I’ve seen many comments and posts regarding the API fiasco on Reddit, with the claim that there will be a huge influx of users when that happens. I’m all for it, but I find it hard to believe that the average or even above average user will make the effort to switch.
The only thing we can do is wait and see. It’s only three days from now. My personal belief is that there is definitely going to be an influx of new users, but that number won’t be too big or unmanageable.
I think the influx will be on the 1st. People are gonna try to fire up reddit on their fav app, it won’t work, and a good number of them will do something else.
A portion of those will look for alternatives. Most of those people will probably end up here. I don’t think it’s going to be a gigantic number or anything, due to how many “gates” there are to go through, but I’m expecting the biggest single-day increase so far.
I agree. Reddit has been trying to sweep all this under the rug, and as pathetically transparent as their efforts are they have worked well enough that a lot of “casual” users probably have no idea what’s coming. When the 1st rolls around and they suddenly can’t use Reddit (as far as they know it) then quite a few will be looking for somewhere else to go.
I mean a lot of them will probably just grab the official Reddit app, but 30 minutes using that ad-infested garbage pile may dissuade them from sticking with it.
They can sweep whatever they want wherever they want to sweep it to. That doesn’t cure early-stage internet cancer.
Unfortunately, filthy casuals tend to grin and bare early-stage cancer on the internet. I dare say most of us who cared have already made the switch with the minority choosing to hang on as long as possible with the more tech-savvy casuals coming over in the first few days of third-party apps getting killed.
It won’t be instant, but quite a few 3PA users will find it incredibly difficult (maybe even impossible) to make the switch to the official app; it’s just that bad. Hell, I can’t imagine using Reddit without the crutch Apollo provided.
I find it hard to believe that the average or even above average user will make the effort to switch.
Not really impossible if said users “dopamine fix” gets cut off. Which may happen (or not, depending of how intense it is.)
Nobody knows the future, but speaking as an instance admin, the ideal scenario would be a continued steady growth and not a huge sudden influx 😅
I think it is great here on Lemmy but tbh, the content is limited. My enjoyment here is partly watching it develop. Im like 1 week in and I can see it growing day by day. I don’t think that is what most eventual users want to experience. They want it all set up with the party in full swing.
I love the conversations here. It’s just normal people talking. No amateur comedians at the top of threads with their crappy jokes. It’s so nice.
Yes this is like Reddit was back 10-16 years ago when I joined. Much better discussions here than Reddit now. I’m honestly pretty happy where everything is already, I’d like to take the growth nice and slow so that we can stay in the good zone longer. Both digg and Reddit were too banal for me towards the end.
Thank you for your service. Would you be interested in testing my modern UI theme for Lemmy on your instance? It works with Lemmy 0.17 and 0.18.0. You can get the CSS files from the releases page.
Hey! I have had a few questions about themes. At this point, I am asking users to apply non-mainlined themes through userscripts - I am wary of taking on extra responsibilities in maintaining compatibility for additional themes. Sorry about that!
But all themes that get added to the main lemmy-ui repo will always be available out of the box on lemm.ee as well. The repo is open to contributions, so you could have a look at that option if that’s something you’re interested in.
I already made a proposal to improve the default theme, but my issue was closed without any response from the developers. The required changes were small on purpose and should be easy to implement for anyone already familiar with the code. So it seems that UI is not a priority to Lemmy developers. That’s why I had to develop my addon, which I then also turned into a theme. I hope that one day Lemmy instances will start using some kind of modern theme (doesn’t have to be mine), so that my addon is no longer needed.
My theme is just a small amount of styles applied on top of the default litely and darkly themes, which should make maintenance easier. Unlike an addon, a theme doesn’t need to support multiple versions of Lemmy at the same time, so we could simplify it even more. Lemmy 0.18 uses CSS variables now, so that also makes things easier.
Something needs to be done about Lemmy’s outdated UI and I’m not sure if the current approach of developing multiple userscripts and addons is efficient. I understand if you think this might cause too much work for you though.
