In the last 3 days I’ve been paying attention to r/all, expecting several posts about it and…
Yeah
Wasn’t expecting the website to literally shut down nor to monopolize r/all, because 3rd party users are the minority, but I hoped for more than whatever this was.
At least there’s a silver lining, I discovered new alternatives that have healthier communities
I didn’t go and check things out. But I gotta say, before I was an only Reddit user. Now I don’t expect to totally forgo Reddit forever, but I now know there are alternatives and it is a nicer community so far here.
At least here I’m not getting spammed with bots and “Satan Gets Us” ads.
Same. I won’t let go of Reddit completely until more of the people in my favorite subs migrate and rebuild their communities here, if they do so at all. But Lemmy and Mastodon will become my new main social hubs either way.
Someone’s gotta be the early adopters, it looks like that’s us today.
satan gets us ads?? i’ve been using apollo for years and don’t know what you’re talking about AT ALL hahahaha those sound crazy
I’m watching the Active last month from the Lemmy stats and see that the spike didn’t yet turn into a needle.
there’s room on the internet for more than one link aggregator - even if reddit returns and is bigger and badder than ever, I still wont use it. that platform is dead to me now
But on the other hand, look at how much the lemmy and kbin user base has grown. The blackouts had a significant impact in increasing lemmy adoption and usage.
Prior to the announced blackouts, I had no idea Lemmy even existed. Now here I am running my own instance.
Also, advertisers Reddit sells to have halted their campaigns until “next week.”
I think while on the surface it might feel underwhelming, it had more impact than you think. And now mods are discussing extending the blackout too.
What comes after the blackout is the exodus. So in time, Reddit will decline and people would hear more about Lemmy as the network effect grows, Lemmy can come out pretty strong.
Have you ever added the word Reddit to a web search so you could find an answer online without a lot of digging?
Stuff like that I imagine got hit hard. There will always be core communities that either stay up or are easy replicate but I imagine they’ll be losing a lot of smaller communities.
This is just about the only thing I use Reddit for anymore.
yes! i landed on reddit twice during the last couple days that way.
- the NixOS sub wasn’t dark, but users were asking about that and some were dropping the lemmy link.
- the selfhosted sub (or one adjacent to it, don’t remember) was dark, and for this query i actually could not find the info i needed written anywhere else. that was a wakeup call.
This is why subreddits shouldn’t close permanently. I wonder if its possible to leave subreddits in read-only mode? to allow anyone to find all the incredibly valuable information.
Yes it’s called restricted mode. Only whitelisted users can make posts or comments.
I’m not sure what you were expecting to see? /r/all was never going to look obviously different, there’s just too many people on Reddit. 99.99% of Redditors could leave and the remaining 0.01% would still be enough to churn out a passable couple of pages of content on /r/all.
Plus the people who care about the situation are exactly the people who aren’t currently participating on Reddit, so it’s hardly surprising that no-one is really taking about it there.
For me it’s been pretty great. Lemmy and the fediverse kinda remind me of reddit circa 2007 or 2008 before the eternal September. I’m going to enjoy this for as long as it lasts.
I’m definitely happy the blackout encouraged me to move to the fediverse.
Same, I could never really get into mastodon as I never liked Twitter much, so I’m pretty happy I found out about Lemmy. I know everyone on this site has been saying this, but it feels fresh, and the fact that it’s all open source and community owned is great.
the eternal september?
Its a reference to Usenet back in 1993, its essentially when an online community has to deal with a never ending influx of new users. So think of this as Reddit before it got big/mainstream.
I think the reaction on the site itself also suffered from the AMA getting hard buried.
Which was stupid. People should have upvoted the post in the AMA sub which was just a link to the AMA on the Reddit sub. It wasn’t even pinned. And even if you did find it, until they did a summary you couldn’t see his responses because also buried (understandably)
That said, yes, I agree with you and the adjacent poster - the upside is alternative platforms got a huge boost, and even if a lot of the influx doesn’t stay, it’s still a huge boost.
I never expected the site to just shut down and be in flames from a 2 day partial shut down. I’m pretty happy with the communities that have popped up and discussion about alternative sites.
There’s been a heap of discussion on alternatives and without the blackout I wouldn’t of even found great sites like kbin.
I expect that come the 1st July when third party apps stop working, we’ll get another wave of annoyance and hopefully can use that to help people flee
I know that come the 1st if nothing has changed I’ll be purging all my old comments and deleting my accounts.
To be honest, I’m happy with how it went. I am excited to be off of Reddit and part of the Fediverse now. I never expected Reddit to fail, but I think there will be a drastic decrease in quality content.
What I’m most happy about is that the Fediverse so far seems to be mostly actually pretty good people (though I’ve been largely chilling in kbin since the blackout started – it only just turned on federation). Most past attempts to abandon reddit only saw the most toxic, horrible people leave. Sites like Voat were never an option because the users were awful. It’s nice that so far, I haven’t really seen any of that. In fact, it feels the opposite, with the people who left reddit being disproportionately great people, with the toxic people being more likely to stay on reddit.
I wonder if it’ll last? I hope so. I wanted to leave reddit in the past but never felt like there was anywhere comparable to go that wasn’t shit.
There’s a decent chance it will. The fediverse is—generally speaking—a fairly friendly and welcoming place. That’s in part to it’s decentralized nature and individual moderation tools. Bad actors can be blocked on an individual level (I just blocked /u/donaldtrump last night because I do not want to see stupid parody accounts and just like that he’s gone) as well as on an instance level for anyone not following the rules.
Each instance has their own rules about how to behave, so the bigots and whatnot get booted if they cause problems. Eventually they find an equally terrible server that will have them and once they start up again, that instance can be defederated, which is basically like cutting off the bridge to their island… no way to communicate. Eventually they end up alone or with equally terrible people on other instances.
That’s not to say that the fediverse doesn’t have it’s share of problems or is perfect, but we’re working hard to try and keep this a decent place to be.
I will echo this. I was skeptical that any reddit alternative wouldn’t just be deplorables. I’ve browsed some sites with the most unbelievably racist stuff spewed. Pleased with kbin for now.
Kbin has been really great, everyone here is a lot more civil. I remember when reddit was like that prior to digg v3. And then eternal September. It took a while before reddit got to where it is now with almost everyone with any expertise on the website. But I think for the most part, decent people and decent communities are more fulfilling.
I wonder how kbin will be supported.
The question is basically, how many mods and power users moved to other platforms. It was clear that Reddit would not die over night or that the Fediverse would be able to take on all the users of Reddit.
But without much of the volunteer labour, Reddit will enter a slow death spiral of worse and worse subreddits and the remaining users will slowly leave as a result.
Actually been dramatic for Lemmy. Users went from a little under 50K to a little over 125K total users. I do not know how that is not dramatic. It is not about Reddit really, it is about how many of these users will stay here.
It was pretty underwhelming. I think ultimately it’s, unfortunately, pointless. Spez gonna spez and him and other people monetarily invested in reddit will get theirs–they’ll cash in on the IPO and walk after that being richer than before. Whether they stick around to try to improve the platform or not is anyone’s guess but… at least there are lots of us who likely won’t go back to reddit like we used to. I like this place a lot so far!
Yeah, I don’t think people realize that cashing out in the IPO is likely the end goal in itself.
But I like it here, it’s exciting!
There are several points to be made:
The Old Reddit, whatever it means, is long gone forever. Aaron is gone. Spez does not care. No apologies or retracting will be made and that’s it.
Reddit must have calculated that there are enough ‘casual’ crowd (not a long timer, does not use or care about 3rd party apps or the old interface, comes for the quick laughs and watches ads) so they could withstand whatever pressure the ‘hard-core’ crowd (long timer, uses and cares about old UI and API changes, does not generate ad views in general, spends long hours in site) generates.
Reddit must have also considered the possibility of the second crowd simply going away. I suspect Spez or the investors simply does not give a damn about it. Ad revenues are everything and there’s a loud minority that threatens to leave? Why should they care, after all? All they see is a potential for “more” growth.
What they do and must care is the eventual entrance of a sizeable competition that eats into their revenues - less visitors mean less ad revenues. Lemmy and Fediverse, as much as I love it and will keep using it, is not that threat - yet.
What will probably happen is that the wider internet will label the riot (as of now) a massive failure, laugh at the “bravery” of slacktivism or whatever the latest meme can be slapped at.
Despite that, it should mark the emerging of a sustainable group of Reddit-like communities that could, in one day, become the competition Digg never thought they would face.
No, I don’t think Lemmy is perfect. I do have an issue with the dev’s political stance. But as long as they don’t become the Spez of what was supposed to be the Federation, and the software and the protocol and the community can sustain and rule themselves, things might be alright.
Reddit will eventually die, like many other internet websites. Perhaps not now. They won’t go out in a spectacular way the Digg v4 happened, but simply wither away like Facebook. But we have another home, and it’s all that matters.
If we really want to deal a blow to Reddit, we have to do what happened to Facebook. Get your parents to join Reddit!
Oh god.
That’s the online equivalent of trebucheting plague-infected corpses over the wall.
lol, facebook is joining fediverse