this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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I think fediverse people are wildly overestimating how much 99% of Reddit users care about this. The mod team on r/futurology (I'm one of them) set up a fediverse site just over a month ago (here you go - https://futurology.today/ ) It's been modestly successful so far, but the vast majority of subscribers seem to be coming from elsewhere in the fediverse, not migrants from Reddit.
This is despite the fact we've permanently stickied a post to the top of the sub. r/futurology has over 19 million subscribers, and yet the fediverse is only attracting a tiny trickle of them. I doubt most people on Reddit even know what the word fediverse means.
For what it's worth, I was on Reddit for over a decade and I think I clicked on a stickied thread from any subreddit maybe twice in that whole time. I think a lot of people's eyes just automatically skip over them. Plus, stickied threads disappear under some sorting options. Posting the occasional meme about it might be more effective.
IIRC stickies are also excluded from feed once they get this attribute.
But yeah, we don't even understand what a barrier switching to fediverse sites is for regular joes, jemmas and jermas. Like, for many people the internet is suggested apps' feed and, rarely, their browser's default start page. They don't choose anything, and why would they? And here we are, challenging them to do something on intent while they are pretty happy with what they have now.
and why would they? ........... they are pretty happy with what they have now.
Exactly. Only a very small number of people are motivated as the pioneers who've setup the fediverse now are. Again looking at this through the lens of r/futurology & our fediverse site. Why would a user also want to go to a second version of the exact same thing, but way, way smaller.
My hunch is that long-term the fediverse will prosper. Reddit still isn't too bad even with these changes, at least not compared to what an absolute shithole Twitter has become.
But people who care about making it bigger, should be asking themselves hard questions - this meme comes across as very complacent & out of touch, if many people really believe the sentiments it's expressing.
The meme doesn't mention the Fediverse at all, it just calls out reddit for sucking (again).
I literally only switched because of Boost. Also, since Boost for Reddit still works for me, I continue to use that as well
People who would leave a site like Reddit because of a principled stance often mistakenly believe that the rest of society cares as deeply as they. Spoiler: society mostly doesn't care; at least, not enough to go out of their way to change anything.
There are a lot of people that are actually too dumb to change platforms and assume apps like Reddit are the actual internet.
My father had a doctorate of engineering. He was a brilliant man. When I saw him search for Google and then follow the search link to google.com, to then search on their home page, I started to tell him he should search from the address / search field in his browser. He was instantly becoming confused and so I said, "nevermind," because his way got him satisfactory results so why bother. Some people aren't dumb at all. They just don't care about the same things you or I mighty enough to learn them (beyond basics).
Even the head mod of piracy subreddit was ousted from the subreddit for attempting to migrate the sub to a lemmy instance, and the redditors that remain there actually cheered! It's wild, you would expect pirates, who always at risk of having their subreddit shut down, would understand the need to migrate.
The quality of content in /r/piracy is shit nowadays when compared to [email protected]
Those remaining were probably the leechers. Just there to find content but not give back to the community.
So, good riddance?
I'm technically from elsewhere in the fediverse, but I'm also a Reddit migrant (back in June). Thank you for setting the community up, I've missed it from Reddit days
Literally swap the word Fediverse in that pinned post for Lemmy and you'll get more engagement with it. Because you're right, even if the current reddit user has heard of lemmy and mastodon, they still most likely don't know what the fediverse is, don't understand the site linked to is a lemmy instance / reddit alternative. Subbed to [email protected] btw, if the current activity there can be sustained I think it'll shape up to be a nice community
I don't even know what fediverse means
I fully agree. I believe it's also easy to think that Lemmy/Fediverse is great once you've tried it for a short while, I thought so as well, which confirms the idea that Reddit is dead (and posts like this also confirm the idea). But I've gone back to Reddit lately because there is politics everywhere over here. Instead of being mildly entertained I'm instead getting angered and passively accused of being a Nazi every other day. The atmosphere over at Reddit is a whole lot more welcoming.
It's also likely that most visitors don't go to the sub directly so the stickied post is easily missed
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/15wi75l/rfuturology_is_now_in_the_fediverse_at/
It's hard to know exactly how many people see them from the stats Reddit gives Mods. Reddit gives a figure within the post for views, which stands at about 160,000 for the post I mentioned. That includes the times people have been served the title in their feed & and the times people clicked on it (sadly Reddit doesn't differentiate further).
The fediverse site has been going for 6 weeks and has about 620 subscribers. My guestimate from looking at addresses in comments is that maybe 100-150 are reddit migrants. So roughly speaking 1 in 1000 r/futurology people who saw something about our fediverse site were motivated to join.
A sobering thought for people who think the fediverse is about to crush reddit.
[email protected] and some others are also a good places to promote your communities.
Those sub numbers don't include federated subscribers, from what I've read. And a lot of people seem to just browse All all the time and block communities they don't want to see. Still doesn't match any numbers in the millions, but things might be a bit more impactful than you think.
This is still the early adoption phase. You can't expect all of the general populace to swap over. But it has been strong enough to start building the fedoverse into a real alternative. The "replacement" of reddit at large is far in the future.