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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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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 ;)