After all the BS from /u/spez?
I think a lot of the general reddit user base is still out of the loop on it or just doesn’t care about the drama enough to make any kind of change.
Many users don’t log in every day, and might just sign in to look up answers to specific questions or to read individual subs. Those folks are a lot less likely to have been following all the updates through last month and before since so much was announced across a variety of subs.
Because Reddit has been our online home for years. It’s where our communities are, where are online friends are, it’s become home. People have spent thousands of hours building communities there, as a labor of love.
Unfortunately I agree with you- the home is on fucking fire and unless a monsoon spontaneously erupts we should get the hell out before it burns to the ground.
Why? Because the whole reason reddit is even worth visiting is the posters.
Sure, the people in charge of the whole infrastructure that supports the act of posting and reading posts are making destructive “business decisions”, but until now they’ve largely been basically a bunch of invisible, nameless, inconsequential people as long as the proverbial lights stayed on for my ten years on reddit. They were technically in charge of stuff, but any time there was drama around reddit employees themselves, I had to go to places like /r/outoftheloop or /r/ELI5 in order to figure out what in the actual heck the inexplicable hubub was all about.
To me, that means they’re NOT what reddit is, they’re just the people who make it possible.
The folks who do lights and sound at a stage play are necessary for the play to function at that particular theater, but if they were the only ones doing anything there, noone would show up and stick around.
Inertia is a horrible thing. It took a LONG time for most of the niche communities on reddit to get “established” enough to have semi-regular content. Inertia being what it is, it will likely take quite a while for the same to happen here and it won’t be exactly the same thing. It may be better and worse in some ways, but it WILL be different and some of us were quite comfortable with what we had. So, yeah, hope, because losing something you like and care about, watching it get gutted, wrecked, hobbled, and ruined is not inspiring or fun.
That being said, I’m seeing very encouraging things happening here so far, so this might become my new home.
Reddit is profiting a lot from the network effect. By now this reddit is a known brand, has a lot of content is already there, has a lot of people (especially non-technical users) are already on reddit, and they’re there to stay.
All the other reddit alternatives, including lemmy and/or the fediverse suffers from:
- Bugs (I love lemmy, but gosh, have you seen how buggy and sometimes unresponsive it is?)
- The complexity of “servers” (don’t get me wrong, federation is the way to go IMHO, but it is confusing to non-technical users)
- Lack of content
- Lack of users
Everybody is talking about the Digg exodus, but nobody is saying that it didn’t happen in a day, it took ~1 to 2 years.
The complexity of “servers” (don’t get me wrong, federation is the way to go IMHO, but it is confusing to non-technical users)
I’ll admit the technical stuff is probably the most off-putting. Most major social media got where it is by being idiot proof. The whole set-up will need to be much more streamlined if they want to really dip into Reddits user base.
I think the solution is a central registration which selects a random server from https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
For example, join-lemmy.org should do this, IMHO, without any technicality. Just transparently register to random server, with a curated cross-servers pre-selected list of subscriptions. Once users are distributed across servers, people will just recommend friends/family to join their own server, then the centralization of join-lemmy.org won’t become an issue. But I might be utopian.
I don’t think a lot of people who are in the know have any expectation of this turning around and going well, but I don’t blame anyone for hoping it will. The existing communities that are uprooted from all this, not to mention the headaches of signing up for new platforms and all that entails, aren’t exactly ideal. Avoiding them from being necessary would be fantastic… alas, that hope is indeed slim.
