Ask Lemmy
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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.
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.
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.
God can you imagine the shit show if millions had tried to come at once this last time? We'd accidently ddos the fediverse to the stone age.
Don't forget the censorship of the power mods. That's going to be fun here. Already you have swiss cheese in content depending on how tight your mods sphincter is.
This is it. Reddit will keep pulling dumb shit that drives users away and hurts engagement for short term profits. Having viable and stable alternatives gives people a place to go so they don't feel trapped.
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.
Want this the case when Reddit was tiny and Digg was huge too?
The landscape was different. Digg was in 2004. Reddit in 2005. They both came in a time where social media was at it's infancy and it was anyone's game to make it big. Whereas today, there are already established social media sites and the best any alternative social media outlet can do anymore, is absorb some numbers and try to prove to be the better alternative. It's a lot about thinking outside the box and figuring what a platform can do that the other can't.
Generally I agree with you, but let me steelman a different argument. It feels to me like we are in the early stages of another digital renaissance like the one that happened during the rise of Reddit & Facebook. I remember that time well as I was just starting high school, and Reddit opened an entirely new world for me after leaving Digg. It felt like where all the cool kids hung out if you will. There was this wealth of information, discussion, political discourse, and it scratched the itch that ultimately formed a lot of who I am today.
It has always been the visionaries who are then backed by the early adopters that form internet culture. Lemmy is, again, where the cool kids (and technically inclined) are choosing to hang out. There is an exclusivity to it, and that feeling of breaking from the herd. That is an exciting and addicting feeling for content creators and users alike. This is all happening as major players like Meta & Twitter are warring with each other over users, and while Reddit allowed itself to succumb to the narcissistic ambitions of one moron (fuck u/spez) who never cared about the spirit of what used to make Reddit truly great.
I think a lot of us (me included) got complacent, and bogged down in the feeling that there would never be a time where the internet felt new, and alive again. It is a failure of imagination really, and I hope this can be one shot across the bow to the major power structures behind the previous generation of social media that blind corporatism rarely if ever can capture the magic or lightning in a bottle that has been the bedrock of culture in the information age. Only time will tell how this project will evolve and change or if it can become something truly great that stands the test of time. But I, for one, am sincerely hoping that it does....just as much for myself as for all of you!
As long as we don't let ourselves get complacent again this time. I'm not sure what I'd do if even the Fediverse eventually goes the same way.
So what's the solution to blow this joint and start a new paradigm? Television killed radio. Blogs and streaming killed television. Current social media killed blogs. If the fediverse isn't the solution, then what's going to kill and replace current 2010s era social media? And don't say short form video, because that was cool for maybe a decade before the big corpos started pushing it and it was no longer cool.
Decentralized social media seems like the logical next step. And all major platforms seem to either have users going that way (Reddit, Twitter) or are themselves going that way (Mark Fuckerberg's bullshit)
I sure hope you're right. Decentralization won't solve all the issues of course, and will cause its own problems, but it will hopefully be at least a little better the the chain of walled gardens and outrage- and clickbait-driven cesspool that the internet is right now.
Corpos ruin everything