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Lemmy enjoys growth as developers pivot from Reddit amid API charging controversy
(alternativeto.net)
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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I checked a few days ago, and almost all subs I frequented look as before. Maybe a little less content than before, but even midsized ones have more engagement than my whole Lemmy feed.
So I saw this on mastodon ... and it's a little weird, perhaps not unlike the cultures that migrants develop in their new homes.
There's a tendency, I think, to overestimate how bad the "old" platform has become since "we" left. In reality, it's not nearly that bad, if any different at all, and those of us not inclined toward this overestimation go and check the old platform from time to time and get confused as to where all of this "hellscape deadness" is.
I think we can all imagine to some extent why this might happen. But I'm writing this just in case it's healthy to point out that it need not happen, and that the thing that's actually changed, though you might not know if you've arrived here recently, is this place, which is a whole new thing!
A story I think of along these lines is what Steve Jobs did when he went back to Apple in the late 90s. Back then Apple thought they had to beat Microsoft to win. Thing is the company was close to dying with huge debts etc and were never going to do that (still haven't come close today). But they were so enamoured with their past to the point of having a museum of all of their old products. Jobs had the museum removed, told everyone that for Apple to win it has to stop thinking about Microsoft because they'll never be destroyed, instead Apple had to win by doing its own thing, and then, super contraversially for the time, had Bill Gates invest a bunch of money into Apple and appear on the big screen during a keynote to rather audible "boos".
It doesn't matter what Reddit's doing or whether they're doing well. It matters if we're doing well ... as cheesy as that might sound.
It matters, because smaller communities don’t exist here. I try my best to fill !folkmetal@discuss.tchncs.de and !crpg@discuss.tchncs.de, and I simply gave up on /r/malazan, but those communities (and others) are already small on Reddit.
Medium, tech-affine subs like homeassistant and selfhosted were fine to move. Game-specific (outside of AAA) subs and niche-subs are simply dead, the average gamer won’t use something as complicated as Lemmy, and niche-subs are too small. Hell, not even the 4X community exists here, leave alone a sub for any specific 4X. There’s a Strategy community for stuff including 4X: No posts in weeks. It’s sad.
It’s also why I will stay on Reddit for the forseeable future. Lemmy will be my main home, but the users are on Reddit.
I get where you're coming from ... but I'm inclined to push back on this. I don't think it's sad. Reddit has many users on it and lemmy has substantially fewer. Not every interest is going to be covered by the amount of people here. It's just a reality right now.
However convenient it is to have everything on one platform or one place, I think it's important to recognise how much of a weapon or shield that is for big-social monopoly companies. A fractured and more open or diverse internet is, IMO, a good thing. It's also less convenient and staying in contact with people only on reddit makes sense. But that drop in convenience is worth it, IMO, and I don't think it's sad.
Just do what you can on Lemmy for now and wait for the users to make their way over. It will take a couple years but as long as the quality here is better, people will slowly but steadily make the transition. And it won't be hard to beat out reddit in user experience, we all know how far they have fallen and it's only getting worse after they IPO.
This is the exact sort of thinking maegul was attempting to debunk..
Not really, I already knew reddit was shit before I left. I just didn't know of any alternative. I'm also not suggesting that our success is reliant on reddit's failure.
I'm in full agreement with him, reddit hasn't changed much at all, but Lemmy has reminded us that there could be something much better again.
I don't think he was debunking the idea that reddit might eventually fall, but rather that they would fall overnight, as some people here like to imply. Also worth mentioning that Microsoft and Apple are generational tech companies while reddit is a social media platform that's much more susceptible to rapid decline.
But it was not for me. It was amazing. I was not in any default subs or major subreddits (well, ELI5 is major, but I treated that as read-only), but my experience with Reddit was the best of anything since I first went online in the 90s. Lemmy is the first thing that comes close, but Reddit was nowhere near shit. The only reason I’m here, instead of there, is because Spez is some dumb fuck.
Fair enough, I get that. For me personally, reddit seemed to get worse starting over 7 years ago, so by now I felt the experience was significantly worse than previous eras of reddit, even in smaller subs.
But as much as I loved some BBS forums, I'd have to say Reddit was definitely better than them, so yea early 2010s reddit was probably the most fun I've had. Until now.
My experience too. So often reddit would just attract a toxic or at least unattractive culture that would kill conversation and make threads unreadable. It seemed to get worse over time, though I didn't get serious about measuring that. Doesn't of course mean that there wasn't plenty of good stuff there or still isn't, but it, in recent times, felt diluted.
Not that I'm any sort of gospel to be taken seriously or anything ... not really, my point was about focusing on this place doing well rather than focusing on reddit losing or dying, in part because Reddit may not die any time soon. Or it might but not pass all of its users onto the fediverse. But yea ... if the quality of people, culture and, slowly but surely, features, not least of which being the whole FOSS, non-profit decentralised freedom thing, people will surely come just as they have with mastodon.
There are people on Mastodon?
There a LOT more people on Mastodon than there are people using Lemmy.
My Mastodon feed averages one post every two or three days.
Mastodon is what you make of it. It doesn’t do the work of filling your feed for you. Less convenient, but you get to see what you want to see, not what someone else thinks you might want.
What I want to see is still hanging out on Twitter.
You’re doing it wrong.
Three people I followed on Twitter made the move. Two of them eventually moved back. Everyone else stayed. That's where the discussion is.
Rock and stone with us. !drg@lemmy.world
About my 3 least favourite things in gaming: first-person, shooter, multiplayer ;)
Love the pep talk, and the sentiment behind it.
I loved Reddit, spent at least an hour a day there and often much more, but I'm loving the Lemmy too. In many ways it's better, and one of those ways is that it's so much smaller — a much higher ratio of thought vs tired memes and dumb jokes and slick burns.
I'm wondering how much of that is bots.
Reddit is trying to build up to an IPO, so it's not far-fetched to think that Steve Huffman would have seen the exodus coming, and supplemented traffic with bots so the drop in engagement didn't seem so precipitous.
I think the thing that is going to suffer most is comment quality. Unfortunately (or for Huffman, fortunately), it's not really something that can be quantified.
I think we will see a slow decline until the platform is basically walking dead. It'll function, and maybe there will even be apparent engagement, but the quality will be nothing like it was before this whole debacle.
Yeah, if those are bots, then Reddit should shut down and compete with OpenAI instead, because their product is about a decade ahead ;)
I went to some threads on Reddit yesterday. Bloody hell there a lot of shit to wade through before getting to anything useful. It might be more engagement, but the amount of low-effort garbage comments turned me around really quick.
Not sure what kind of subs you are in, I don’t see that in mine.
I saw this thread of ELI5 with amazing comments explaining a part of quantum physics
Yeah mate you found one good comment. How much shit did you read before you found it? These comments are highlighted because they’re the exception. I’m not interested in wading through tons upon tons of “this” and “came here to say this” and “you win the internet sir” before I find a good comment on quantum physics.
None, because I was never in any subreddits where people talked like that.
This was a great comment, but also one that was on my front page when I went to Reddit for this thread.
But again, everything else is also the same as before, your examples make it sound like they are the kinds of subs I always avoided, none of mine have anything like that. But I guess you think I’m a shill or some other kind of liar, so whatever.
I don’t think you’re a shill. There a plenty of normal people on Reddit, enjoying the content like before. While I despise Spez, I can’t discount that they have created a product that people want to use.
But there are also plenty of people who, like me, saw a decline in the average quality of content over the last x number of years. A move to the lowest common denominator. Comments like your example were more frequent years ago relative to today.
Lemmy feels like Reddit when I joined 11-ish years ago. That’s why I’m here now.
Edit: for what it’s worth, I also didn’t go to the default subs. I spent a long time curating to my tastes and hobbies, to the point where I even blocked /r/All from Apollo so I didn’t have to see the day-to-day shit. But it didn’t help. My hobbies deteriorated into memes and low-effort shit every day.
Then why do you accuse me of faking things when I tell you what I experienced?
Lemmy has people get super pissed if you don’t trout the company line. Don’t agree that threads will be the worst thing ever? Insults and downvotes. Don’t think Reddit sucks now? Sometimes similar. Got defederated by beehaw? Tons of insults.
The subreddits I was active in almost all had less toxicity than Lemmy. Tildes.net is for when you want people that aren’t assholes. Lemmy might some day be that place, once everything is settled, and you can choose which communities of people you want to interact with.
/r/europe and /r/de were the only places worse than Lemmy.
Mine didn’t. My frontpage right now on Reddit has 2 memes out of 100 posts. Both from gaming subs that tend to have a healthy mix between meme and non-meme stuff and the memes are rarely low-effort.
I didn't. You posted a comment and I didn't say it was fake?
Then why are you here?
Sounds like a difference of opinion
Me: "Not sure what kind of subs you are in, I don’t see that in mine", followed by an example.
You: Yeah mate you found one good comment. How much shit did you read before you found it?
That’s exactly that. You are the kind of toxic user I’m talking about. There’s no reason to attack other users just because you don’t understand them.
And I’m still here because luckily there are also a lot of users who aren’t assholes, and I can block those who are.
That’s called a question. Wasn’t an attack. You’re the one who went looking for an argument.
To date, you’re the only toxic user I’ve found on Lemmy, so well done.
Beat you to it, see ya.