I think it probably won’t cause the site to collapse now, but will ultimately be a major contributor to it doing so later. The biggest problem for many people leaving reddit is that the various alternatives all lack the most important part of a social media platform: all the users creating new content to consume. Many people are okay with moving to tiny platforms of course, the growth of Lemmy in the past days is an example, but quite a few people on Reddit are not going to be, missing more niche communities or just not knowing much about these underpopulated places. Of those people that do leave, or move to using a new platform alongside reddit, many will probably end up eventually giving in an going back. But some people really will stay, and the alternatives will grow massively compared to their humble origins as a result. Some might die out and fail after awhile, but the ones that don’t will become small but viable communies that have enough content and users to at least be usable, if not as developed as they could be.

Inevitably, reddit will, someday, do something to anger it’s userbase again. But that time, or a few cycles of this down the line, when people start looking to alternatives, one or more will actually be big enough for the majority of redditors to actually be willing to move there. At that point, the site may collapse, the damage reddit does to itself with this incident will become apparent: motivating people to build it’s own competition.

I mean, since there’s no central site to shut down, Lemmy failing would pretty much just mean that it stagnates and some of the bigger instances shut down, at which point there still would be some remnant of it left to stay on, if a smaller one. Failing that, it isn’t the only reddit alternative that people have been working on, so maybe one of the others will be more successful.

Why wouldn’t it be? Twitter doesn’t have ownership of the entire concept of microblogging or anything

The only one Ive played for any length of time is freeciv, which as the name implies is based of the civilization games, mostly civ2. It’s a bit old looking these days and setting up multiplayer has always been a bit fiddly, but the gameplay is pretty fun imo.

Was initially surprised about WeChat not being higher just because my understanding was that it was the main social site in China with a lot of the ones popular outside of that country being banned, but I suppose practically nobody outside of China uses it and they are still a minority of the world, big as they are, so on second thought it makes sense. Seeing Pinterest above Twitter genuinely surprises me though, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone talking about Pinterest, mentioning their Pinterest account, or linking to it, and tbh I don’t actually even know what sort of site it is or what it even looks like.

“Etc”

personally I’ll probably use reddit as well as lemmy for a few weeks, but less and less. I use a 3rd party client (slide for reddit) and dont intend to go back to the official app, when Ive last used it I found it unusable and this whole incident has really soured my opinion of it. I may occasionally visit it on desktop after that is gone, I actually dont mind new reddit on desktop unlike most, but since I dont usually use social sites on my desktop anyway and again, have been liking reddit less after this, I dont foresee myself using it that way much and probably will leave entirely after awhile. Lemmy doesnt really have all the small communities reddit does, but that does seem to be changing pretty rapidly. Im sure a whole lot of recent lemmy users will go back after awhile, but given the apps havent even shut down yet, my hope is that enough people come and stay for there to be enough to be happy with, even if its nowhere near the user count of reddit

that would explain why Im suddenly seeing a ton of star trek posts on my federated feed, I mean Id expect some but Ive seen a lot more all of a sudden

Did some somewhat sizable instance close down or become invisible to that site or something like that maybe?

Technically it should already be possible for a company to advertise here, no? Not in the “there are little video boxes you can’t get rid of (barring adblocker extensions)” but in the sense that one could have their employees create accounts and make comments and posts to promote their products. They’d probably have to do it subtly and sneakily, because they’d likely get banned or if they had their own instance, defederated, but they could. Wouldn’t even need to pay anything beyond employee salaries to make it.

I feel like “proper” ads would be more difficult to implement, because even if the software were updated to include the ability to add them, people could and likely would make forks of it that just didn’t display those from federated servers, or clients that don’t on any server, and because the software is open source there would be no stopping it. An instance could defederate instances using such an ad-blocking fork, but that would risk ending up themselves isolated and therefore lose much of their traffic and viability as a platform.