While I don’t expect there’s going to be any meaningful impact on Reddit once the dust settles, I do think this will bring a lot of new users to the Fediverse.
Reddit losing a few hundred thousand users is a drop in a bucket given their user base, but it is a significant boost for us.
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This is going to work like the Mastodon migrations. It will come in waves as Reddit does more and more shitty stuff.
Most likely, and this works well because it allows time for server capacity to grow and for wrinkles to get ironed out gradually. Fediverse would have a hard time absorbing millions of people all at once, but a gradual trickle of users allows things to grow organically.
Fediverse does not need to have million of users. Fediverse only need enough users to mature the technology and ecosystem.
Agreed. The community will grow naturally over time as things continue to get better and better.
I completely agree, the total number of users isn’t really that important. The three things that count are having enough users to generate interesting content, developers who can develop the ecosystem, and people hosting instances. As long as these three things can be done sustainably then the Fediverse will be around indefinitely, and will likely outlast all the existing commercial platforms.
Too much rapid growth can also be a negative because it can disrupt the existing culture and normalize negative behaviors on mainstream platforms. When the growth is gradual then new people are more likely to adjust to the existing community norms.
I think things will probably slow down a bit again after the initial euphoria is over, but yes, I think this has brought a lot of attention to Fediverse alternatives.
The same happened with the migration to Reddit from Digg. It wasn’t all overnight, some people switched early as Reddit got more users, and for a while people used both, etc.
But I think things are in a pretty good state (especially if 0.18 fixes some of the UI issues), I see no reason to go back to Reddit.
Mainly that as more of the contributors and technical users switch to Lemmy, there’s less of what you’d want to see on Reddit anyway. This is exactly what happened to Digg over 6 months or so.
That’s a good thing, and after slowing down instance admins can focus on improving the experience for existing users.
Reddit blackouts were the kick the Fediverse needed to reach a critical mass. Fediverse sites are already starting to appear in Google search and join-lemmy.org is the third result when you look up “lemmy”.
I’m seeing it the same way. We got a critical mass of not just users, but smart internet types.
However the platform is still very raw. After the migration slows, it’s actually beneficial to have some time for the devs to patch things up to a level more suitable for normies.
Then, with a solid core community and a functioning UX, we can begin to aggressively advertise the Fediverse via coordinated campaigns. It’s not going to happen overnight but there’s a clear path laid out before us.
also laymen (normies) need to get used to the rules of how distribution works and not to expect a megacorporation to interfere
That’s never going to happen. Capitalism runs too deep and the average person is too dumb. But we need to push them in the right direction
I completely agree.
Thanks, /u/spez. Couldn’t have done it without you.
He might be a shitty CEO but he’s a GENIUS marketeer for friendly-fire campaigns.
New users is not a good metric. Many people will create accounts just to check it out even if they dont stay.
I’ve made multiple Lemmy accounts on different servers.sure, but it’s still an indicator of growth and some percentage of users does stay active
Wow, reading all of these comments gives me hope for social media in the future. I’ll be honest, I’m a reddit refugee I just migrated a few days ago.
And I’ll tell you guys this place is amazing compared to Reddit. I never realized how much of a cesspool the site was until moving and seeing people actually talk to each other, have conversations.
I had given up on social media because it got to the point that every post I made was downvoted into oblivion and if they weren’t harrasing me, they were fighting one another. It was such a toxic site full of cruel, caustic, spiteful, hateful people and I’m sure I’ll see the cracks in Lemmy once the honeymoon period ends but right now I’m really liking social media for first in well, ever.
Tl;Dr you guys have a nice place and I’m glad to be here.
I think it will make a noticeable impact to Reddit. And maybe the initial impact won’t look very big but when a large group suddenly sprouts up somewhere else, and that group is largely the active, community driving members, thats going to have an impact.
The individual instances doesn’t really matter. What is actually shown in the picture is that fediverse grew by 200k users.
It actually does matter for the individual instances because the amount of content and interactions grows regardless which server users join because servers federate with each other. This is a fundamentally different dynamic from commercial walled gardens where each platform competes for users with every other.
