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Lemmy enjoys growth as developers pivot from Reddit amid API charging controversy
(alternativeto.net)
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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So I saw this on mastodon ... and it's a little weird, perhaps not unlike the cultures that migrants develop in their new homes.
There's a tendency, I think, to overestimate how bad the "old" platform has become since "we" left. In reality, it's not nearly that bad, if any different at all, and those of us not inclined toward this overestimation go and check the old platform from time to time and get confused as to where all of this "hellscape deadness" is.
I think we can all imagine to some extent why this might happen. But I'm writing this just in case it's healthy to point out that it need not happen, and that the thing that's actually changed, though you might not know if you've arrived here recently, is this place, which is a whole new thing!
A story I think of along these lines is what Steve Jobs did when he went back to Apple in the late 90s. Back then Apple thought they had to beat Microsoft to win. Thing is the company was close to dying with huge debts etc and were never going to do that (still haven't come close today). But they were so enamoured with their past to the point of having a museum of all of their old products. Jobs had the museum removed, told everyone that for Apple to win it has to stop thinking about Microsoft because they'll never be destroyed, instead Apple had to win by doing its own thing, and then, super contraversially for the time, had Bill Gates invest a bunch of money into Apple and appear on the big screen during a keynote to rather audible "boos".
It doesn't matter what Reddit's doing or whether they're doing well. It matters if we're doing well ... as cheesy as that might sound.
I get where you're coming from ... but I'm inclined to push back on this. I don't think it's sad. Reddit has many users on it and lemmy has substantially fewer. Not every interest is going to be covered by the amount of people here. It's just a reality right now.
However convenient it is to have everything on one platform or one place, I think it's important to recognise how much of a weapon or shield that is for big-social monopoly companies. A fractured and more open or diverse internet is, IMO, a good thing. It's also less convenient and staying in contact with people only on reddit makes sense. But that drop in convenience is worth it, IMO, and I don't think it's sad.
Just do what you can on Lemmy for now and wait for the users to make their way over. It will take a couple years but as long as the quality here is better, people will slowly but steadily make the transition. And it won't be hard to beat out reddit in user experience, we all know how far they have fallen and it's only getting worse after they IPO.
This is the exact sort of thinking maegul was attempting to debunk..
Not really, I already knew reddit was shit before I left. I just didn't know of any alternative. I'm also not suggesting that our success is reliant on reddit's failure.
I'm in full agreement with him, reddit hasn't changed much at all, but Lemmy has reminded us that there could be something much better again.
I don't think he was debunking the idea that reddit might eventually fall, but rather that they would fall overnight, as some people here like to imply. Also worth mentioning that Microsoft and Apple are generational tech companies while reddit is a social media platform that's much more susceptible to rapid decline.
Fair enough, I get that. For me personally, reddit seemed to get worse starting over 7 years ago, so by now I felt the experience was significantly worse than previous eras of reddit, even in smaller subs.
But as much as I loved some BBS forums, I'd have to say Reddit was definitely better than them, so yea early 2010s reddit was probably the most fun I've had. Until now.
My experience too. So often reddit would just attract a toxic or at least unattractive culture that would kill conversation and make threads unreadable. It seemed to get worse over time, though I didn't get serious about measuring that. Doesn't of course mean that there wasn't plenty of good stuff there or still isn't, but it, in recent times, felt diluted.
Not that I'm any sort of gospel to be taken seriously or anything ... not really, my point was about focusing on this place doing well rather than focusing on reddit losing or dying, in part because Reddit may not die any time soon. Or it might but not pass all of its users onto the fediverse. But yea ... if the quality of people, culture and, slowly but surely, features, not least of which being the whole FOSS, non-profit decentralised freedom thing, people will surely come just as they have with mastodon.
There are people on Mastodon?
My Mastodon feed averages one post every two or three days.
You’re doing it wrong.
Three people I followed on Twitter made the move. Two of them eventually moved back. Everyone else stayed. That's where the discussion is.
What I want to see is still hanging out on Twitter.
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Love the pep talk, and the sentiment behind it.
I loved Reddit, spent at least an hour a day there and often much more, but I'm loving the Lemmy too. In many ways it's better, and one of those ways is that it's so much smaller — a much higher ratio of thought vs tired memes and dumb jokes and slick burns.
I'm wondering how much of that is bots.
Reddit is trying to build up to an IPO, so it's not far-fetched to think that Steve Huffman would have seen the exodus coming, and supplemented traffic with bots so the drop in engagement didn't seem so precipitous.
I think the thing that is going to suffer most is comment quality. Unfortunately (or for Huffman, fortunately), it's not really something that can be quantified.
I think we will see a slow decline until the platform is basically walking dead. It'll function, and maybe there will even be apparent engagement, but the quality will be nothing like it was before this whole debacle.
I went to some threads on Reddit yesterday. Bloody hell there a lot of shit to wade through before getting to anything useful. It might be more engagement, but the amount of low-effort garbage comments turned me around really quick.
Yeah mate you found one good comment. How much shit did you read before you found it? These comments are highlighted because they’re the exception. I’m not interested in wading through tons upon tons of “this” and “came here to say this” and “you win the internet sir” before I find a good comment on quantum physics.
I don’t think you’re a shill. There a plenty of normal people on Reddit, enjoying the content like before. While I despise Spez, I can’t discount that they have created a product that people want to use.
But there are also plenty of people who, like me, saw a decline in the average quality of content over the last x number of years. A move to the lowest common denominator. Comments like your example were more frequent years ago relative to today.
Lemmy feels like Reddit when I joined 11-ish years ago. That’s why I’m here now.
Edit: for what it’s worth, I also didn’t go to the default subs. I spent a long time curating to my tastes and hobbies, to the point where I even blocked /r/All from Apollo so I didn’t have to see the day-to-day shit. But it didn’t help. My hobbies deteriorated into memes and low-effort shit every day.
I didn't. You posted a comment and I didn't say it was fake?
Then why are you here?
Sounds like a difference of opinion
That’s called a question. Wasn’t an attack. You’re the one who went looking for an argument.
To date, you’re the only toxic user I’ve found on Lemmy, so well done.
Beat you to it, see ya.