any sort of user-genetated content anymore. Same news layout of something like The Register or the Verge
In my view this isn’t the end of Reddit, but it is the beginning of the end. This situation will probably pass, but the lemmy devs and instance owners have already gotten useful feedback about how to handle situations like this, and what kinds of things would help lemmy and the fediverse grow. The next time something like this happens (and there will be a next time) they’ll be just that little bit more ready.
Although for me specifically, I don’t actually care too much if Reddit dies. I’m happy as long as there’s a community here. The best thing that seems to be coming out of this situation so far is that many subreddits are now getting lemmy community analogs for people to move to.
I want reddit to die. It had its day, and what we have now is a poor reflection on what it was and what it’s supposed to be. Change is a good thing, it leads to improvement and making things better.
I used to feel the same way, but the more I think about it, I want Reddit to linger on so it can soak up the lower quality users and content. This will help keep communities like Lemmy more focused and useful for users who are interested in more than just mindless scrolling.
Gone downhill ever since Aaron left RIP. I think if it dies it will be slow and sad, but probably for the best. The model of putting all the power into the hands of some greedy company isn‘t working well for internet communities.
I think you’re going to know by one metric. Quality of content over the next ~3 - 6 months. Whether subs stay or go is one thing, that’s been part of Reddit for the 12 years I used it. What would get folks to leave is when the communities they are interested in aren’t supplying content.
So if you lose some lurkers, that’s not gonna matter because they didn’t post anyways. If you start losing power users, who regularly feed your community content, what’s going to drive you to stick around? If you ask me, I think the fact we are even having this conversation means Reddit is losing in this equation.
deleted by creator
I’m a fellow Sim Racer… I used to frequent the sub daily prior to nuking my account a week or so ago. Would you mind sharing the new community you found? I’m yet to find a replacement on Lemmy :)
MIle wide but inch deep is a good descriptor of a lot of subs these days. For instance, Formula 1. 10-12 years ago when it was more of a niche community you had hardcore fans there with a rich knowledge of the history of the sport. As it grew in popularity the quality of the content decreased. These days there are threads reposting fashion photos of the drivers with hundreds or thousands of upvotes and comments, which ultimately don’t mean anything. I can think of other subs where posters started sharing their fan art or creations and eventually everybody was doing it instead of having intelligent conversations.
Same here. I’ve begun actively searching for communities forums, lemmy, etc that make me want to participate outside of lurking.
Your point about the depth of content/conversations is so true. The number of times you’d see the same post over and over again. Then dive into the comments for the top comments to be highly predictable copypasta or “unpopular” opinions that were actually super common made browsing very unenjoyable.
If it’s like mastodon, most people will get bored and move back to reddit. Lemmy will grow marginally, and be more ready for the next stress test.
There will be other reddit outrages after the ipo, and lemmy will be more ready for migration. Repeat. Hopefully there’s a critical mass one day, but there’s no guarantee.
Personally I’m not moving back. It’s a nice change of pace for me being here. I’m finally being more productive with my life now that I don’t have Reddit.
For me, it’s no more reddit on mobile but I’m not blocking it any time soon. If it’s a Google result, so be it, there’s still useful content over there.
This is what most people fail to understand. The information that has amassed on Reddit is important, yet they turn so much of it to private, some indefinitely. A proper solution would be to permanently be read-only, and have it be very easy to see “hey, new posts are now on Lemmy, feel free to post there” so that you have a permanent cripple to Reddit’s userbase, and you don’t burn the library to “stick it to the man”.
r/datahoarder is working on archiving everything: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1479c7b/historic_reddit_archives_ongoing_archival_effort/
so that should be covered at least.
I think this is a good solution until the info can be transferred over.
I think we’ll see a temporary “return to normalcy” after the protest finishes and most subs come back online. But come June 30 and the end of third-party apps, we’ll see a bunch of users come back to Lemmy/Kbin again.
In a way, this seems like the best way of driving things. The protest has raised awareness and got a ton of development work going, and then there’s going to be a respite giving instances time to prepare themselves for the second surge.
I think we’ll see a temporary “return to normalcy” after the protest finishes and most subs come back online. But come June 30 and the end of third-party apps, we’ll see a bunch of users come back to Lemmy/Kbin again.
Knowing corporate, reddit is playing good cop/bad cop with app devs right now. Apollo and RIF had huge targets on their backs for being popular, profitable, and developers who aren’t afraid to speak out.
meanwhile over at baconreader there has been radio silence from the devs, largely because i think they are cutting a deal with reddit for a much better rate in return for knuckling under. pricing terms of course will be under a NDA
I honestly hope that some kind of community remains here
It will. I’ve been on Reddit 16+ years and I have no itch to return or reopen the app. Meanwhile I’m getting nothing done for work because I have Mastodon, kbin, and lemmy open. The sticky/addictive power is here already.
I’m an old head Reddit user like you. Are you feeling like Lemmy is feeling like the early days of Reddit. Smaller, more of a community feel?
I’ve been with Reddit for 10 years, and Lemmy feels like what Reddit was around 8-7 years ago. Reddit front page posts used to be in 3-4 digit upvotes max before they changed the vote counting mechanism. Lemmy is already having 3 digit upvoted posts with hundreds of comments. My complaints of Lemmy are purely technical, and hope they get resolved before people get frustrated enough.
I think the missing element for fed sites is creating a level of experience that works seamlessly for users that are not tech savvy at all. The really big genuine innovation that Reddit made was bridging the gap between “the internet” and “regular people”, which granted access to an enormous wealth of information that more tech focused sites aren’t ever going to be able to achieve because those totally non technical users DO have a shit ton of other knowledge and value to bring.
The Reddit site design was terrible when I first started there. I didn’t know there were other subreddits.
Can you browse Lemmy without an account? The vast majority of Reddit users have no account and view the front page
Can you browse Lemmy without an account?
Yeah you definitely can, I have a few other instances ‘Community’ pages bookmarked so I can go and check them out if my main instance is down. Is read-only and you can’t vote but that’s not really a big issue.
More attention means more open source developers, biggest effect in QA, so hopefully soon.
I definitely agree that lemmy needs some polish. I can’t really recommend it in its current state but I’m definitely having fun here
Yeah I’m definitely satisfied here, but when I tried getting people to migrate here and they responded with what bad experiences they had, I don’t even feel like trying to convince them. Not everybody wants to be patient with a beta platform, look past it’s shortcomings and work to make it better. Most people want what is already working, and I don’t blame them.
Ooof yes! The “lemmy post” mantra is really sticking for me and it has being and simple to do that here , scary but like accelerating. Never dared to participate on reddit and now here is so fun to so. Only in time we will now how thing pan out but here , in lemmy, is fun. Hope to see you guys around.
We are really happy that you are here and participating! Cheers, my friend!
As a few people have said already, I think it’ll slowly become more crap and alternatives will slowly bring in people who get sick of it.
They’re hoping for IPO and once that’s done, they’ll be much less forgiving when it comes to cash grabs. I can imagine them doing things like getting rid of old.reddit, not allowing the hiding of suggested posts, ads which are very targeted and intrusive.
I saw an article on the official Reddit Inc website talking about the use context in advertising, where advertiser’s can change their ad based on the context of the thread. It doesn’t say how they’re implementing this but I could imagine a situation where they put ads directly into threads. Either way you’ll start to see ads using wording which mimics the subreddits you’re in or the comments you write.
I have the feeling the reddits decisions are just going to get worse as long as they can get away with it.
Yeah, honestly whether or not they back down or some solution is reached regarding the current situation, they will not stop aggressively monetizing users. A lot of veteran users will leave, some will stay or come back eventually, but I think pretty much every veteran user will be gone permanently if they get rid of old Reddit.
Yeah for sure. One thing I was thinking is that old.reddit and lots of the third party apps don’t include new features Reddit put out (I think the API didn’t include stuff like chat etc.) So they also could not want third party apps cause it might get in the way of people adopting new features (power users using apps that didn’t have those features).
I’m voting for #1. Even the subs that remain offline will be replaced.
But there’s a caveat-- I think Reddit will start to suck more quickly than it has, and, without some core mods and content providers, will become pretty much a shell of itself in a few years. Maybe it’s before it’s public; maybe it’s after.
Yeah if the whole Netflix thing has taught us anything it’s that people don’t want to change and will put up with being treated like absolute garbage to remain in their comfortable space. Reddit will be fine. But I do hope enough people leave and stay here to start a new thriving community long term.
I think you’re wildly overestimating that timetable - over on that site I’m a member of a sub where you need intimate knowledge of the subject to moderate it effectively (and because of the nature of the subject it gets a lot of trolls to put it mildly). With no community mods that sub would become a cesspit within days, as would subs that are currently the focus of the alt-right, such as science, LGBT subs etc. It’s going to be a bin fire if the community mods leave - you’ll feel so dirty you’ll have to take a shower after every visit to your previously favourite subs…
I was also a mod over there (recreated the same community here, but it’ll take time to fill in if it ever does). In that sub, despite well over a million subscribers, less than 200 people wrote the valuable comments. If a sizable chunk of those 200 leave, then the sub dies. And several wrote to modmail about the fact that the sub did not participate in the blackout and that they were done with the sub (and frankly, I don’t blame them, I’m also out).
A million members doesn’t matter if the couple hundred experts pack up and leave.
Yeah this is what I keep thinking. Most people don’t contribute at all, and there’s “power submitters” who do most of the posts and top comments. With them gone, who’s actually gonna make content for people to view?
Hard agree. A few years back I was a member of a local subreddit that only had one mod. It was small enough that they were able to keep up with spam/moderating. Then one day it started getting brigaded by one of the racist subreddits. One of the many ones that had an unrepeatable name (variant on a racial slur) that’s since been banned.
We later found out that sole mod had gone camping for a few days, so there was no one to remove all the explicit racism and ban people. They immediately cleaned up and notified admins when they got back, but I can see how quickly a community can turn awful if you don’t have dedicated mods.
You’re talking as if mods are hard to find. Everybody on Reddit knows how mods powertrip, and if given an option many more will fight to fill those positions.
It will be no problem at all to find mods, what will be hard is finding good mods. You’ll have a lot of people who have 0 experience or are just genuine assholes moderating
I mean, if the quality of content on the site currently is any indication of how things will look like going forward, I think maybe ditching reddit will be easier than I thought. it’s wayyyyyyy more reactionary than usual, though I think there’s some 4chan-originated pot-stirring going on. still though, it’s not a pleasant place to be right now.
you cant really return to normalcy from this, but i dont think most users care. whenever i get into a casual convo about the fediverse online, the general consensus from people is ‘yeah reddit isnt going to die, i’ll stay on reddit for my communities’. so if the majority think reddit isn’t going to die and continue using the site, it probably wont die! it’ll just go back to normal with a few million less users (which actually isnt that much for a big site) unless spez hilariously fucks up
really the fediverse is just a lot of people who like tech at the end of the day, not the average web user
I agree, we’re getting an insane amount of hate on our sub for remaining restricted indefinitely. The general users do not seem to care about 3rd party apps or that Reddit can just bend us over at any time.
Unfortunately yeah :/ a few people I’ve talked to support the blackout but have never heard of Lemmy or the fediverse and presumably have no alternative
It’s going to end with a relatively small reddit exodus with most returning to reddit in a few weeks. People are lazy, and will concede to the API changes just like they all did with Twitter. Remember when Musk took over and made all those dramatic changes heavily monetizing the platform? Everyone was crying how Twitter will die and that they were all quitting. Well guess what? Almost all of them went back to Twitter anyway and now use the official app just like Musk wanted. Reddit will be no different sadly.
I’ve been off Twitter and on mastodon for a long time now so take this with a grain of salt.
November changed mastodon forever. It’s 5-10x more active with a much broader userbase. Sure it’s gotten quieter than it was in December, but it went from ‘weird nerd twitter’ to ‘small social media’.
The events of this month have brought lemmy from ‘alpha demo of activitypub groups’ to ‘weird nerd reddit’
I think that those who are most passionate about this situation, and are sticking to their morals, tend to be are more active group and the power users who are actually the backbone of reddit. On reddit, I post a lot, I comment and discuss a lot, and I participate in a ton of communities. I offer a lot of expertise in the niches I am in. I am not going back without a 3rd party app compromise. I think many like me feel the same way. Those who just consume on reddit will probably return.
Reddit is different from Twitter. You stay in Twitter for famous accounts, not for the communities like Reddit. If enough of people (especially mods and power users) actually move to another place, Reddit will slowly die. The community-based approach of the fediverses I think works well with immigrants Redditors
i don’t disagree with your point, but want to add that twitter did take some minor damage from their changes. notably, npr still won’t post to twitter and i’m sure there are many dead accounts like that.
i imagine the platform is damaged from stunts like this in terms of quality content and posts, but probably not enough to make much of a difference for most users. and honestly, media has never been able to help themselves with twitter - i can’t imagine news media will ever stop with the low effort “let’s see what idiots on twitter are saying!” obsession that gained critical mass in the 2008 election.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter-government-funded-media-label
