I decided to take a peek at Reddit to see what kind of activity is happening, a good handful of the subreddits I am subscribed to are still super active with posts and commenters.
There’s quite a few news articles on the front page regarding Spez and the blackouts, I am surprised those articles are even still up for people to see.
The comment section is filled with people saying how they should just kick the mods out of the dark Reddit’s and take over, ofcourse these posts are heavily upvoted…
Perhaps there is some AI activity going on, I mean it’s kind of easy to do in this day and age. You just prompt an army of AI bots to defend Reddit, and try to keep users engaged.
I am so happy I found Lemmy, and I am so happy that there is a comfortable level of activity. Sure it’s only a small fraction of what Reddit is activity wise, but it’s so much more hearty and welcoming.
Reddit has just turned into one big toxic mess. Lemmy reminds me of what Reddit used to be 10 years ago.
I’m sorry but the protest was a complete failure that accomplished nothing. The real successful protest would be making a sub on here and redirecting their uses to it.
Lemmy went from a few thousand users with very little activity to 100k+ with constant activity. It was a massive success.
We don’t know yet. If it’s sticky then I would wholeheartedly agree. But if activity drops to pre protest levels in a month then eh…
Yeah, we don’t know yet. On the one hand, it’s still the early days of (some) people leaving Reddit - and who knows if they won’t go back.
On the other hand, the API payment structure and the shutdown of 3PAs hasn’t even happened yet. Even people who are completely oblivious to the situation but who are using a 3PA will have to decide if they’ll be able to deal with the shitty official app, if they’ll just stop browsing Reddit on mobile, or if they’re willing to take a look at alternatives.
For a website with over 800 million monthly users, 100k is nothing, barely even a rounding error. You can say it was a success for lemmy, but as far as the actual goal of the protest it achieved basically nothing.
As Lemmy grows reddit will shrink. Reddit might always be around, but that’s the same crowd that uses Facebook. Stragglers be damned, many users found a new home and that’s a big win in my books. The rest were shown how shitty and incompetent the management is at Reddit, and it’ll only get worse until they lose more and more users.
And when Lemmy becomes compatible with the wider activitypub network, we’ll gain another 9M users. (Its also closer to 200k now I believe.)
I wouldn’t say it accomplished nothing. I clearly motivated a bunch of people to start investing in other platforms. Platforms like Kbin and Lemmy now have a lot more mods and developers contributing. It gave alternatives MUCH needed attention. Mos of us had never even heard about these platforms a few weeks ago.
And that’s something that’s easy to forget once you’ve made the change. Uprooting something you use daily, to move to a new platform which feels new and different, takes quite a bit of mental effort and requires you to accept some anxiety, as you wean yourself off your habits. But when the power users go, and the new place becomes more familiar and understood, the rest will follow eventually as every step becomes easier to accept.
I deleted my reddit account years ago and lurked only because trying to interact there was a cesspool. Learning about the alternatives and seeing how well behaved it is over here on lemmy is a breath of fresh air. Sure there isn’t as much content yet but it’ll come. Reddit wasn’t an overnight success either.
I feel after the 3rd party apps get killed off we’ll start seeing a slow trickle of users after the initial flood once the ones that stuck around start realizing the content that’s left in reddit has become low effort bot posts and spam.
