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!
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.
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.
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.
Probably 50 million users and 50 million alt accounts to look at porn.
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Cool, thanks. I had suspected as much, good to have it confirmed.
White the absolute numbers aren’t so huge, it’s more about the kind of people who are leaving Reddit. Many if those are former mods or people who create a lot if content. I do think this will lead to an appreciable lots in overall quality of Reddit. Not that the quality they’re had been anything to write home about. But the downward trajectory continues.
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.
How many of those only scroll?
The Great Digg Migration was way bigger and Digg was never the same after that. If Lemmy gets a couple more big waves from Reddit, it could mean the end for Reddit as it currently is.
I still pop into reddit (with UBO) and r/all has certainly seen a massive shift since the onset of the protest
Not even close is right. As of May, Reddit had 2.02B Monthly views. I don’t think lemmy or mastodon come close to crack the top 10 yet
i thought reddit has like 30M-50M users
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.
We could get many users providing useful content thats why I recommend checking out these subs:
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)
Sure doesn’t feel like one.
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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)
Would you happen to know of a good step-by-step guide on how to create a new community?
There’s a niche sub on Reddit I have not seen yet here and I would not mind having a go at recreating it, I’m just having a hard time figuring out what the steps are because the information is in different places. So if anyone can point me in the right direction I’d truly appreciate it.
Are you on phone or PC, web or app?
Web on PC, plain browser interface, sorry I didn’t state that upfront. And thank you. :)
There is a New Community button in the header
I don’t know how I missed that. Many thanks. :D
Awesome, thanks for pointing me to the new Accidental Renaissance community! I subscribed to the old one on Reddit but haven’t looked for all the Lemmy replacements yet.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl
Lemmy has exploded in popularity over the last few weeks, that is the mass exodus that most people are talking about.
From Reddit’s PoV I don’t think that there is a mass emigration; it’s just that the most engaged sectors of the community left, so the 99% left don’t give a damn about it. Over time I predict that it’ll be a slow drain, not a mass exodus.
However from Lemmy/Kbin’s PoV there is a mass immigration. And the users are disproportionally active; for example a comm with 3k subscribers getting 1k upvotes in a post, stuff like this.
It’s a strategy straight out of MBA textbooks: Once you’re above a certain size and have a large “common consumer” base, you kick out everyone who would complain about shitty practices and exploitative behaviour. Then you squeeze out all the money you can over a year or three before the rest realize and leave.
It’s fast ROI at the cost of customer retention and long term profits. And investors literally don’t care if the company goes bankrupt as long as they get that money. Because they’ll just move on to the next company and do the same thing all over.
Interesting, didn’t know that was MBA textbook strategy. Makes much sense, however.
Brazen but unsurprising to have that in a business text book. Does that strategy have a name?
I am seeing precisely this in my workplace. A global company, bought by an investment fund for billions.
The fund cuts away anything that does not directly generate revenue, like product development, maintenance, support. So many people have been let go, the few remaining are unable to keep the ship afloat.
Fund doesn’t care because the numbers are amazing (income vs expenses) and they just want to sell before it sinks.
No care for the livelihood of thousands of employees, or the many very large customers. They will practically die, and that’s okay to the ones in charge.
Oh interesting, yeah. That makes sense. Thanks!
@anarchoplayworker I don’t have any number but I do come here from time to time when I’m on laptop. Hope there will be a good app for iOS soon.
Memmy for Lemmy is already in the App Store! Loving it so far.
@wyrd @anarchoplayworker do you know if it support kbis as well?
I have no idea, sorry!
Yeah and you can access Mlem which is pretty good too on TestFlight. And there’s WefWef which you can put on your phone and functions as an app, even though it’s really a web app. (At least I think that’s how it works. I’m not an expert in such things).
Wefwef has renamed to Vger. The sudden influx/attention has definitely had people rethinking about branding and polish now it no longer seems like a bunch of people in a basement. It’s good
I’ve found mlem pretty buggy compared to memmy so far, but hopefully as popularity continues to increase we get more options.
I think it’s more of a mass giving up on Reddit. Some people might come here, some people might go elsewhere, some people might use it to digital detox.
But the ‘mass’ bit will probably be ex mods, power users and people who cared about the way Reddit was being run - a sizeable number but definitely not a majority of users. But crucially a lot of the people who helped to provide quality content.
Despite the hate he gets, Spez is not quite as batshit crazy as Musk (he still is coming up with shit ideas for the future of Reddit though). So although I think Reddit will become a much less interesting place it probably won’t become an unuseable dumpster fire for casual users (like Twitter).
Oh and if people are also going elsewhere, where else are people going? (ie not lemmy)
Some are going to Tildes, although they remain invite only
Oh I hadn’t heard of Tildes. I’ll have to poke around and see what it’s all about. Thanks!
If not lemmy, they are probably going to Mastodon, as it is an open source Twitter alternative.
That makes sense. Thanks!
There’s kbin, which is similar to lemmy, but not the same. They’ve picked up a decent number of users.
There’s others too, but none that have really boomed the way lemmy and kbin have.
Fwiw, if you go to most of the more casual subs, particularly the meme/image based ones, probably won’t notice the lost users from reddit because most of those were already swamped with reposts via bots and karma whores. But if you were into the useful side of reddit, there’s a difference in quality and tone. A shit ton of the exodus was not only power users, but mods.
As much shit as mods get, they really are what keeps any forum from devolving into chaos and stupidity. It doesn’t matter how “power mad” people think they are, what matters is that they put the time in to keep a given forum in a reliable state. The reliability is what left with the exodus.
Moderating a forum is a skill, not an inborn talent. It takes time to develop, and by the time the mods lost from there are replaced, and they get up to speed, it’s months at least before they can start rebuilding the culture of a given forum. Even an experienced mod can take weeks to months to adapt to the culture of a given forum, assuming they don’t make the mistake of trying to force a change.
Reddit straight up killed a lot of tools as well. The bot defense bot is essentially dead. That isn’t something that can be replaced in the time the folks running it have given before they pull the plug all the way. Toolbox is alive, but lost the lead developer, and if it goes, moderating there becomes a major pain in the ass. I still keep an eye on a small handful of subs that aren’t duplicated in some form elsewhere, via things like geddit and stealth, that are having major bot issues, and they aren’t really mainstream. I can’t imagine what the big subs are like in that regard now.
Reddit isn’t going to “die”, not soon. But, as often has been said when this comes up, the reddit we knew and loved is already dead. It’s gone, and not coming back.
If people say lemmy, I just mentally include kbin. Because by and large they don’t realise people on kbin are reading and replying to their comments and probably don’t realise it’s not all just lemmy. It’s just see lemmy as threadiverse for most purposes.
I don’t think I’d call it close to an exodus. But, really that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to us if people are leaving reddit. What matters is that there’s enough people here to create a feed with interesting subjects that we can reply to, or we can create content and people will likely reply to it.
We’re at that critical mass now where the content isn’t really a problem. There’s plenty.
While we have that happening, over time as reddit do more corporately motivated rubbish to their users, they will be looking for alternatives and the threadiverse should be a tempting one.
Clearly it is not. Just watch the number of upvotes and comments in hot and top day posts.
That’s a very poor metric considering the vast number of karma farming, chatgpt, and other bots they have. Reddit admins have been caught several times and even admitted to inflating the numbers
Mass exodus maybe in terms of power users. The average Reddit user used the official client before the api restrictions. My guess is that many people who posted good stuff ditched Reddit.
Oh got it. So it’ll be interesting to see how Reddit does without those people, whether others will step up or whether it’ll just lose all that content.
No, they won’t loose all content. I think the quality will just get worse and worse depending on what you view as quality. For the average social media user it probably will be good enough, or it will develop into reposts from other mainstream platforms.
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.
It’s all relative.
For lemmy it’s been a mass exodus. I was on this part of the fediverse before all this, and it’s a fundamentally different thing now than it was. There were maybe a dozen servers, most of them didn’t have a whole lot going on. Now there’s millions of active users on thousands of servers.
That might not be a mass exodus for reddit, but it sure is one for lemmy.
