First all the bs with Twitter and Elon, then Reddit having an exodus to Lemmy (not complaining lol), then Twitch. Are we like, in an alternate self healing dimension or something?
This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.
I’ve always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn’t invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I’m probably on here too much though!
Agree with you on this! The migration was super smooth, and even tho, its still quiet small comparative to reddit… It seems to be growing quickly, and seems pretty polished for something in such infancy
Same. Never cared about Twitter, but I like new internet stuff, so I got on Mastodon. Never used it and forgot about it for years. Came back to it with all the Elon stuff and realized the instance was dead, so I created a new account on another instance to never use. The point is, like you said, Lemmy is something I will actually use if the community continues to grow and sticks around.
Mastodon has a place, just isn’t for some people. I found the same problem you had with it. Just like how conversations work better in a Reddit-like style of communicating.
I think we do have a sufficient number of users now to keep going irrespective of how reddit fares. Communities are beginning to form and even if there is no futher mass exodus from reddit, I think Lemmy will be fine and will see organic growth over time.
I’ve already noticed I’m spending more time of Lemmy than reddit since the past few days.
It’s easier to spend time on Lemmy for me because the comments are actually worth reading. Seems like the type of person who’s drawn here are actually interested in holding a conversation vs. reddit where it’s about saying something witty or whatever to get them upvotes
All these websites have almost always been net cash flow negative. They bleed venture capital to provide a service below cost in order to build a user base.
The problem now is interest rates have spiked. Rates have been basically zilch for much of the internet’s history over the past 20+ years, so sites could actually operate for quite some time on super cheap debt that they almost never had to repay. And venture capital firms would just keep pouring money into the “next best thing”.
Now that debt is rapidly becoming much more expensive to maintain, and those VC investors want their chunk of the pie back in their pockets. And they are going to extract it from every single one of these centralized services by whatever force is necessary. It’s only just getting started, you watch.
Note that they are cashflow negative because of expensive advertising features.
Twitter is pretty cheap to run for base functionality and if you open up dev console and see all of the resources Twitter is requesting its like 90% ad stuff and suggestions.
But advertising is also where 90% of their revenue comes from- so really, given the service is “free”, what is the product?
Maga hats
That’s just bandwidth, though. What about database load? A big part of Lemmy’s growing pains come from slow database queries. It doesn’t take much bandwidth to send you the content, but the server has to do a lot of work to figure out which content to send you.
Every request is tied to some functionality. Databases and storage is laughably cheap these days.
The complex queries and all the overhead features is where the real expense is. Crafting a personal, ad-optimized timelines is what’s costing Twitter the most money. The public/subscribed feeds of mastodon are incredibly efficient even on something super slow like ruby on rails.
Lemmy is having the same problem and doesn’t have ads.
Does it though? This instance has thousands of users and interactions already and is running on just few dollars a month.
It’s running on a few hundred dollars a month, if I recall correctly, and it has only about 450 users per day. (The sidebar statistics don’t include a figure for peak concurrent users, unfortunately, and that’s what we really need to know.)
Ah didnt see that increase though decentralized systems are inheritly very inefficient unfortunately
You can’t lose money forever, not as a business. What’s great about the Fediverse is that it makes social media something that can be done as a hobbyist project. Money is nice, but the hobbyist isn’t necessarily out to make money.
They saw Lemmy becoming successful, corporate mistook Lemmy with Lemmings, and decided to go out Lemmings style.
…jokes aside, Cory Doctorow has a great text about that, called “Tiktok’s enshittification”. It’s a four-steps process:
- The platform is good for its users.
- The platform abuses the users, to be good for its business customers.
- The platform abuses the business customers, to claw back all value for itself.
- The platform dies.
In my opinion it’s also the result of management being disconnected from the platform that it manages, and not knowing fully the implications of their own decisions.
Was going link this.
You beat me to it, the man is an oracle.
Really great article. I’ve been hearing about it for a while, but finally managed to read through it fully. Very well thought out and a brilliant write-up IMO.
I don’t think all that many redditors are moving to Lemmy. Judging by the stats on join-lemmy, there are only several thousand monthly Lemmy users, which is nothing compared to reddit which had tens of millions daily users
Counting methods are probably different, Lemmy stats only count users that posted at least once in the interval. I assume Reddit counts anyone who opens the site.
The Twitter exodus (which is still limited) was because all of the problems at Twitter were sudden. Huge staff cuts meant lower quality, way more bots, and of course, the owner’s mercurial impulses.
Reddit is a bit different. It’s more of a boiled frog situation. A little tweak here, a little change there, all definitely for the worse (and Reddit is going down hill) but so far nothing seismic. Even the number of users affected by the third party apps thing is pretty small because most users just looking at memes and sharing news just use the native app (my wife does).
I’m not sure whether that really results in an exodus.
Look at Amazon: it just gets worse and worse, but have people stopped buying from it en masse? Nope. It’s getting worse, but ever so slowly.
To be clear, I like it better here, but I do not want an exodus of any type. I want slow migration to help the platform grow more organically and for people to see a polished experience.
People won’t come back if they show up once, interact with this not-pretty-but-functional site and don’t like it. So I’d rather wait for the influx of users to be at a later time tbh.
The trick is to have enough of an interest from enthusiasts now to “prime the pump” so when the general population comes over there is enough to keep them here.
It sort of reminds me of the Digg exodus. Reddit was a much smaller site than Digg yet there were many instances of Digg users reposting things from Reddit since the community had quality content despite it’s small size. The Digg redesign only accelerated the migration.
I agree. A few more people will learn about Lemmy and come over, but to call it an exodus is probably nowhere near accurate. I just don’t think most people care enough. Yes Reddit will suffer. I’m just not convinced Lemmy will benefit that much.
That said, I think we will benefit in the sense that there will now be enough people to sustain some nice communities.
Disclaimer: I’m new here, so obviously talking somewhat out of my lower bode parts here.
Reddit may not even suffer if it primarily loses users that browse with third party apps or on desktop with adblock. That would be a net benefit for reddit based on average revenue per user.
That’s fair to point out, but it implies the only utility users provide to the site is ad impressions. I see a couple of reasons this is not the case.
Mods make up a tiny portion of users but are disproportionately 3rd party app users and rely on 3rd party tools. But if any meaningful portion of the mod community leaves? The remainder were going to have a much bigger job without the tools. To attempt the bigger job with a smaller workforce is a double-whammy. Their only option will be to focus on their favorite subs and elevate more members to mods. The inevitable result will be experienced mods being far outnumbered by new mods, all of whom will have to stick to tedious tasks for subs to not be overrun by spam and hate speech. It’s hard not to predict the same result as what’s happened to Twitter’s content.
Now consider nsfw content, which has always made up a huge chunk of reddit’s traffic. Moderation is even more difficult there to begin with and could easily melt down for the same reasons, even setting aside reddit’s growing distaste for it. Reddit is largely young and male and while many users may have no interest in it, the combination of nsfw imgur links going dead, moderation challenges, and the likelihood of reddit cracking down on nsfw is a combination that may cause reddit to be less attractive for many of the young, male userbase to visit.
I think your point still has merit - reddit won’t miss many of the users seeking alternatives. I would say reddit’s casual “I didn’t even know there were 3rd party apps / old.reddit.com” users are also likely to be turned off by the ultimate results of their changes.
Oh, that’s a point. Do third party apps not show those sponsored posts that look like a discussion, but are actually an ad?
RIF is Fun does not show sponsored posts.
I will confirm that I don’t see sponsored content using a third party app and RES.
I use Infinity (for Reddit), and I don’t see any sponsored posts
I can’t comment on if they do or not as I exclusively use(d) Syncpro, but there are still loads of “real” posts that are blatant marketing attempts that get posted.
I think the Lemmy userbase stands to gain much, while Reddit Inc probably won’t feel a gut stabbing loss.
I commented similarly elsewhere, but the “power user” content creator types on Reddit actively avoid r/all for being a dumpster fire. This disconnects them from the fact that there is an absolutely massive userbase on Reddit who scroll the frontpage and keep coming back to that low quality content.
When power users threaten with “if we leave who will create content?” they are not understanding that their content isn’t relevant. R/all is full of low quality reposts, and political ragebait. My own original content probably cracked about 4K upvotes at highest. It was never going to go to the frontpage. When I deleted it, frontpage users never noticed.
That kind of content is more fit for smaller spaces that have not become the self perpetuating juggernaut that the Reddit front page is.
Lemmy and other sites will gain the quality from exiting power users, and Reddit Inc won’t feel it in the way they care about.
I guess the question is: Do you care more about having a good online experience and not thinking about Reddit, or about burning Reddit to the ground? Because the later I don’t think happens from an exodus.
Oh, I’m not saying it’s not good for us (or maybe I did. Badly worded in that case). I just don’t think Reddit cares or will notice to be honest.
I think we are agreeing in high view concept, just expressing it differently.
Well right now lemmy is beefing itself up ready for a predict wave a people moving from reddit to lemmy due to the blackout. Now how many of those people stay and how many return to reddit is a different question. Few of us are moving right now, since you’d have to be involved in reddit communities more. But we will see how many people move on the 12th etc
When I joined lemmy.ml and beehaw.org, the stats on join-lemmy.org were just over 100/month.
Now it’s at 1K/month for beehaw and 1.6K/month for lemmy.ml
There’s also a HUGE list now, where as when I joined last week there were maybe 8?
Small numbers, ya, but Reddit still hasn’t done anything. I am sure July 1st will bring a huge wave of people who are still sticking with Reddit since apps still work.
I feel like reddit power users are the only ones who might switch, normal people simply won’t care. However, power users are already well aware of the coming changes, and have likely already looked for alternates by this point.
Ive seen so many reddit posts on where people are like “what’s wrong with the official reddit app, it’s all I’ve ever used”… Lemmy is much better than the official reddit experience - the issue is most niche communities that exist on Reddit have ~1-5 subscribers here, makes it kind of a hard sell.
Personally i’d way rather be in a small community filled with frequent commenters and posters than a big one where all you see is reposts and ads, however.
I mean, power users make most interesting content, so i can easily imagine regular users just naturally getting, like, bored.
Exactly this. I moved from Digg to Reddit ~14 years ago and mostly participate in the smaller/ niche communities on Reddit. I’m switching over to Lemmy and it reminds me of what Reddit used to be like.
I came here from Reddit in preparation for it getting whack… ready to make a jump to something closer to how old school reddit was. I think we’ll see a lot more people who are like minded coming over too.
@Dandylion @JshKlsn @technology I’m interested in a Fediverse Reddit alternative. I’m familiar with Lemmy as a software project, but not as a community. Beehaw is totally new to me.
What are these projects aiming for community-wise? What is needed to help them grow?
And critically: Who is paying hosting costs and handling DMCA issues?
A DMCA method, Privacy Policy and even a TOS is what is needed to make me feel more comfortable here. Right now, you have no idea what the plan is for your data (and its rentention), data collection, etc. I might dig into the lemmy code and see if I can sus it out myself if I have time.
I cannot answer most of your questions, as I don’t know.
And critically: Who is paying hosting costs and handling DMCA issues?
The hosting costs are paid by the instance host. As of now, servers are community funded. This doesn’t seem like a viable long term solution, as people hate paying, but hate ads. Unfortunately one of them has to be done.
DMCA is also unknown to me. I guess it would be the admins of the instance the copyrighted content is hosted on? however, given the fact there’s nothing stopping an instance from being hosted in a different country, similar to pirate websites, I don’t know if there’s anything stopping or enforcing that stuff? I mean, from a legal standpoint. Sure, admins might not want their instance being full of piracy, but that would be more of a morality thing.
One cool thing about decentralization is the higher costs incurred to copyright trolls. No longer can they comb through a single corp platform raising the alarm on violations, they’ll have to spend some effort searching wider, sometimes dealing with uncooperative admins, hydra effect within the same fed network, etc. I can see forces pulling in both directions, not sure where it’ll land.
Imho hosting costs, community moderation, federation politics are the larger elephants in the room. Copyright has always been just a suggestion, the huge platforms are the exception.
Some people have come up with the word “enshittification” to describe the basic cycle of modern web services.
The cycle consists of three parts:
- You make the service that attracts new users by providing what they want. Often you do that at a loss, because your goal is to gain a big enough userbase for steps 2 and 3.
- Once there’s enough users, you shift to attracting commercial interests instead – vendors if you’re running a store, advertisers or celebrities or other “big clients” if you’re a social network, etc.
- Once both users and commercial interests are hooked, you can start tightening all the rules and switching completely to profiting yourself and your shareholders.
I am under the impression that the term was popularized, if not invented, by Cory Doctorow. See his many writings on his ad & tracker-free website; https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/
Wiktionary gives him the invention credit (although its source does seem to be KnowYourMeme).
That is a spectacular definition though! Spot on!
The bestest of sources.
I disagree, we all know that any article that cites the onion is 100% infallibly correct 100% of the time
“entshittification” is such a terrible word, can’t believe that a professional writer came up with it
It’s not just tech companies like Reddit and Twitter, it seems like it’s most companies. Ever since the COVID lockdowns prices have been going through the roof, you get less for what you pay for, they’re laying off workers, and all while raking in record profits while also crying about how no one wants to work and how they can’t afford anything because of the economy. I’ve never been more cynical about companies than I have been the last year.
please can youtube be next?
I really want to stop using my google account and that’s the only thing keeping me from moving away from it.
in this day and age, you have to be really screwing your customers to get any money from investors
What’s going on with Twitch ?
They were going to ban multi-streaming. Basically most streamers stream to YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and I forgot the last site but Twitch was going to ban this so they could only stream to Twitch no matter if they were official twitch partners or not.
Ultimately all these big platforms are gonna cannibalize their userbase at some point. That’s the reason I started since 2 years archiving all the YouTube channels/playlists I care about. I already have many videos that were taken down by YT afterwards.
I assume you’re using some form of youtube-dl.
Do you have a quick script for downloading the video and scraping the data like the uploader, date, and title of the video?
Right now I use https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist
It requires a bit of technical skills to setup the instance but offers an easy UI to quickly add channels/playlist and automatically archives new videos.
If you want an easier script checkout https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate-YouTube-DL-Scripts-Collection/
You can put in a file the list of channels/playlists it videos to save and run the script, it downloads everything organized in folders including subtitles and video descriptions.
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This is the first time I heard of odysee, so I just went and looked, and oh my god who picked the “lady fungus” monstrosity as a help avatar. 0.o They could’ve at least made her a cute mushroom or something instead of fleshy finger-thing, what the hell.
I have no real opinion of it yet otherwise, except that I’m automatically wary of anything touting blockchain at this point.
Youtube does need a viable competitor or three so badly, regardless.
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It’s an alt-right cesspool, even worse than youtube.
Don’t be too much critical of it, it’s also decentralized in the same vein as Lemmy. There are a lot of dissident voices who have been chased out of YT who can now only talk on Odyssey.
Technically Odyssey is just a front interface to LBRY which the decentralized video streaming platform behind it. I run LBRY directly on my phone. It’s a bit clunky but essential for finding non censored information. Just ignore the alt-right channels.
I came to the conclusion long time ago that any healthy community should not suppress speech no matter its political orientation. In a decentralized system it should be natural to find people from all political spectrums those at the extreme opposite of ours. Reddit became an outright racist and bigoted platform. The few anti capitalist communities left are kept there to keep some semblance of neutrality so the people who support the status-quo keep believing in this fake reality. And as history shows, bigotry and racial hatred is the escape trap of the capitalists when the reality of their exploitation starts to be apparent in society.
That being said, I understand that some instances on Lemmy for example would be more picky on what kind of speech is allowed, since anyone can create his own instance. The ecosystem as a whole allows all voices to exist.
I thought this was already forbidden if you’re an affiliate / partner (i.e. have a subscribe button)?
iirc it’s only partners that have exclusivity deals. affiliate lets people subscribe to your channel, while partner contracts are mostly standard across the board, aside from the obvious exceptions (significantly large channel streamers).
they were also going to ban sponsorship overlays, but backpedaled on it the next day.
Let them self destruct.
I’m just glad to have found this place. 😂
Although there’s a lot of protesting going on over at Reddit right now, I really don’t think it can be compared to twitter. 6 months from now, I doubt things will be all that different at Reddit. A small number of users (relatively speaking when compared to their total number of users) will leave, and that’s probably it.
Depends on whether Reddit deletes NSFW content once they go public
That’s my guess. I started on old Reddit 10+ years ago, but now use only the first party apps. They’re clunky and sluggish, but good enough if you just want your doom scrolling fix.
I’m glad this drama alerted me to Lemmy, though. I probably would have joined one sooner had I known about them.
But… why
idk, if all the 3rd party apps can no longer afford to keep running, they’ll either need to shut down or switch to Lemmy, and those apps have many many users
honestly would be pretty insane to open up RIF (or whatever 3rd party reddit app you use) and there’s an announcement saying this is a Lemmy app now lol, I wonder how many users that could pull
I’m fairly sure that much traffic would smother Lemmy
They could make their own instances, but idk how much money those apps pull in
honestly would be pretty insane to open up RIF (or whatever 3rd party reddit app you use) and there’s an announcement saying this is a Lemmy app now lol, I wonder how many users that could pull
Is that legal? or if not illegal, is that allowed by the play/app store?
Seems against the rules to just build up a user base for Site A, and then flip a switch behind the scenes to now serve all data from Site B.
What they can do, is just put a notice to download their new LIF (lemmy is fun) app when you open the RIF app. Kinda like what Tweetbot did. When you opened their app, it talked about getting a refund, or asked if you wanted to transfer your pro subscription to Ivory for Mastodon.
Don’t forget that Reddit has invested almost nothing into good moderation tools, and most medium to large subreddits use third party tools (that use the API) to moderate.
This means moderating a subreddit will either be extremely difficult (by using the official apps and website), or moderators will literally have to pay reddit to moderate a subreddit. For larger raids or groups of spambots, those costs will quickly add up.
I think things will be very different on reddit after the change, although still not entirely comparable to twitter.
Reddit has announced they are making an API access exception for apps devoted to accessibility. They will have to do the same for moderation tools.
The reality is that nothing is really dying and nothing is really changing. Twitter is still fully operational and other than a small hit nothing happened. Twitch already did a step back. For Reddit we’ll see but only a really small percentage of reddit is using third party apps.
From everything I have observed, businesses are hunkering down for a recession in the next fiscal year. It explains the lay offs, the penny pinching, and puzzling decisions that look like business suicide.
For services that are free for users, advertising revenue and investment fund raisers are the only thing keeping them afloat. With banks like SVB getting seized by the FDIC, it’s starting to scare investors. Advertisers are seeing the writing on the wall that people will stop spending as much as they used to. We are also probably seeing jacked up pricing across the board because businesses are taking what they can before it’s gone.
So what’s left? Squeeze users for money. Additionally, shed users that actually cost them money and these tend to be power users. The question, which everyone seems to be assuming is a foregone conclusion, is if this shedding strategy will end up killing the service. In reality, we don’t know but the idealists would sure feel good if someone else ate their market share.
I’m just glad that federation is picking up steam in the social media space.
I hope self hosting sites take over free speech for the win tech bros need to keep taking the L
Facebook dies due to privacy concerns and misinformation. Twitter under threat because Elon. Imgur just deleted their NSFW content. Reddit with its API pricing. Twitch executives also getting greedy. Youtube has been going down for years.
It feels like we’re seeing the natural life-cycle of social media companies in real time.
Discord’s been going very downhill for years, and recently made a wider known awful change (although not too impactful). Wonder when they will be going too far with things like “Mee6” and “Nitro”.
TikTok might be the next
One can only hope.
I very much like the community aspect of TikTok; is there anyone working on a Fediverse alternative to it? Or perhaps adding its features to PeerTube?
PeerTube could, but it needs more people to develop the Shorts feature, as well as proper client for mobile.
TikTok is literally owned by China.
