I’ll be directing all of my users in Sync to lemmy.world tomorrow.

I dunno, but the fact that I’m browsing a post with 118 comments using a skin that looks a lot like Apollo tells that things are going in a good direction.

Not gonna be a sudden exodus.

More that Reddit’s entered a slow death spiral. Redditors will start seeing an upsurge in toxicity, since mods will have left, been replaced with stooges, had their tools taken away, and most of the good mods will have abandoned ship.

Some may come here. Some may move on to Discord or other social media. Some will stick it out on Reddit, but notice that bots and trolls are taking over, whatever moderators are left can’t or won’t keep up, and the admins are seemingly asleep at the switch.

In a few months, discourse there will have assumed Youtube quality, with bots shouting down human discourse, and trolls scaring anyone remotely normal away. They’ll limp along like that for years.

Like Twitter.

The average user would not know about lemmy without a reddit post linking and explaining. It’s what got me here.

Probably the first since that is the day the bullshit goes into effect.

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 😅

As much as I’m enjoying Lemmy, I don’t see the vast majority of Reddit users making the switch to anything. Mastodon, Lemmy, and kbin are far too obscure, and most people use Reddit for pino and memes. People just aren’t very technologically inclined and Reddit satisfies the dopamine fix for most regular visitors.

Reddit is gigantic, and while Fediversal alternatives are gaining users rapidly there’s a long ways to go.

A useful way to look at it is, we don’t have to defeat Reddit. We’re creating a community as an alternative. Reddit hasn’t lost a large number users when judged as a percentage of their base, but many of the people who are leaving are the ones who see where it’s going, and are the power users, the knowledgeable people, the cool people. The ones who make Reddit a place worth being.

It’s the same with Twitter. A lot of Twitter and Reddit users just keep their heads down and use the service, as it goes to hell around them. A lot of people join social media sites because it’s where other people are, or it’s where their friends are. People who joined when social media finally broke the internet away from being mostly the domain of the technically inclined. Even now, a lot of people mostly use it for streaming. These people may not leave Twitter or Reddit ever, because they really don’t care about it. But the people who were big internet users, or would have been were old enough in the late 90s or early 2000s, those are the kinds of people that Reddit, and Twitter, are losing.

Now, there are a lot of people on Twitter who I’d have thought have jumped ship by now, but to many people admin decisions feel like they have only a theoretical impact unless it affects their experience, or themselves, directly. The best thing that can be done is just keep on being awesome, and make cool posts that can’t be found elsewhere. Once a community gets a reputation for that, people will come naturally.

I already switched over. But I guess majority of 3rd party app users are still waiting for the last moment.

It all comes down to mobile UI. Most of most peoples web usage is on mobile phones, occasionally a tablet, rarely sitting at a desk with a laptop or desktop computer.

The reason 3rd Party apps is such a sticking point for Reddit users is because the “factory” options are shite. Both the new and old web interfaces are garbage compared to the factory app, which is also garbage compared with any third party app.

The Steve Jobs Sweet Solution of WebApps was flawed. Twitteriffic and other pioneering mobile Smartphone apps proved that. Proprietary Apps with no alternative destroy intrinsic value of a platform to users. Facebook.app and YouTube.app prove that.

I would imagine most people planning to head here already have accounts, activity will no doubt go up though.

As the weeks go on though more will find this place and I’m sure there will be more surges to come.

I think it really depends on how real the 1% rule of the internet is.

TBH I believe that 90% of mobile users uses the official app. Maybe they don’t know about 3PA, or simply just don’t bother. 3PA might be “for power users/advanced users” to them. All they want from Reddit is just the laugh (and porn probably) when doom scrolling. Not to mention because there is an official app, it’ll be the first result when searching “Reddit” on the app/play store. Most of the time people will just go for the first/official one. This whole API/protest thing will just be another Reddit drama for them and they just don’t care.

However, I believe that this whole thing affects those 1% users the most. For mobile users (of the 1%), I believe most of them are using 3PA. As the official is just too bad. For everyone else (of the 1%), if they care (even just a little bit) about Reddit, they will be greatly disappointed with how Reddit handles the whole situation. They will either have left already, or will be leaving soon. Which then the question will be, to where?

Obviously, users tends to go to wherever places that has the most interesting content to them. If enough 1% users left Reddit, migrated to Kbin/Lemmy, and continued to create content over here, I think those 99% users will eventually migrate as well - especially:

1. The content are created by the same 1% users, so the content will be similar to what they consumed back when they were on Reddit.

2. Reddit is full of repost bots, which hopefully should be more obvious when no new contents are being created anymore.

There’s also another possible but quite pessimistic possibility:
Some of those 99% users became the new 1% users, and began creating content with the redesigned UI/official app.
*Puts on tinfoil hat* Which is what Reddit wants - to kick out the “old”, power/advanced users (users who can and will protest/rebel, in essence), making Reddit into another generic social media platform. With everything under the complete control of Reddit, not its users.

Yes

I think it depends in part on whether there are some good, short (!) tutorials on how to use Lemmy on Reddit.

People who just want to continue to browse content will be deterred from walls of text with technical details about the Fediverse and how Lemmy works. It should really be a step-by-step instruction… ideally offering a few instances to choose from at the start. So that the few biggest instances don’t break down from the influx and people leave again.

From my experience with unexperienced users, they will drop Lemmy like hot potatoes when they run into the first problem or broken down server.

Started here a week ago. There will probably be a spike in users. Hopefully as the weeks go on, more will come. People will try Reddits official app. I think the Fediverse will get more popular, and Reddit will get more unusable.