this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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This will end exactly the same way the Twitter -> Mastodon thing ended.
Reddit will continue. A slightly worse Reddit, with more bots, more low-effort content, and less quality OC.
Moderation will degrade slightly as the admins replace protesting moderators with more obedient ones, and/or communities lose interest and use the new "voting" (lol) systems to pick admins which will give them the reliable dopamine hits.
A small percentage of Redditors, especially the power users, will move on. A small percentage in Reddit terms is a tidal wave for any other platform. Some percentage of that number of Redditors leaving will come here.
Lemmy & Kbin will experience growing pains. Issues caused by scaling up infrastructure, instance to instance friction, etc. These will get resolved with time. When things settle, we will have a fraction of reddit's userbase, but neither will we need more. We'll have enough to have stable, engaging communities which will slowly grow.
In other words, a mirror reflection of the Mastodon story.
Twitter relies on celebrities, athletes, and journalists. All of them want to be where the eyeballs are so until Mastodon grows more, they'll stay on Twitter.
Lemmy just needs to continue to grow and improve. Maybe it never gets as big as reddit but the content has the potential to be just as good.
In the three or so days I've been using it it's expanded noticeably, and I'd say it's on the verge of being big enough already. Once it rounds that tipping point it has a decent chance of becoming sustainable on its own.
This might be a little different for a website like reddit, where lurkers want to be where the content creators are. Concent creators, posters don't need lurkers as much as lurkers need them.
But to make Mastodon more enticing, it should be necessary for celebrities to also post there. Feels like a "the chicken or the egg" situation.
Why not post in both places? Many celebrities probably don't directly post on Twitter, it's a job for the PR team. Most celebrities probably are not even aware of Mastodon. But the PR teams probably are.
Then what is the chance that petty little CEO decides to punish anybody posting in the competition? Most PR teams might also have this on their minds.
It reminds me of old reddit when it was primarily tech-heavy content filled with passionate developers constantly building on top of the platform. I doubt Lemmy or kbin ever see a fraction of reddit's traffic but that's ok with me as the content is better suited to me and the conversation taking place is just as valuable
Having been on Lemmy now for a few weeks it's really brought home to me how brand and bot driven Reddit had become.
I spend a few hours here a day and have yet to see a single post which subtly (or non subtly) includes branding.
It's really quite refreshing to just be among other people, our thoughts and opinions without being sold to.
Like the Reddit of yester year for sure......
I think it was bound to happen at some point. Like the tech-oriented part of the conversation moved from reddit to Hacker News in a drip feed.
And Reddit will probably do something else before long to drive even more people away and hopefully the Fediverse will be better prepared and ready for the influx with a better user experience.
Don't forget Reddit making a few more incredibly dumb and tone-deaf moves to give the 'threadiverse' a few more influxes of users while the bugs & issues with Lemmy and Kbin are worked out! :)