this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Was there even a mass exodus? I largely avoid Reddit now, but I do kind of doubt that they've been hurt in any meaningful way by all the protests and people leaving...

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[–] [email protected] 326 points 1 year ago (20 children)

Is it important that Reddit suffers? For me the important thing is that lemmy flourishes and has good oc.

[–] [email protected] 124 points 1 year ago

I support this point of view, but at the same time I want the status quo to be disrupted and the internet to change, I'm not a fan of allowing corporations to fall into complacency when they hold so much power.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right? Ignore them, have fun here. No reason to give any thought to them.

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[–] voidMainVoid 181 points 1 year ago (5 children)

No idea, and I don't care. What matters for me is that there are enough people on Lemmy to keep it interesting.

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[–] Daisyifyoudo 126 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Can't speak for anyone else, but as soon as RIF died I was gone. Was on it for over 10 years, and the only way I would view reddit content. Reddit's ui is cancer.

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[–] Phegan 103 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Honestly, I don't really care. I like it here more than reddit and if it stays like it is, awesome.

I have no desire to see reddit succeed or fail, I simply found a place I fit in better.

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[–] [email protected] 100 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Just have a look at the content there, it dropped a lot in quality.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As someone who only ever browsed all, I see no difference.

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[–] legion 98 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I didn't leave to make the service worse.

The service got worse, and so I left.

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[–] STRIKINGdebate2 95 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Anyone that expected Lemmy to instantly get as big as reddit overnight were naive. Overall I think only a small fraction went away but reddit is clearly using tactics like mass inviting to group chats and reopening places to boost activity.

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[–] soulifix 87 points 1 year ago (11 children)

If we're perfectly honest - No.

Reddit has over 53 some odd million users. Million with an M. Lemmy has gained, at most, upwards of just thousands. To call it a 'mass exodus' is really overselling it.

It's going to take a fairly long time, for Lemmy to even scratch 100k even. I'm on both Reddit and Lemmy. Lemmy, for a more positive experience. Reddit, because the numbers are just there.

[–] althea_vestrid 99 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This crisis has given Lemmy enough users to be a vibrant, viable alternative with the software and apps undergoing rapid development. This means the next time that reddit tries to pull some shit, there will be somewhere for people to go, unlike this time. Lemmy just wasn't really ready for prime time.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I think you are correct. Lemmy is really just gearing up at the moment, but can't handle the volume to compete with reddit.

The increase of instances, user guides, communities and third party apps are necessary building stones of a federated reddit alternative of size.

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[–] SlothMama 39 points 1 year ago

Lemmy has almost half a million accounts ( 400k ) with over 1.5 million posts. lemmy.world grew by ~30k new accounts in June.

Others grew by single digit thousands, so the migration seems to be about ~50k new users to Lemmy.

That's not trivial, Reddit had those kind of numbers in like 2007. Give it time.

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[–] Cipher22 82 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Several major subs have closed, they're forced to campaign to keep mods, a significant amount of content generators have left. Even though it's been only a couple weeks, they've slid on the global index of visited sites. They've lost 3-4% of 1.7 billion views in weeks. That's 10's of millions of ads not delivered. That alone is several million dollars lost on a site trying to be profitable. This doesn't include people on the fence, people currently unaffected because their app didn't die until this week, or people just watching the drama until it's boring again. Also, Reddit depends heavily on free labor to succeed, the bulk of the community that is leaving is their free labor pool. They don't have the cash to pay moderators for their time and they just removed the tools that let those people do their work.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago

This is some fomo type shit.... forget about your ex, invest in your current!!!

[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Their user numbers are available with a web search. Reddit useage dipped towards end of June but has mostly leveled out.

Quite a few mods left, which has had a larger impact than an equal number of general users leaving would. The niche topic sub I was involved in went from four mods to one half-hearted mod. The quality of posts has dropped. Almost every comment thread contains complaints. Reports are piled up.

Most surprising to me when I peeked at the sub this weekend was the amount of borderline-incel desperation and negativity. The sub is for a hobby that while slightly male majority, we had plenty of women contributing with minimal problems. Not anymore. If I were a woman looking at that sub for the first time, I would probably block it. It is so depressing and angry now, I barely recognize it.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I have to wonder how much of Reddit's traffic is bots and lurkers though.

Post quality is a bigger indicator, and that does seem to be dropping. This is why Reddit banning 3rd party apps was such a big deal. It doesn't matter if 99% of your users use the official app if 99% of the content posted to the side is posted by the 1% that don't.

As someone who was around for the digg migration, it didn't drop off overnight (hell digg.com is still around), but they gradually bled content until everyone was on Reddit. Lemmy right now is very reminiscent of early Reddit.

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[–] sneezymrmilo 60 points 1 year ago (9 children)

The real question is why anyone cares? Move on and just enjoy Lemmy. Forget about reddit.

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[–] alphacyberranger 60 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Honestly I like Lemmy more and more everyday. It's quality vs quantity when it comes to posts and the users.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel all those posts about reddit looking for mods for various communities is a good indicator. They might not have lost quantity all that much, but a very small portion of quality kept a lot of reddit interesting and running smoothly. A lot of that has either just dropped entirely engaging or migrated.

I doubt everyone would move. Some people simply take it as a sign to move on and do other things with their limited time on this little planet.

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[–] GoddessOfGouda 55 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

Personally I came over bc the app I used stopped working (boost). Lemmy seems to have the same content I used reddit for:

  • US politics headlines
  • Memes
  • Niche communities

I don't plan on going back to reddit unless it's via Boost. Fediverse is better anyway

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[–] HoagieBoy 54 points 1 year ago

Only evidence I have is:
any day of week 1 of using Lemmy I had about 1 page of new stories on my subscribed communities any day of week 2 of using Lemmy I had about 2 pages of new stories on my communities any day of week 3 (this week) I'm at least 4 pages in and still haven't hit on the old stories

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago

I'm just happy to be here. I care less and less about reddit. Using lemmy and mastodon for a while, it's gotten more and more important to me to just build a great, fun, healthy community and less important (emotionally) to bring down the giants. I still care about it politically and theoretically, I just don't feel it as much.

[–] ComptitiveSubset 49 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fuck Reddit. I’m here now and it’s great.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the damage done to Reddit is not from protests but the bad management decisions -- enshittification as Corey Doctorow put it -- in order to hasten Reddit's IPO. The attitude by upper management, taking user content for granted, is going to continue to serve to chase users away, or drive them to deprioritize engagement with Reddit.

I'm missing only a couple of communities here on Lemmy but otherwise it serves me as a daily feed. And reddit still can be searched for troubleshooting.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The timing of /r/place nullified any possibility evidence of an effect, as a ton of streamer featured this event, creating traffic. I wouldn't be surprised if they got a huge net profit this month.

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[–] Sniatch 36 points 1 year ago

I really don't care about reddit anymore. I pretty happy with Lemmy right now.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What I do know is that I'm happier having left.

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[–] Rylyshar 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I hope so, but I don't care. The same with the bird site. I chose to delete my barely-used bird account when that idiot bought it, and to explore mastadon and lemmy when I could no longer use Apollo to view reddit. Two or 3 times I've popped over to reddit to see what's going on, and check on any other subreddits that have moved to lemmy, and using the official reddit browser or app just reinforces why I left. It's shit, and getting shittier.

Basically I like the mantra "not my circus, not my monkeys."

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[–] Macaque 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you seen the content lately? It's all trash now. Most contributors have altered their posting habits or left?

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

We came to Lemmy for our own benefit, not just to fuck with reddit. Who cares if it hurt them or not? We're better off without reddit, and that is all that matters.

[–] jayemecee 33 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The effect is going to be long term. The most active users (usually 10% posters, 1% content creators and mods) were the most affected by the changes. Those are also the most vocal. And, probably the first ones to move here. Once those move reddit content will get worse over time which will make the other users move (89%) too. So yea, don't expect short term impact. It's the long run that matters

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[–] Greee1911 32 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I left and deleted my baconreader app. Haven't gone back since. And I used to spend about an hour a day on there.

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[–] PagingDoctorLove 32 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't know if I'd call it a mass exodus, and I don't know that it directly has anything to do with Lemmy, but there's been a noticeable dip in quality. Fewer posts across many of the front page subreddits, fewer votes, more bot posts, more low effort posts, less discussion in comment sections, lots of deleted comments and accounts... overall there just seems to be a dip in quality.

I was going to delete, but decided to stick around for a while first, to see how things pan out, and I've got to say the mobile site is even worse than expected. I get constant pop ups trying to direct me to download the app, then when I say no the website will auto reload, often sending me back to the top of the page. It's difficult to find and respond to anyone who replies to your comments, and sometimes if you sort by top: today it won't even show any posts. Just... blank. Clicking on a post opens it as a tab that is more like a popup, and closing it resets where you were on the page.

I could keep going but I think that pretty much summarizes what I've noticed. Don't know that it's directly related to a Lemmy "exodus," and I'm still finding my way around here so I can't really say, but reddit as we knew it seems pretty dead.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It may be my imagination but I think the quality of Reddit posts has severely gone down. There's also noticeably more nazi propaganda.

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[–] SageWaterDragon 32 points 1 year ago (4 children)

No, of course not. If you're using Lemmy as a "protest" instead of thinking that it's a better platform, it's totally ineffectual and you'll go back to using Reddit sooner or later. Personally, I think that the fediverse is a more compelling idea than the traditional internet, so I'm sticking with Lemmy for a bit in one form or another.

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[–] ClamDrinker 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A mass exodus doesn't really happen in the traditional sense unless shit really hits the fan. For that to happen a large majority or even everyone has to be displaced at once and there can be no way to salvage the situation. In this case, there were a lot of short term ways out here for users not directly affected.

But, the whole situation is more akin to a war of attrition. The ones not convinced by the big things, will be convinced by the smaller things that accumulate over time. Goodwill for reddit is at an all time low, which hampers their ability to grow since word of mouth is effectively dead. People that provided effective labour for reddit in the form of moderation or content aggregation lost their morale to continue. Not all of them for sure, but it might very well be a critical mass (even if they didn't move to lemmy).

It's like a line of dominos increasing in size, if the ones that fell now were big enough to topple the next, eventually there will be a ripple effect. Eventually the quality of content goes down, the discourse turns stale and antagonistic, and communities fall apart. Only once the users who took the easy way out now realize that will they finally start the process of moving. And if reddit was doing so bad they had to make this move, I can only assume their future will be very grim indeed. The seed of destruction has been planted. (And if you want an example of that future, look at Twitter)

Whether or not that all actually happens, I'm not sure. I'd like to believe it will, but some people revel in their unreasonableness, and they're often the easiest to exploit for financial gain. I think the best thing is to stop looking back, and focus on what we have here and now. I think what lemmy has achieved so far is already more valuable than reddit had.

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